Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-depression I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review. This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including: 1. Typos 2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence 3. Extra things you think I should add 4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you 5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice. 6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other. Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don't kn

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights I. One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man. Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries - and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you're black, don't worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It's a weird constant. Maybe it's the author's fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people - from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story. Our tale begins in Samarkand.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower [This is the eleventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics and economic development in a way that an ACX fan would appreciate. He puts a timeline on it. The book isn't about "some hazy distant future after we're all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives." Zeihan's subtitle hints at his big and bold thesis, which predicts "the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China," which "is all just a fleeting transition" to a world largely abandoned by America. People have fun making predictions like this (and mocking those who get things spectacularly wrong). With money and fame available to people whose predictions turn out right, and the ease with which we fo

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: Apparently one important step on the way to healing partisan divides in America is implementing prophecy reform. "Yes, prophecy reform." 2: For the first time since 1797, someone has used the infamous Venetian doge selection process to select an officeholder - specifically, the new moderators of not-quite-officially-affiliated-with-ACX politics discussion subreddit r/TheMotte. I assume this is why dogecoin is up this month.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-culture Some of the best comments were on the history of 4Chan. Mr. Doolittle writes: The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of its former edgy hilarity, as internet culture caught up with its redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool). Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for. I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true. And Fabian writes:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design [This is the tenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] I was scrolling through TikTok videos a few weeks ago when I came across a TikTok-sponsored video telling me to stop scrolling and go outside. I was confused. Here I was, perfectly willing (nay, wanting) to spend hours watching dance routines and drawing tutorials I had no intention of copying, but TikTok wanted me to stop? Why? Shouldn't they have been taking advantage of me to maximize "eyeballs," "time per session," and "user engagement"? One explanation is that TikTok is a good corporate citizen that helps its users maintain responsible screen time habits. Another explanation comes from Natasha Dow Schüll's excellent book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012). Schüll talks about gambling machines, people who use them, and the addictions that develop between the two. I think the conclusions she draws are applicable not only to the gambling industry, but also to other peddlers of vice like TikTok. The Machine Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon' … [W]e actually compete with sleep. - Reed Hastings

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cbt Several people in the comments pointed out existing lower-cost CBT-i apps! This was news to me - I'd searched pretty comprehensively and hadn't found any besides the VA's CBT-i Coach, which is not intended for individual use. They were: 1: Night Owl, seems good but only available for iOS 2: Sleepedy is more of a service than an app, and involves consultations and coaches. When I tried to sign up, it made me take an annoying quiz, click through a bunch of testimonials, and then finally gave me a "Schedule your free call today!" page. Still probably less annoying than seeing an in-person therapist, I guess, and $29/month. 3: Dozy, seems potentially good but still in private beta. Will probably launch in a few months; expected $10 - $30 price point. Someone mentioned the founder of Dozy was an effective altruist and connected to me through the social graph, so I reached out. He says he's a CS student who dropped out to work on "creat[ing] more accessible & impactful mental health treatments, with insomnia as a starting point". He writes that he's looking for potential co-founders, fundraising help, and advisors in the field. If you're interested, please contact him at [email protected].

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of Trouble falling asleep? You could take sleeping pills, but they've got side effects. Guidelines recommend you try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Insomnia (CBT-i), a medication-free process where you train yourself to fall asleep by altering your schedule and sleep conditions. The journals are full of articles begging doctors to use CBT-i instead of potentially-dangerous sleeping pills. Doctors rarely comply: getting patients CBT-i is hard. The usual sound bite is that "there are 60 million people with insomnia in the US but only 75 licensed CBT-i therapists." What can you do? Not much. Until now! Late last year, Pear Therapeutics released a CBT-i app (formerly "SHUT-i", now "Somryst") which holds the patient's hand through the complicated CBT-i process. Studies show it works as well as a real therapist, which is very well indeed. There's only one catch: you need a doctor's prescription. Wait, you can prescription-gate an app? Yes! Although you can download Somryst off your normal App Store, it won't work until a doctor writes you a prescription to "activate" it. Until then, it just shows you ads for how great CBT-i would be if you could get it. And it's not just Somryst. I know of at least three other prescription apps. reSET and reSET-O are 12-week courses to help addiction and opioid addiction, respectively. EndeavourRx is a video game which is supposed to help manage ADHD in kids. I guarantee you there are a lot more of these in the pipeline. In theory, an app is a great solution to accessibility issues. Some people can't afford to see a professional. Or they have complicated schedules that make it hard to see a professional. Or they've been traumatized by the medical system and don't want to see a professional. Or they have executive function problems and can't schedule a appointment with a professional. Or they have bad insurance that doesn't have many professionals in-network, and all of them have six month wait lists. Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people, describes his experience trying to get a therapist here:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theses-on-the-current-moment [followup to The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars] 1. The Salem Witch Hunts might not be the right metaphor We usually stick to the same stock examples of repression and retaliation against nonconformists - the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution. These are rightly remembered as awful, and reminders of them make good rallying cries. But they were also short and abnormal - brief orgies of violence, after which people mostly regretted what they had done. They were bizarre unstable extremes in the history of authoritarianism. If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture [Followup to: New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed] I. Introduction You've probably seen these graphs before: They tell a familiar story: America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism. Identity issues are dominating our politics more and more with no end in sight. But what does Google Trends have to say? I chose these as especially obvious terms. But other gender-related terms

