Astral Codex Ten Podcast (Jeremiah)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-prediction-contest

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack

Ah, Culture. This is where you go to read about Shakespeare, post-modernism, arthouse films, and Chinese tapestries, right?

This is maybe not that kind of culture:

Saturday, just as I was finally logging off the internet after three tireless days spent tracking the Queen’s passing with sad and incessant scrolling, Ray J exploded on IG live, fuming about Kris Jenner’s latest PR stunt; a lie detector test conducted on The Late Late Show With James Corden, to prove she had no hand in leaking the infamous sex tape. The test, administered by a polygraph “expert” John Grogan, determined that Kris was in fact telling the truth.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/play-money-and-reputation-systems?utm_source=url

For now, US-based prediction markets can’t use real money without clearing near-impossible regulatory hurdles. So smaller and more innovative projects will have to stick with some kind of play money or reputation-based system.

I used to be really skeptical here, but Metaculus and Manifold have softened my stance. So let’s look closer at how and whether these kinds of systems work.

Any play money or reputation system has to confront two big design decisions:

1. Should you reward absolute accuracy, relative accuracy, or some combination of both?

2. Should your scoring be zero-sum, positive-sum, or negative sum?

Relative Vs. Absolute Accuracy

As far as I know, nobody suggests rewarding only absolute accuracy; the debate is between relative accuracy vs. some combination of both. Why? If you rewarded only absolute accuracy, it would be trivially easy to make money predicting 99.999% on “will the sun rise tomorrow” style questions.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no

Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.]

—

I bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

A year of no significance? It's not often a history book makes me laugh, but that did. Sure, many history books investigate the insignificant, but your typical author doesn't call your attention to it.

This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.)

A little backstory: in my younger days, I thought it might be fun and useful to learn the entire history of the world. To that end, I started with accounts of archaeology and prehistory, then the ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, and so on until I lost momentum somewhere around Tamerlane and the Black Death.

Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/constitutional-ai-rlhf-on-steroids

A Machine Alignment Monday post, 5/8/23

What Is Constitutional AI?

AIs like GPT-4 go through several different

types of training. First, they train on giant text corpuses in order to work at all. Later, they go through a process called “reinforcement learning through human feedback” (RLHF) which trains them to be “nice”. RLHF is why they (usually) won’t make up fake answers to your questions, tell you how to make a bomb, or rank all human races from best to worst.

RLHF is hard. The usual method is to make human crowdworkers rate thousands of AI responses as good or bad, then train the AI towards the good answers and away from the bad answers. But having thousands of crowdworkers rate thousands of answers is expensive and time-consuming. And it puts the AI’s ethics in the hands of random crowdworkers. Companies train these crowdworkers in what responses they want, but they’re limited by the crowdworkers’ ability to follow their rules.f

There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty.

I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 responses (thank you, you are great). Here was the overall distribution of probabilities. Horizontal axis is percent chance he did it; vertical axis is number of people who responded with that percent:

This looks weird because people were most likely to give numbers rounded off the the nearest ten.

I separated responses into bins from 0 – 9%, 10 – 19%, and so on to 90 – 100%. Keep in mind that the last bin is slightly larger than the others, so it might make it unfairly look like more people gave extreme high answers than extreme low answers. I also switched the vertical axis to percent of responses in each bin. Smoothed out, it looks like this:

This looks pretty balanced, and it is: the average probability is 52.64%. This is probably a fake balance based on all the different demographic skews involved cancelling out: 2.5x as many Democrats as Republicans answered the survey, but 9x as many men as women did.

Manifest || Manifold.Love || Eyeless in Gaza

Last month, the Lighthaven convention center in Berkeley hosted Manifest, the first conference for prediction market enthusiasts. By now this has already been covered elsewhere, including in a great article by the New York Times, but here are some particular highlights:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-103023

Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes:

What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari’s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari’s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn’t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn’t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time?

(I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn’t my main objection.)

He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this:

Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.

I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism 

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life

Sometimes people do amateur research through online surveys. Then they find interesting things. Then their commenters say it doesn’t count, because “selection bias!” This has been happening to Aella for years, but people try it sometimes on me too.

I think these people are operating off some model where amateur surveys necessarily have selection bias, because they only capture the survey-maker’s Twitter followers, or blog readers, or some other weird highly-selected snapshot of the Internet-using public. But real studies by professional scientists don’t have selection bias, because . . . sorry, I don’t know how their model would end this sentence.

The real studies by professional scientists usually use Psych 101 students at the professional scientists’ university. Or sometimes they will put up a flyer on a bulletin board in town, saying “Earn $10 By Participating In A Study!” in which case their population will be selected for people who want $10 (poor people, bored people, etc). Sometimes the scientists will get really into cross-cultural research, and retest their hypothesis on various primitive tribes - in which case their population will be selected for the primitive tribes that don’t murder scientists who try to study them. As far as I know, nobody in history has ever done a psychology study on a truly representative sample of the world population.

This is fine. Why?

Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism

Summary - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of

I have an essay that my friends won’t let me post because it’s too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts:

Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities.
A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities?

Q: Long-termism is just an excuse to avoid helping people today!
A: Are you helping people today?

Q: I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change.
A: Are you working hard to produce systemic change?

Q: Here are some exotic philosophical scenarios where utilitarianism gives the wrong answer.
A: Are you donating 10% of your income to poor people who aren’t in those exotic philosophical scenarios?

Many people will answer yes to all of these! In which case, fine! But…well, suppose you’re a Christian. An atheist comes up to you and says “Christianity is stupid, because the New International Version of the Bible has serious translation errors”.

You might immediately have questions like “Couldn’t you just use a different Bible version?” or “Couldn’t you just worship Jesus and love your fellow man while accepting that you might be misunderstanding parts of the Bible?”

But beyond that, you might wonder why the atheist didn’t think of these things. Are the translation errors his real objection to Christianity, or is he just seizing on them as an excuse? And if he’s just seizing on them as an excuse, what’s his real objection? And why isn’t he trying to convince you of that?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism

Some weird psychiatric trivia: no congenitally blind person ever gets schizophrenia (journal article, popular article). “Trivia” is exactly the right word for this fact; it’s undeniably interesting, but what do you do with it? So far nobody has done anything, other than remark “hmm, that’s funny”.

I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diametrical model of autism vs. schizophrenia. This is itself pretty close to psychiatric trivia - a lot of features of schizophrenia and autism seem to be opposites of each other. As I put it here:

Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have unusually low smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues

During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism.

I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them.

The section I find interesting is the one called Climate Plagues:

There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them - the 32,000 year old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million-year-old one that a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity - to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.

The best thing about personalized medicine is that it’s obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But outside a few special cases like cancer, we don’t know how to predict which treatment will work for which person. Some psychiatric researchers claim they can do this at a high level; I think they’re wrong. For most treatments and most conditions, there’s no way to figure out whether a given sometimes-effective treatment will work on a given individual besides trying it and seeing.

This suggests that some chronic conditions might do best with a model centered around a controlled process of guess-and-check. When it’s safe and possible, we should be maximizing throughput – finding out how to test as many medications as we can in the short time before we exhaust our patients’ patience, and how to best assess the effects of each. The process of treating each individual should mirror the process of medicine in general, balancing the need to run controlled trials and gather more evidence with the need to move quickly.

I don’t know how seriously to take this idea, but I would like to try it.

Related to: Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions

Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I’m a particular fan of this one. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this:

All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly. You wouldn’t even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you’ve gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again.

All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory. The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can’t be directly reduced to any specific contradiction.

(I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to this post where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn’t look like you “debunking” one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian crisis of faith.)

[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.]

[Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to “Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.]

I.

Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant hurtful lies:

I just find it kind of darkly amusing and sad that the “rationalist community” loves “rationality is winning” so much as a tagline and yet are clearly not winning. And then complain about losing rather than changing their tactics to match those of people who are winning.

Which is probably because if you *really* want to be the kind of person who wins you have to actually care about winning something, which means you have to have politics, which means you have to embrace “politics the mindkiller” and “politics is war and arguments are soldiers”, and Scott would clearly rather spend the rest of his life losing than do this.

That post [the one debunking false rape statistics] is exactly my problem with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it’s a worthwhile use of his time, energy and mental effort to download evil people’s evil worldviews into his mind and try to analytically debate them with statistics and cost-benefit analyses.

He gets *mad* at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense.

It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind of thing that “social justice” activists like me *intend* to attack and “trigger” when we use “triggery” catchphrases about the mewling pusillanimity of privileged white allies.

In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence.

It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I’ve always secretly suspected them of believing.

My natural instinct is to give some of the reasons why I think Andrew is wrong, starting with the history of the “noble lie” concept and moving on to some examples of why it didn’t work very well, and why it might not be expected not to work so well in the future.

But in a way, that would be assuming the conclusion. I wouldn’t be showing respect for Andrew’s arguments. I wouldn’t be going halfway to meet them on their own terms.

The respectful way to rebut Andrew’s argument would be to spread malicious lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for them to destroy his reputation. Then if the stress ends up bursting an aneurysm in his brain, I can dance on his grave, singing:

♪ ♬ I won this debate in a very effective manner. Now you can’t argue in favor of nasty debate tactics any more ♬ ♪

I’m not going to do that, but if I did it’s unclear to me how Andrew could object. I mean, he thinks that sexism is detrimental to society, so spreading lies and destroying people is justified in order to stop it. I think that discourse based on mud-slinging and falsehoods is detrimental to society. Therefore…

I.

One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn’t directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have.

While I sympathize with adjuncts’ terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doing their work. You can probably trace the argument- imagine a simplified toy model where the only two jobs are professor and salesperson, and being a professor is fun and high-status but being a salesperson is boring and low-status. Everyone will become a professor, and this will decrease the demand for professors and increase the demand for salespeople until the employers involved change their policies accordingly. Eventually it will stabilize where the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are perfectly compensated by the monetary advantages of being a salesperson. If professors are getting paid shockingly little, it means the system is sending a signal that the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are shockingly high, or else why would people keep trying? If we demand that professors get paid more, then we’re letting them keep all their nonmonetary advantages over salespeople but demanding they have monetary advantages as well. It destroys the system’s incentives to have people go into less fun but nevertheless necessary fields.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/24/employer-provided-health-insurance-delenda-est/

My last post didn’t really go to deep into why I dislike the way we do health insurance so much.

Of course, there are the usual criticisms based on compassion and efficiency. Compassion because poor people can’t get access to life-saving medical care. Efficiency because it’s ruinously expensive compared to every other system around. I agree with these arguments. And they’re strong enough that asking whether there are any other reasons is kind of like the proverbial “But besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

But I had already internalized the compassion and efficiency critiques before becoming a doctor. After starting work, I encountered new problems I never would have expected, ones which have yet to fade into the amorphous cloud of injustices we all know about and mostly ignore. Most of my patients have insurance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intelligent enough that they should be able to navigate the bureaucracy. Listen to the usual debate around insurance, and you would expect them to be the winners of our system; the rich people who can turn their financial advantage into better care. And yet barely a day goes by without a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.

Here are some people I have encountered – some of them patients, some of them friends – who have made me skeptical that our system works for anyone at all:

This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you’ve read at least one blog post here before, please take the surveyif you haven’t already. Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this post could bias your results.

1. Can we confirm or disconfirm different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts?

2. Can we replicate the study showing that people who eat more beef jerky are more likely to be hospitalized for bipolar mania?

3. Are there differences in side effects among SSRIs? (to be limited to people taking an SSRI one month or more, will be looked at both effect by effect, and with a lumped-together side effect index where each mild effect counts as 1 point and each severe effect as 3 points)

4. Is there a difference in people’s efficacy ratings for SSRIs (SSRI Effectiveness, SSRI Overall) depending on whether the person was taking the SSRI for depression vs. for anxiety?

5. What percent of people coming off SSRIs experience discontinuation symptoms? Are there differences among different agents? (main analysis to be limited to people who were taking an SSRI at least a few months, discontinued with a gradual taper lasting at least a few weeks, and were not cross-tapering onto any other psychiatric medication).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone

How excited should we be about the latest class of antidepressants?

1: What is Zulresso?

Wikipedia describes Zulresso as “A bat-winged, armless toad with tentacles instead of a face... ” - no! sorry! That’s Zvilpogghua, one of the Great Old Ones from the Lovecraft mythos.

Zulresso is the brand name of allopregnanolone (aka brexanolone), a new medication for post-partum depression. It’s interesting as a potential missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation.

2: What do you mean by “missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation?”

Allopregnanolone is a naturally-occuring metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. In 1981, scientists found it was present in unusually high concentrations in the brain (including male brains), suggesting that maybe the brain was making it separately and using it for something.

They did some tests and found that it was a positive allosteric modulator of GABA.

Superconductor autopsy -- Prediction mutual funds -- Flight delays

Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn’t work. The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It’s over.

What does this tell us about prediction markets? Were they dumb to ever believe at all? Or were they aggregating the evidence effectively, only to update after new evidence came in?

I claim they were dumb. Although the media was running with the “maybe there’s a room-temperature superconductor” story, the smartest physicists I knew were all very skeptical. The markets tracked the level of media hype, not the level of expert opinion. Here’s my evidence:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-82823

Dr. Matthew Dumont treated a 44 year old woman with depression, body dysmorphia, and psychosis. She failed to respond to most of the ordinary treatments, failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy, and seemed generally untreatable until she mentioned offhandedly that she spent evenings cleaning up after her husband’s half-baked attempts to scrape lead paint off the walls. Blood tests revealed elevated lead levels, the doctor convinced her to be more careful about lead exposure, and even though that didn’t make the depression any better, at least it was a moral victory.

The story continues: Dr. Dumont investigated lead more generally, found that a lot of his most severely affected patients had high lead levels, discovered that his town had a giant, poorly-maintained lead bridge that was making everyone sick, and – well, the rest stops being story about psychiatry and turns into a (barely believable, outrageous) story about politics. Read the whole thing on Siderea’s blog.

Siderea continues by asking: why don’t psychiatrists regularly test for lead?

Now, in my case, I’m a talk therapist, and worrying about patients maybe being poisoned is not even supposed to be on my radar. I’m supposed to trust the MDs to handle it.

Dumont, however, is just such an MD. And that this was a clinical possibility was almost entirely ignored by his training.

Dumont’s point here is that while “medical science” knows about the psychiatric effects of lead poisoning and carbon disulfide poisoning and other poisons that have psychiatric effects – as evidenced by his quoting from the scientific literature – psychiatry as practiced in the hospitals and clinics behaves as if it knows no such thing. Dumont is arguing that, in fact, he knew no such thing, because his professional training as a psychiatrist did not include it as a fact, or even as a possibility of a fact.

Dumont’s point is that psychiatry, as a practical, clinical branch of medicine, has acted, collectively, as if poisoning is just not a medical problem that comes up in psychiatry. Psychiatry generally did not consider poisoning, whether by lead or any other noxious substance, as a clinical explanation for psychiatric conditions. By which I mean, that when a patient presented with the sorts of symptoms he described, the question was simply never asked, is the patient being poisoned?

Dumont wants you to be shocked and horrified by what was done to those people, yes. He also wants you to be shocked and horrified by this: psychiatry as a profession – in the 1970s, when (I believe) the incidents he relates where happening, in the 1990s, when he wrote it in his book, or in 2000 when a journal on public health decided to publish it – psychiatry as a profession did not ask the question is the patient being poisoned?

And it didn’t ask the question, because clinical psychiatry had other explanations it liked better, to which it had a priori philosophical commitments.

And that, when you think through what it means for psychiatry, is absolutely chilling.

And:

Finalist #3 in the Book Review Contest

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan 

[Original review is here. Don’t worry, people who had interesting comments on the review – I’ll try to get a comments highlights thread up eventually.]

For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents. Like Malthus, he had virtually no genuine statistics at his disposal. He nevertheless had intimate knowledge of the capitalism of his time. Born into a family of Jewish financiers with Portuguese roots, he also seems to have had fewer political prejudices than Malthus, Young, or Smith. He was influenced by the Malthusian model but pushed the argument farther. He was above all interested in the following logical paradox. Once both population and output begin to grow steadily, land tends to become increasingly scarce relative to other goods. The law of supply and demand then implies that the price of land will rise continuously, as will the rents paid to landlords. The landlords will therefore claim a growing share of national income, as the share available to the rest of the population decreases, thus upsetting the social equilibrium. For Ricardo, the only logically and politically acceptable answer was to impose a steadily increasing tax on land rents.

This somber prediction proved wrong: land rents did remain high for an extended period, but in the end the value of farm land inexorably declined relative to other forms of wealth as the share of agriculture in national income decreased. Writing in the 1810s, Ricardo had no way of anticipating the importance of technological progress or industrial growth in the years ahead. Like Malthus and Young, he could not imagine that humankind would ever be totally freed from the alimentary imperative.

One underappreciated feature of Piketty is his engaging presentation of economic history. A constant feature of the theorists he discusses is that they are all brilliant thinkers, they all follow the trends of their time to their obvious conclusions in ways deeper and more insightful than their contemporaries – and they all miss complicated paradigm shifts that make the trends obsolete and totally ruin their theories. Rationalists take note.

Like Ricardo, Marx based his work on an analysis of the internal logical contradictions of the capitalist system. He therefore sought to distinguish himself from both bourgeois economists (who saw the market as a self-regulated system, that is, a system capable of achieving equilibrium on its own without major deviations, in accordance with Adam Smith’s image of “the invisible hand” and Jean-Baptiste Say’s “law” that production creates its own demand), and utopian socialists and Proudhonians, who in Marx’s view were content to denounce the misery of the working class without proposing a truly scientific analysis of the economic processes responsible for it.7 In short, Marx took the Ricardian model of the price of capital and the principle of scarcity as the basis of a more thorough analysis of the dynamics of capitalism in a world where capital was primarily industrial (machinery, plants, etc.) rather than landed property, so that in principle there was no limit to the amount of capital that could be accumulated. In fact, his principal conclusion was what one might call the “principle of infinite accumulation,” that is, the inexorable tendency for capital to accumulate and become concentrated in ever fewer hands, with no natural limit to the process. This is the basis of Marx’s prediction of an apocalyptic end to capitalism: either the rate of return on capital would steadily diminish (thereby killing the engine of accumulation and leading to violent conflict among capitalists), or capital’s share of national income would increase indefinitely (which sooner or later would unite the workers in revolt). In either case, no stable socioeconomic or political equilibrium was possible.

SSC’s review of postmodernism got very mixed reviews. Some of them made a good point: why should I be trying this at all? I’m not a postmodernist, I’m not a philosophy professor, surely someone much more qualified has already written a blog-post-length explanation of postmodernism.

This is all true. My only excuse is that trying to figure out complicated concepts requires a different approach than trying to teach simple ones.

Some knowledge is easy to transfer. “What is the thyroid?” Some expert should write an explanation, anyone interested can read it, and nobody else should ever worry about it again.

[Original post here.]

Aeon writes:

The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words.

This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d said at the beginning.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sorry  

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821

Telosa, USA

Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis

Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy.

Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pitch is that Telosa (working name) will be inclusive and sustainable by following a Georgist model: all the land will be held in a community-owned trust, and all profits will go to social services.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]

I.

I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.

John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.

Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/

I.

I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them.

A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompete and destroy another business you liked better, or if they have some kind of externalities, or if they lobby the government to do something bad. But in general, if you’re angry at a business, you need to explain how one of these unusual conditions applies. Otherwise they’re just “helping you less than you wish they did”, not hurting you.

And so the standard justification for paywalls. Journalists are providing you a deal: you may read their articles in exchange for money. You are not entitled to their product without paying them money. They need to earn a living just like everyone else. So you can either accept their deal – pay money for the articles – or refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they didn’t exist.

But I notice feeling like this isn’t true. I think I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist, compared to the world where they exist but their articles are paywalled. Take a second and check if you feel the same way. If so, what could be going on?

[Content warning: References to anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic canards]

I feel deep affection for Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a bizarre screed about the Federal Reserve/Communist/Trilateral Commission plot for a one world government. From its ridiculous title to its even-more-ridiculous cover image, this is a book that accepts its own nature. In the Aristotelian framework, where everything is trying to be the most perfect example of whatever it is, None Dare Call It Conspiracy has reached a certain apotheosis.

But my problem is the opposite of Allen’s. Too many people dare call too many things conspiracy. Perfectly reasonable hypotheses get attacked as conspiracy theories, derailing the discussion into arguments over when you’re allowed to use the phrase. These arguments are surprisingly tough. Which of the following do you think should be classified as “conspiracy theories”? Which ones are so deranged that people espousing them should be excluded from civilized discussion?

1. Donald Trump and his advisors secretly met with Russian agents to discuss how to throw the 2016 election in his favor.

2. Donald Trump didn’t collaborate with any Russians, but Democrats are working together to convince everyone that he did, in the hopes of getting him indicted or convincing the electorate that he’s a traitor.

3. Insurance companies are working to sabotage any proposal for universal health care; if not for their constant machinations, we would have universal health care already.

4. The ruling classes constantly use lobbyists and soft power to sabotage tax increases, labor laws, and any other policy that increase the relative power of the poor.

5. America’s aid to Israel is not in America’s best interest, but is maintained through the power of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups mainly supported by America’s Jewish community.

6. The Jews are behind Brexit as a plot to weaken Western Europe.

7. Climate scientists routinely exaggerate or massage their studies to get the results they want, or only publish studies that get the results they want, both because of their personal political leanings and because they know it is good for their field to constantly be discovering exciting things that their funders and their supporters among the public want to hear.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects

[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]

I.

On the recent global warming post, a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um:

There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right?

You can find the source here (study, popular article). The study confirms that it is claiming that 8.52% of all deaths are cold-related (plus an additional ~1% heat-related). It separates the world into a grid of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree squares. It uses a bunch of assumptions and interpolations to get a dataset of daily average temperatures and mortality rates for each square over ten years. Then it calculates a function of how mortality varies with respect

Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario.

Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast, timelines forecast, takeoff forecast, AI goals forecast, and security forecast. I’m highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they’re what transforms the scenario from cool story to research-backed debate contribution.

These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-takeaways-from-ai-2027

Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret.

“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us 

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061

Originally: The Media Very Rarely Lies and Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying. Please don’t have opinions based on the titles until you’ve read the posts!

Table of contents:

1. Comments Accusing Me Of Using An Overly Strict Definition Of “Lie”

2. Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy Reasoning

3. Comments About Whether Infowars Believes Their Own Claims

4. Comments On Why 8% Of Americans Said They Had Relatives Who Died From The COVID Vaccine

5. Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies

6. Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds

7. Other Comments

8. My Actual Thoughts

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd

The long road to Moscow

Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this, and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration.

126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open: 

People generally reported slight but positive changes: 

When asked to rate the magnitude of improvement to well-being on a 0 to 5 scale, they averaged 1.4: 

I mentioned in the post that succulents could help in theory, but you needed to get the right kind of succulents and you needed at least ten of them. I was skeptical that anyone really got ten succulents in their room, so I wondered whether that might work as a crypto-placebo group.

If so, the intervention failed to separate from placebo. Succulent users had an average improvement of 1.29, compared to about 1.50 for people who did other things. The difference wasn’t significant, although admittedly the sample size was low.

Looking at the various groups, the most striking difference was actually people who left a window open (1.57) vs. people who did one of the other named options (1.31). A few people who left windows open mentioned this made their room cooler, which seemed to help with sleep. But this is very post hoc, and this difference wasn’t significant either.

Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry.

GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on the Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, a 117 MB collection of pre-1923 English poetry, to create a specialized poetry AI.

I previously tested the out-of-the-box version of GPT-2 and couldn’t make it understand rhyme and meter. I wrongly assumed this was a fundamental limitation: “obviously something that has never heard sound can’t derive these complex rhythms just from meaningless strings of letters.” I was wrong; it just didn’t have enough training data. Gwern’s retrained version gets both of these right, and more too. For example:

Thou know’st how Menoetiades the swift
Was dragged, of Hector and the fierce compeers
And Phrygian warriors. So, we will dispatch
Your bodies, then, yourselves to burn the ships
In sacrifice; with torches and with bells
To burn them, and with oxen to replace
Your gallant friends for ever. But I wish
That no man living has so long endured
The onset of his foes, as I have power
To burn or storm; for mighty Hector erst
Was slain, and now returns his safe return

This is all perfect iambic pentameter. I know AP English students who can’t write iambic pentameter as competently as this.

(by the way, both “compeers” and “erst” are perfectly cromulent words from the period when people wrote poems like this; both show up in Shelley)

It has more trouble with rhymes – my guess is a lot of the poetry it was trained on was blank verse. But when it decides it should be rhyming, it can keep it up for a little while. From its Elegy Written in a Country Churchyardfanfic:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing

[Original article: Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School]

I.

Many commenters shared their own stories of missing lots of school and bouncing back from it. For example, Rachel E:

I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures). BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more

And ral:

Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life.

And Pepe:

If you are interested in an anecdote: I did not go to high school (well, attended for two or three months) and now I have a PhD from a very good university. Not receiving any formal education between the ages of 16 and 23 does not seem to have affected my ability to do college (and later grad school) level work.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest

- Read the contest description/rules here
- Give feedback on the contest here
- And once again, the form where you take the contest is here

I didn’t let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question.

See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey.

US/WORLD
1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40%
2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10%
3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80%
4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60%
5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99%
6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50%
7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5%
8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5%
9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5%
10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%

ECON/TECH
11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30%
12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20%
13. Ethereum above 5K: 20%
14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90%
15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40%
16. Dow above 35K: 90%
17. ...above 37.5K: 40%
18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90%
19. Unemployment below five percent: 50%
20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50%
21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-81522

RIP PredictIt -- Hedgehog Markets -- Salem/CSPI Fellowship

The Passing Of PredictIt

In 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research purposes only. Their no-action letter placed strict limits on Victoria’s project:

• The market would be run by the university and not-for profit. It would charge only enough fees to cover operations.

• Questions would be limited to 5,000 traders each, who could bet up to $850 per question. They would be on politics and economics only.

• They would do the usual know-your-customer process and take steps to avoid their traders try to meddle in world events.

Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria’s market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site.

On August 4, the CFTC reversed itself, saying the PredictIt had “not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter” and that it had to shut down by February.

Pop science likes to dub dopamine “the reward chemical” and serotonin “the happiness chemical”. God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I’m sure it’s cutesy.

In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine might be “the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical”, but even that can’t be more than a gross oversimplification. As for serotonin, people have studied it for seventy years and the best they can come up with is “uh, something to do with stress”.

Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors by Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt tries to cut through the mystery. Both authors are suitably important to attempt such an undertaking. Carhart-Harris is a neuropsychopharmacologist and one of the top psychedelic researchers in the world. Nutt was previously the British drug czar but missed the memo saying drug czars were actually supposed to be against drugs; after using his position to tell everyone drugs were pretty great, he was summarily fired. Now he’s another neuropsychopharmacology professor, though with cool side projects like inventing magical side-effect-free alcohol. These are good people.

A person has two kidneys; one advises him to do good and one advises him to do evil. And it stands to reason that the one advising him to do good is to his right and the one that advises him to do evil is to his left.

— Talmud (Berakhot 61a)

I.

As I left the Uber, I saw with horror the growing wet spot around my crotch. “It’s not urine!”, I almost blurted to the driver, before considering that 1) this would just call attention to it and 2) it was urine. “It’s not my urine,” was my brain’s next proposal - but no, that was also false. “It is urine, and it is mine, but just because it’s pooling around my crotch doesn’t mean I peed myself; that’s just a coincidence!” That one would have been true, but by the time I thought of it he had driven away.

Like most such situations, it began with a Vox article.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney

Machine Alignment Monday 8/8/22

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress

The Broader Fossil Fuel Community

Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader “fossil fuel community”. Exxon and Shell would be “fossil fuel capabilities”; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be “fossil fuel safety” - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron.

This is how AI safety works now. AI capabilities - the work of researching bigger and better AI - is poorly differentiated from AI safety - the work of preventing AI from becoming dangerous. Two of the biggest AI safety teams are at DeepMind and OpenAI, ie the two biggest AI capabilities companies. Some labs straddle the line between capabilities and safety research.

Probably the people at DeepMind and OpenAI think this makes sense. Building AIs and aligning AIs could be complementary goals, like building airplanes and preventing the airplanes from crashing. It sounds superficially plausible.

But a lot of people in AI safety believe that unaligned AI could end the world, that we don’t know how to align AI yet, and that our best chance is to delay superintelligent AI until we do know. Actively working on advancing AI seems like the opposite of that plan.

So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies. Nothing violent or illegal - doing violent illegal things is the best way to lose 100% of your support immediately. But maybe glare a little at your friend who goes into AI capabilities research, instead of getting excited about how cool their new project is. Or agitate for government regulation of AI - either because you trust the government to regulate wisely, or because you at least expect them to come up with burdensome rules that hamstring the industry. While there are salient examples of government regulatory failure, some regulations - like the EU’s ban on GMO or the US restrictions on nuclear power - have effectively stopped their respective industries.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health

I’m experimenting with making this more structured this time, so:

Section I: Collection of comments on US health care
Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world?
Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics?
Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries’ health systems, and their experiences with them.

I.

GummyBearDoc writes:

I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!

 

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-december

[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: List Of Games That Buddha Would Not Play.

2: Claim via NPR: When Brazil had high inflation in the 1990s, some economists developed a plan: price everything in inflation-adjusted units, so that people felt like things were “stable”, then declare that the Inflation Adjusted Unit was the new currency. How Fake Money Saved Brazil. Also interesting: they tried it because the new finance minister knew no economics, recognized his ignorance, and was willing to call up random economists and listen to their hare-brained plans.

3: In the 19th century, a group of Tibeto-Burman-speaking former headhunters along the India/Burma border declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh (one of the Ten Lost Tribes) and converted en masse to Judaism. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted their claim and expedited immigration paperwork for several thousand of them.

Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance.”

There have been some really weird and poorly-informed socialist critiques of public choice theory lately, and this article generalizes from those to a claim that Marxists just don’t like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government. This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama

I.

Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future.

(never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice)

His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate religious authorities (who apparently hated prophecies, but loved prophecies phrased as obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish).

In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written:

The young lion will overcome the older one,
  On the field of combat in a single battle;
  He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
  Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death

RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics. He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like “encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children” or “encouraging intelligent people to have more children”; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for eugenics was a belief that it would not work; people who believed the qualities involved were heritable were much more likely to support programs to select for them. For example, of people who thought criminality was completely genetic, a full 65% supported encouraging criminals to have fewer children.

I was surprised to hear this, because I thought of moral opposition to eugenics was basically universal. If a prominent politician tentatively supported eugenics, it would provoke a media firestorm and they would get shouted down. This would be true even if they supported the sort of generally mild, noncoercive policies the paper seems to be talking about. How do we square that with a 40% support rate?

I think back to a metaphor for norm enforcement I used in an argument against Bryan Caplan:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may-2023

[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative

Support the author: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe 

Then support the creation of the pocast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast 

Hindenburg Research has a great business model:

1. Investigate companies
2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud
3. Short the fraudulent company
4. Publicly reveal the fraud
5. Company's stock goes down
6. Profit!

I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.

Link: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end

You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it’s because they don’t really love you. You’re the compromise candidate, you’ve never lied about that to yourself. 

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions

Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline.

This seems pretty analogous to addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal. If you use eg heroin, I’m told it feels very good the first few times. After that it gets gradually less euphoric, until eventually you need it to feel okay at all. If you quit, you feel much worse than normal (withdrawal) for a while until you even out. I claim I went through this whole process in the space of a twenty minute dinner.

I notice this most strongly with potato chips. Presumably this is pretty common, given their branding:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet

I.

DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”.

Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words relate to each other and where everything should be.

I ran into this problem in my stained glass window post. When I asked it for a stained glass window of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth, it gave me everything from “a library with a stained glass window in it” to “a half-human, half-raven abomination”.

The collective intellect is change-blind. Knowledge gained seems so natural that we forget what it was like not to have it. Piaget says children gain long-term memory at age 4 and don’t learn abstract thought until ten; do you remember what it was like not to have abstract thought? We underestimate our intellectual progress because every every sliver of knowledge acquired gets backpropagated unboundedly into the past.

For decades, people talked about “the gene for height”, “the gene for intelligence”, etc. Was the gene for intelligence on chromosome 6? Was it on the X chromosome? What happens if your baby doesn’t have the gene for intelligence? Can they still succeed?

Meanwhile, the responsible experts were saying traits might be determined by a two-digit number of genes. Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins estimated that there were “about twelve genes” for diabetes, and “all of them will be discovered in the next two years”. Quanta Magazine reminds us of a 1999 study which claimed that “perhaps more than fifteen genes” might contribute to autism. By the early 2000s, the American Psychological Association was a little more cautious, was saying intelligence might be linked to “dozens – if not hundreds” of genes.

Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?

This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven’t heard it before:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates

California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they’re listed on the ballot. Starting with:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome 

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lewis-carroll-invented-retroactive

Retroactive public goods funding is one of those ideas that’s so great people can’t stop reinventing it.

I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: “social impact bonds” by a New Zealand economist in 1988, “certificates of impact” by Paul Christiano in 2014, “retroactive public goods funding” by Vitalik Buterin a few years ago, “EA loans” by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, and “venture grants” by Mako Yass. These aren’t all exactly the same idea. Some are slightly better framed than others and probably I’m being terribly disrespectful to the better ones by saying they’re the same as the worse ones. But I think they all share a basic core: some structure that lets profit-seeking venture capitalist types invest in altruistic causes, in the hopes that altruists will pay them back later once they’ve been shown to work.

Upon re-reading some old SSC comments, I found a gem I’d missed the first time around: Julie K says that the actual first person to invent this idea was Lewis Carroll (aka author of Alice in Wonderland) back in 1894. She quotes from his book Sylvie and Bruno:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way

I.

Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?

My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.

At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

There’s a tradition on Reddit that when somebody repeats some cliche in a tone that makes it sound like she believes she is bringing some brilliant and heretical insight – like “I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but believe we should have less government waste!” – people respond “SO BRAVE” in the comments. That’s what I mean by bravery debates. Discussions over who is bravely holding a nonconformist position in the face of persecution, and who is a coward defending the popular status quo and trying to silence dissenters.

These are frickin’ toxic. I don’t have a great explanation for why. It could be a status thing – saying that you’re the original thinker who has cast off the Matrix of omnipresent conformity and your opponent is a sheeple (sherson?) too fearful to realize your insight. Or it could be that, as the saying goes, “everyone is fighting a hard battle”, and telling someone else they’ve got it easy compared to you is just about the most demeaning thing you can do, especially when you’re wrong.

But the possible explanations aren’t the point. The point is that, empirically, starting a bravery debate is the quickest way to make sure that a conversation becomes horrible and infuriating. I’m generalizing from my own experience here, but one of the least pleasant philosophical experiences is thinking you’re bravely defending an unpopular but correct position, facing the constant persecution and prejudice from your more numerous and extremely smug opponents day in and day out without being worn-down … only to have one of your opponents offhandedly refer to how brave they are for resisting the monolithic machine that you and the rest of the unfairly-biased-toward-you culture have set up against them. You just want to scream NO YOU’RE WRONG SEFSEFILASDJO:IALJAOI:JA:O>ILFJASL:KFJ

And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended"

People hate this phrase. They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way.

People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions:

• Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them.

• Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person.

• Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized.

I see three classes of potential response:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that 

[This is the second of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]

I.

If you’re looking for the whipping boy for all of medicine, and most of science, look no further than Galen of Pergamon.

As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the “specious causes” that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it’s pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters.

Centuries went by, but not much changed. Charles Richet, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said that Galen and “all the physicians who followed [him] during sixteen centuries, describe humours which they had never seen, and which no one will ever see, for they do not exist.” Some of the ‘humors’ exist, he says, like blood and bile. But of the “extraordinary phlegm or pituitary accretion” he says, “where is it? Who will ever see it? Who has ever seen it? What can we say of this fanciful classification of humours into four groups, of which two are absolutely imaginary?”

And so on until the present day. In Scott’s review of Superforecasting, he quotes Tetlock’s comment on Galen:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the

I.

If you’re like me, all you’ve heard about international health care systems is “America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever”. Is there more we can learn?

Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I’ve been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few years ago for a comment that got summed up as “life after 75 is not worth living”, but he never used those exact words, and his point about the dangers of excessive life-prolonging medical care is well-taken. He opposes euthanasia, which I interpret as demanding state-sponsored coercive violence to prevent torture victims from escaping, but I know other people interpret it differently. And he’s the brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, but ... nope, can’t think of any extenuating circumstances for this one.

Still, Emanuel is one of a very few people qualified to compare international health systems. And

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.

Introduction: Review of abortion and pregnancy data in the United States

We agreed that it was important to first reach an understanding about the general facts of abortion, pregnancy and motherhood in the US prior to making ethical assertions. To understand abortion rates and distributions, we reviewed data obtained by the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System (1). The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) and National Vital Statistics datasets were used to evaluate the medical hazards imposed by pregnancy (2, 3, 4). Finally, we examined a number of studies performed on the Turnaway Study cohort, maintained by UCSF, to investigate the economic effects of denying wanted abortions to women (5, 6, 7, 13).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you

Most health articles ask you to act on their opinions. I am specifically asking you not to act on mine. In a moment, I'll tell you whether or not I think Vitamin D prevents or treats coronavirus. But I'll give you a free spoiler: I am less than 100% certain of what I'm about to say. So if you want to take Vitamin D, take it. If it does prevent or cure coronavirus, great. If not, the worst that will happen is you'll have slightly better bone health. I can't stress how much I don't want to be those people who said they couldn't prove face masks helped so you must not use face masks. Just ignore everything I'm saying, do a quick cost-benefit calculation, and take Vitamin D. That having been said:

Lots of people think Vitamin D treats coronavirus, and some of them have good evidence. For example, infection rate from coronavirus seems latitude dependent; in general, the further north an area, the worse it's been hit. Northern areas get less sunlight, and sunlight helps produce Vitamin D, so whenever you see a disease that's worse at high latitudes, Vitamin D should be on your short list of potential causes.

Also - in the US, COVID seemed to remit with the summer and worsen over the winter. It's hard to distinguish this from general exponential growth and from the effect of playing ping-pong with gradually loosening/ tightening lockdowns, but the US spike this winter was pretty dramatic. Most Northern Hemisphere countries show such a pattern, most equatorial countries don't, and some Southern Hemisphere countries arguably show the opposite. Whenever you see a disease that's better in summer and worse in winter, Vitamin D is one of the possible culprits.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/

Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehere focuses on elections, and the mystery is wider than that.

Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.

But also, what about lobbying? Open Secrets reports $3.5 billion in lobbying spending in 2018. Again, sounds like a lot. But when we add $3.5 billion in lobbying to the $5 billion in election spending, we only get $8.5 billion – still less than almonds.

What about think tanks? Based on numbers discussed in this post, I estimate that the budget for all US think tanks, liberal and conservative combined, is probably around $500 million per year. Again, an amount of money that I wish I had. But add it to the total, and we’re only at $9 billion. Still less than almonds!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work

The Security Guard

He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.

It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.

At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.

This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.

It’s been two and a half months since I deleted the blog, so I owe all of you an update on recent events.

I haven’t heard anything from the New York Times one way or the other. Since nothing has been published, I’d assume they dropped the article, except that they approached an acquaintance for another interview last month. Overall I’m confused.

But they definitely haven’t given me any explicit reassurance that they won’t reveal my private information. And now that I’ve publicly admitted privacy is important to me – something I tried to avoid coming on too strong about before, for exactly this reason – some people have taken it upon themselves to post my real name all over Twitter in order to harass me. I probably inadvertently Streisand-Effect-ed myself with all this; I still think it was the right thing to do.

At this point I think maintaining anonymity is a losing battle. So I am gradually reworking my life to be compatible with the sort of publicity that circumstances seem to be forcing on me. I had a talk with my employer and we came to a mutual agreement that I would gradually transition away from working there. At some point, I may start my own private practice, where I’m my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I’m most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure. I’m trying to do all of this maximally slowly and carefully and in a way that won’t cause undue burden to any of my patients, and it’s taking a long time to figure out.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-hreha-on-behavioral-economics

Jason Hreha’s article on The Death Of Behavioral Economics has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance.

The article itself mostly just urges behavioral economists to do better, which is always good advice for everyone. But as usual, it’s the inflammatory title that’s gone viral. I think a strong interpretation of behavioral economics as dead or debunked is unjustified.

I.

My medical school had final exams made of true-false questions, with an option to answer “don’t know”. They were scored like so: if you got it right, +1 point; wrong, -0.5 points; don’t know, 0. You can easily confirm that it’s always worth guessing even if you genuinely don’t know the answer (+0.25 points on average instead of 0). On average people probably had to guess on ~30% of questions (don’t ask; it’s an Irish education system thing), so you could increase your test score 7.5% with the right strategy here.

I knew all this, but it was still really hard to guess. I did it, but I had to fight my natural inclinations. And when I talked about this with friends - smart people, the sort of people who got into medical school! - none of them guessed, and no matter how much I argued with them they refused to start. The average medical student would sell their soul for 7.5% higher grades on standardized tests - but this was a step too far.

I want to signal-boost Tumblr user squareallworthy‘s analysis of various UBI plans:

1. Jensen et al’s plan
2. Healy et al’s plan
3. Andrew Yang’s plan
4. Torry’s plan
5. Sheahen’s plan
6. Dolan’s plan
7. Stern and Murray’s plans
8. Santens’ plan
8½. Varoufakis and Reich’s plan
9. Yang’s plan, redux

He finds that most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn’t come close to covering costs. The rest are too small to actually lift people out of poverty. None of them are at all credible.

These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let themselves make it fail on basic math.

This is humbling and depressing. And it concludes the intelligent and useful part of this post that signal-boosts the work of a responsible person. Everything below is epistemic status: wild speculation.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan

I.

If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan".

If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years.

I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how.

As an analysis of the rise of a dictator, this book fails a pretty basic desideratum: it seems less than fully convinced the dictator's rise was bad. Again and again I found myself checking to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked up a pro-Erdogan book. I didn't; author Soner Cagaptay is a well-respected Turkey scholar in a US think tank who's written other much more critical things. The fact is, Erdogan's rise is inherently a pretty sympathetic story. If he'd died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice, a scrappy kid who overcame poverty and discrimination to become a great and unifying leader.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/

I.

In 2006, Bryan Caplan wrote a critique of psychiatry. In 2015, I responded. Now it’s 2020, and Bryan has a counterargument. I’m going to break the cycle of delay and respond now, and maybe we’ll finish this argument before we’re both too old and demented to operate computers.

Bryan writes:

1. With a few exceptions, Scott fairly and accurately explains my original (and current) position.

2. Scott correctly identifies several gray areas in my position, but by my count I explicitly acknowledged all of them in my original article.

3. Scott then uses those gray areas to reject my whole position in favor of the conventional view.

4. The range of the gray areas isn’t actually that big, so he should have accepted most of my heterodoxies.

5. If the gray areas were as big as Scott says, he should reject the conventional view too and just be agnostic.

I think the gray areas are overwhelming and provide proof that Bryan’s strict dichotomies don’t match the real world.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog.

I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful.

I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn't care that much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos

HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it):

One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance, which directly includes low admissions rates, as a measure of how well a school is doing.

These rankings and metrics also heavily incentivize having high yield (a large fraction of students that are admitted end up attending) which for a fixed size applicant pool also encourages accepting as few people as possible. This has led to the death of safety schools, because they would rather reject a high performing student than admit them and have them not attend.

These factors might also be a driving force behind the rise of common app, since schools are trying to get as many applicants as possible, even if it hurts the quality of their pool.

kaakitwitaasota points out that consulting is an exception to the “where you go to school doesn’t matter” principle:A lot of top firms these days won’t even look at you if you didn’t go to the “right” college. My mother did her MBA at Northeastern, and recently had lunch with an old classmate who ended up at a top consulting firm. My mother’s classmate’s résumé would end up in the trash unread these days–Northeastern isn’t considered good enough.

So while it’s probably true on the macro level that smart kids will do just fine anywhere they end up, there is a subset of extremely prestigious, extremely well-paid jobs which will not even look at you if you didn’t get into the right institution at the age of 18–which, in practice, means that the élite are chosen on the basis of who they were at the age of 14-17. When viewed in those terms, it’s completely nuts.

I’d heard this before; my impression is that a big part of consulting is having prestigious-looking people tell you what you want to hear. If what they’re actually hiring for is prestige rather than competence per se, that could make it a special case

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/

[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this all already]

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the history of early psychedelic research. Since I had a tough crowd, I focused on the fascinating biographies of some of the early psychedelicists.

Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor and former NIMH researcher who made well-regarded contributions to psychotherapy and psychometrics. He started the Harvard Psilocybin Project and several other Harvard-based experiments to test the effects of psychedelics on normal and mentally ill subjects. He was later fired from Harvard and arrested; later he accomplished a spectacular break out of prison and fled to Algeria. During his later life, he wrote books about how the human brain had hidden circuits of consciousness that would allow us to live in space, including a quantum overmind which could control reality and break the speed of light. He eventually fell so deep into madness that he started hanging out with Robert Anton Wilson and participating in Ron Paul fundraisers.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/29/predictions-for-2020/

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2020.

Rules: all predictions are about what will be true on January 1, 2021. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I’m using the full 0 – 100 range in making predictions this year, but they’ll be flipped and judged as 50 – 100 in the rating stage, just like in previous years. I’ve tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said.

Feel free to get in a big fight over whether 50% predictions are meaningful.

CORONAVIRUS:
1. Bay Area lockdown (eg restaurants closed) will be extended beyond June 15: 60%
2. …until Election Day: 10%
3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10%
4. Fewer than 300,000 US coronavirus deaths: 50%
5. Fewer than 3 million US coronavirus deaths: 90%
6. US has highest official death toll of any country: 80%
7. US has highest death toll as per expert guesses of real numbers: 70%
8. NYC widely considered worst-hit US city: 90%

Because I hate you, I included this question on the SSC survey:

It’s a weird trick question, but I would say B is right. Imagine converting “(” to X and “)” to Y. Then the first answer is XYXY, and the second answer is YXXY. I suppose you could group the parentheses in pairs, in which case the answer would be “both”, but in practice few people wanted to say that. Of the 6,000 answers I received, most were either A or B. And one factor had a dramatic effect: age.

This is a big effect. People in their 20s were more than twice as likely to choose B as people their 60s. There’s a slight improvement after 70, but I think that’s just noise caused by a low sample size in that group.

My first thought was that the younger population on this blog is disproportionately techies, and techies have to work with very finicky parentheses all day. There was indeed a slight tendency for techies to do better on this, but it was a very small part of the effect. Even controlling for that, or limiting the analysis to only non-techies, most of the effect remained.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122

Warcasting

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14:

1. Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 14% —→ 2%

2. Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 70% —→ 53%

3. Will World War III happen before 2050?: 21% —→20%

4. Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 10% —→7%

5. Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% —→ 80%

6. Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 12% —→ 10%

7. Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 20% —→15%

If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)

Insight Prediction: Still Alive, Somehow

Insight Prediction was a collaboration between a Russia-based founder and a group of Ukrainian developers. So, uh, they’ve had a tough few weeks.

But getting better! Their founder recently announced on Discord:

I myself am (was?) an American professor in Moscow. I have been allowed to teach my next course which starts in 10 days online, and so I am moving back to the US on Sunday, to Puerto Rico. Some of our development team is stuck in Ukraine. I've offered to move them to Puerto Rico, but it's not clear they'll be able to leave the country anytime soon. Progress with the site may be slow, but obviously that's not the most important thing now.

And:

I am now out of Russia, and on to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The people here are quite anti-war. I fly to Dubai in a bit. It was surprisingly difficult (and expensive) to book a ticket out of Moscow after all the airspace closures.

Robots of prediction, predictions of robots

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-31124 

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/

[Related To: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours Because I Just Made Them Up, List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA]

I.

Clamzoria is an acausal democracy.

The problem with democracy is that elections happen before the winning candidate takes office. If somebody’s never been President, how are you supposed to judge how good a President they’d be? Clamzoria realized this was dumb, and moved elections to the last day of an official’s term.

When the outgoing President left office, the country would hold an election. It was run by approval voting: you could either approve or disapprove of the candidate who had just held power. The results were tabulated, announced, and then nobody ever thought about them again.

Clamzoria chose its officials through a prediction market. The Central Bank released bonds for each candidate, which paid out X dollars at term’s end, where X was the percent of voters who voted Approve. Traders could provisionally buy and sell these bonds. On the first day of the term, whichever candidate’s bonds were trading at the highest value was inaugurated as the new President; everyone else’s bonds were retroactively cancelled and their traders refunded. The President would spend a term in office, the election would be held, and the bondholders would be reimbursed the appropriate amount.

I.

Bryan Caplan thinks he’s debating me about mental illness. He’s not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying “this is part of my debate with Scott”. Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong. Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with “this is part of my debate with Scott”. I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating which is less polite but as far as I can tell equally appropriate.

Although he doesn’t answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness.

Let it be known to all that I am never secretly admitting Bryan Caplan is right about mental illness. There is no further need to speculate that I am doing this. If you want to know my position vis-a-vis Bryan Caplan and mental illness, you are welcome to read my four thousand word essay on the subject, Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych. You will notice that the title clearly telegraphs that it is about Bryan Caplan and mental illness, and that (if you count up the contras) I am against him. If that ever changes, rest assured I will telegraph it in something titled equally clearly.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.¹ It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.

https://ai-2027.com/ 

(A condensed two-hour version with footnotes and text boxes removed is available at the above link.)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire

[original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability]

1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes:

Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil")

I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I posted the english version and a short preface: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/

Their observation is that when access to something is gated either by nature or by political regulation, you get what's called a "resource rent" -- a superabundance of profit that isn't a return for effort or investment, but purely from economic leverage -- a reward simply for "getting there first." Norway's solution to this in two of their most successful industries (hydropower and oil prospecting) was to apply heavy taxation to the monopolies, and treating the people at large as the natural legal owner of the monopolized resource.

(To address Bryan Caplan's argument about disincentives to explore and invest, you can just subsidize those directly -- a perpetual monopoly should not be the carrot we use to encourage development, and Norway's success over the past few decades bears this out IMHO).

The Oil & Hydropower systems aren't perfect, and there's plenty of debates (especially lately) about what we should do with the publicly-owned profits from the monopoly taxation, but it's clear that without them Norway would be in a much worse place.

The thing the authors warn about in the article is that all the hopes for new resources on the horizon to be the "new oil" (Salmon aquaculture, Wind & Solar Power, Bio-prospecting) are likely to be dashed, because Norway has lost touch with its traditional solutions, and so new monopolies are likely to arise uncontested, allowing private (and often foreign) countries to siphon money out of the country.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust

I.

Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There’s live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming.

Do you believe this?

I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this.

Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them?

Again, yes. While I've heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, "the police have apprehended" seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference - or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear "Abdullah Abdul" - is way worse than anything I've ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think "wow that's crazy" and still not update to believing they did it all the time.

It doesn't matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that "FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it's in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don't exist". Or "FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist". But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX's worst enemies don't accuse them of doing things like this.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/

Little Soldiers is a book by Lenora Chu about the Chinese education system. I haven’t read it. This is a review of Dormin111’s review of Little Soldiers.

Dormin describes the “plot”: The author is a second-generation Chinese-American woman, raised by demanding Asian parents. Her parents made her work herself to the bone to get perfect grades in school, practice piano, get into Ivy League schools, etc. She resisted and resented the hell she was forced to go through (though she got into Stanford, so she couldn’t have resisted too hard).

Skip a decade. She is grown up, married, and has a three year old child. Her husband (a white guy named Rob) gets a job in China, so they move to Shanghai. She wants their three-year-old son to be bilingual/bicultural, so she enrolls him in Soong Qing Ling, the Harvard of Chinese preschools. The book is about her experiences there and what it taught her about various aspects of Chinese education. Like the lunches:

During his first week at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey began complaining to his mom about eating eggs. This puzzled Lenora because as far as she knew, Rainey refused to eat eggs and never did so at home. But somehow he was eating them at school.

After much coaxing (three-year-olds aren’t especially articulate), Lenora discovered that Rainey was being force-fed eggs. By his telling, every day at school, Rainey’s teacher would pass hardboiled eggs to all students and order them to eat. When Rainey refused (as he always did), the teacher would grab the egg and shove it in his mouth. When Rainey spit the egg out (as he always did), the teacher would do the same thing. This cycle would repeat 3-5 times with louder yelling from the teacher each time until Rainey surrendered and ate the egg.

[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness]

I.

Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “If you could bang any celebrity who would it be?” – turn to “What will you say as your last words?”

Sounds like a valid question. You can go out with a wisecrack, like Oscar Wilde (“Either this wallpaper goes or I do”). Or with piety and humility, like Jesus (“Into thy hands, o Father, I commend my spirit.”) Or burning with defiance, like Karl Marx (“Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”)

Well, this is an atheist/skeptic blog, so let me do my job of puncturing all your pleasant dreams. You’ll probably never become an astronaut. You’re not going to bang Emma Watson. And your last words will probably be something like “mmmrrrgggg graaaaaaaaaaaHAAACK!”

I guess I always pictured dying as – unless you got hit by a truck or something – a bittersweet and strangely beautiful process. You’d grow older and weaker and gradually get some disease and feel your time was upon you. You’d be in a nice big bed at home with all your friends and family gathered around. You’d gradually feel the darkness closing in. You’d tell them all how much you loved them, there would be tears, you would say something witty or pious or defiant, and then you would close your eyes and drift away into a dreamless sleep.

And I think this happens sometimes. For all I know, maybe it happens quite a lot. If it does, I never see these people. They very wisely stay far away from hospitals and the medical system in general. I see the other kind of people.

It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.

Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist.

Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is Conway’s Game of Life; the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over time (the laws of physics).

Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conway’s Life might be like this: it’s Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be “simulating” the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much

This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting. It’s less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist’s Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses.

On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it’s all stuff like “take prenatal vitamins” and “avoid alcohol” and “don’t strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects”. It’s fine, but it’s the equivalent of college counselors who say “get good grades and try hard on the SAT.” Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What’s the pregnancy-advice version of that?

That’s what we’re doing here. Do not take this guide as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion.

Here are my headline findings:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-31422

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28:

1. Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 69% —→ 14%

2. Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 71% —→ 70%

3. Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% —→21%

4. Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?: 12% —→10%

5. Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 71% —→ 80%

6. Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 8% —→ 12%

7. Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 63% —→20%

If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)

Numbers 1 and 7 are impressive changes! (it’s interesting how similarly they’ve evolved, even though they’re superficially about different things and the questions were on different prediction markets). Early in the war, prediction markets didn’t like Ukraine’s odds; now they’re much more sanguine.

Let’s look at the exact course:

This is almost monotonically decreasing. Every day it’s lower than the day before.

How suspicious should we be of this? If there were a stock that decreased every day for twenty days, we’d be surprised that investors were constantly overestimating it. At some point on day 10, someone should think “looks like this keeps declining, maybe I should short it”, and that would halt its decline. In efficient markets, there should never be predictable patterns! So what’s going on here?

Maybe it’s a technical issue with Metaculus? Suppose that at the beginning of the war, people thought there was an 80% chance of occupation. Lots of people predicted 80%. Then events immediately showed the real probability was more like 10%. Each day a couple more people showed up and predicted 10%, which gradually moved the average of all predictions (old and new) down. You can see a description of their updating function here - it seems slightly savvier than the toy version I just described, but not savvy enough to avoid the problem entirely.

But Polymarket has the same problem:

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:

1. Comment of the week is Stefferi on the circumstances leading to the rise of Hitler. See also idontknow: “The strongest defense against extreme right wingers is a moderate right wing party that is vigorous.”

2. Please vote for your favorite adversarial collaboration from the last week. The entries were:

a. Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students?
b. Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible?
c. Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory?
d. Should Transgender Children Transition?

After some discussion with the contestants, the winner of the popular vote will get a $500 prize, and the winner of my vote will get a second $500 prize; these may or may not be the same entry. After you’ve read all the entries, you can vote here.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/26/please-vote-for-acc-winner/

I’ve now posted all eight adversarial collaborations.

In case you missed any, you can find a list of them (with links) here.

If you have read all the collaborations, please vote on your favorite. This year I will decide the winner by popular vote; I don’t feel like putting my finger on the scale this time. I will give $2000 to the first place winner and $500 to second place. You can vote for your favorite collaboration here. No, you may not vote for the Grinch.

Thanks again to all participants, readers, and voters.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death

Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay awake to check, and the answer is: they feel great! About 70% of cases of treatment-resistant depression go away completely if the patient stays awake long enough. This would be a great depression cure, except that the depression comes back as soon as they go to sleep. There's a lot of great work going on to figure out how to make cure-by-sleep-deprivation last longer - see the Chronotherapeutics Manual for more details.

But forget the practical side of this for now. It looks like sleep is somehow renewing these people's depressions. As if depression is caused by some injury during sleep, heals part of the way during an average day (or all the way during an extra-long day of sleep deprivation) and then the same injury gets re-inflicted during sleep the next night.

When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into things their theories can’t explain. Then some genius develops a new theory, and scientists are guided by that one. So the cycle repeats, knowledge gained with every step.

When I hear philosophers talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds like a madman. There is no such thing as ground-level truth! Only theory! No objective sense-data! Only theory! No basis for accepting or rejecting any theory over any other! Only theory! No scientists! Only theories, wearing lab coats and fake beards, hoping nobody will notice the charade!

I decided to read Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions in order to understand this better. Having finished, I have come to a conclusion: yup, I can see why this book causes so much confusion.

At first Kuhn’s thesis appears simple, maybe even obvious. I found myself worrying at times that he was knocking down a straw man, although of course we have to read the history of philosophy backwards and remember that Kuhn may already be in the water supply, so to speak. He argues against a simplistic view of science in which it is merely the gradual accumulation of facts. So Aristotle discovered a few true facts, Galileo added a few more on, then Newton discovered a few more, and now we have very many facts indeed.

In this model, good science cannot disagree with other good science. You’re either wrong – as various pseudoscientists and failed scientists have been throughout history, positing false ideas like “the brain is only there to cool the blood” or “the sun orbits the earth”. Or you’re right, your ideas are enshrined in the Sacristry Of Settled Science, and your facts join the accumulated store that passes through the ages.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san

[Original post here]

1:

Nifty775 writes:

This doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness.

Many comments made this point. Shellenberger did bring it up in the book, so its absence in the post is my fault and mine alone. He writes:

I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis

I.

Start with Lior Pachter's Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial". The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn’t. But there was some controversy over the randomization, which looked like this

Remember, we want to randomly create two groups of similar people, then give Vitamin D to one group and see what happens. If the groups are different to start with, then we won't be able to tell if the Vitamin D did anything or if it was just the pre-existing difference. In this case, they checked for fifteen important ways that the groups could be different, and found they were only significantly different on one - blood pressure.

Jungreis and Kellis, two scientists who support this study, say that shouldn't bother us too much. They point out that because of multiple testing (we checked fifteen hypotheses), we need a higher significance threshold before we care about significance in any of them, and once we apply this correction, the blood pressure result stops being significant. Pachter challenges their math - but even aside from that, come on! We found that there was actually a big difference between these groups! You can play around with statistics and show that ignoring this difference meets certain formal criteria for statistical good practice. But the difference is still there and it's real. For all we know it could be driving the Vitamin D results.

I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023. Both asked questions about IQ:

• The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138.

• The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130.

These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average.

Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right.

And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else.

Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs 

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia.

The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic Philosopher

For me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else.

In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition. 

He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road. 

The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down. 

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.

In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note. 

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head