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon [This is the ninth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Despite appearances, this is not a biography. It's actually an epic fantasy series that happens to be true. A young man grows up on the edge of civilization, decides to fix his father's mistakes, turns to the dark side for power, wins victories despite the odds, betrays his mentors, and smashes the oppressive status quo. There's even a Bilbo. (Instead of Bilbo Baggins, it's Senator Bilbo, a white supremacist who says things like "the pure and undefiled Caucasian strain" while he's on the Senate floor.) 1: Memorable characters Sam Rayburn: Speaker of the House. He had so much integrity that he scared other members of Congress. Alvin Wirtz: LBJ's evil lawyer. (For non-Americans, Lyndon Baines Johnson was often abbreviated as LBJ.) "Wirtz was the kind of lawyer who would slip into a contract a sentence---a sentence that changed the contract's meaning---in the hope that the opposing lawyer would not notice it."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye [This is the eighth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium. Within a generation, much of the wealth of great senators like Symmachus was lost or slipped into the Christian church. Goths sacked the city of Rome. Vandals conquered wealthy north Africa and the great city of Carthage. Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one. It was not only a political revolution. "It was in this world that the conglomerate of ideas that medieval persons took for granted was first formed." This period rivals the Enlightenment as the most dramatic transformation of the West. Background on the Author Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He's one of the great scholars of "Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I'm not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown's work in the extremely readable "The World of Late Antiquity" from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown's 2014 book "Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-it-hard-to-acknowledge-preferences I recently stayed at a B&B owned by a nice elderly couple. Very, very nice. The moment I stepped in the door, they asked how my flight was, where I was from, what I did, how I'd enjoyed my three minutes of visiting their city so far, what kind of food I liked, what my favorite color was, et cetera. I played along - no point in offending people - but I warned that my friend, who would be arriving a little later, was much more introverted, and would appreciate being efficiently directed to her room without the welcome committee. A little later, my friend arrived. From my room, I could hear them start welcoming her, ask her how her flight had been, start trying to get to know her - until I ran out and rescued her, for which she reports gratitude. For the rest of our stay, they continued to talk both of our ears off, with my friend growing increasingly annoyed and uncomfortable.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism I. Around 1970, something went wrong. The global economy, after twenty-five years of good post-war growth, suddenly blipped. The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of "embedded liberalism" - was a pleasant place. There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other. Executive pay was taxed so heavily that nobody had much incentive to try to increase their profit margin; workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees. As long as companies followed the script, the government embraced and protected them. Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired. The government wasn't exactly socialist per se, but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and every night you went to sleep knowing there would be probably be another uncontroversial, mostly-successful government welfare program tomorrow.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be Support the author Scott Alexander on Substack. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ Spotted on Reddit about the rationalist community: I like the culture while hating a lot of the specifics...however[,] there is no such thing as "rationality" that is free from ideology. I've got to admit, I hate this argument. Also related ones, like: "They say we're politicizing this scientific field. But no science is inherently apolitical. There are political assumptions wrapped up with everything we do." Or: "They say we're 'biased', but there's no such thing as a view-from-nowhere objectivity that doesn't import any assumptions. Everyone's biased, we're just not trying to deny it like they are."

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the [This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I'm one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre's misquoting of Dostoevsky's take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn't kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I'm thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. According to the instructions on the tin, The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold [This is the sixth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA] If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York "World," odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you'll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable. The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results Thanks to the 852 of you who took the 2020 SSC nootropics survey. I asked people to rate various nootropics on whether they "worked" or not, deliberately leaving the question kind of vague. This is using a broad definition of "nootropics" - any supplement or taken-outside-the-usual-medical-system drug that's purported to have mental health effects. Most of the chemicals I asked about were supposed stimulants, anxiolytics, or antidepressants. I'll start with the headline results, then go into details: Nootropic (sample size in parentheses), adjusted mean rating 1-10 (note truncated axis!), and 95% confidence interval. Click to expand. I tried to include a mix of common and well-studied nootropics as a baseline, plus some newer rarer substances nobody had looked into before. Predictably, the common substances got large sample sizes, and the rare substances got small ones. I excluded etifoxene, RGPU-95, and white jelly mushrooms from the graph because the sample was so small that the confidence interval would have covered the entire displayed range. A few substances on there are based off only 5 - 10 data points. I did a sort of ad hoc Bayesian adjustment where I assumed a prior of "average" for every substance and let the data try to push it away from that, which helped the numbers swing around a little less wildly.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-predictions-for-2021 At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. This year I'm really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021. Rules: unless otherwise stated, all predictions are about what will be true on/by January 1, 2022. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I've tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said. This isn't about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it's about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am. I'm also moving towards trying to learn to predict shorter-term and more specific events as they happen - you can see my log here. US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is [This is the fifth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA] The dark side of enlightenment The main character of The Matrix, Neo, gets to choose whether to take the red or blue pill: whether to escape his dream world or remain inside it. Unlike Neo, we're (probably) not trapped in a virtual reality. Nevertheless, we may be living in something of a dream world. At least, that's what Robert Wright claims in Why Buddhism Is True. According to Wright, evolution has packed us full of illusions. They range from the relatively harmless falsehood "powdered sugar donuts are good for me" to the sweeping distortion "I have a self." These misperceptions are not only inaccurate; they are dangerous. They cause unhappiness by trapping us on the hedonic treadmill and immorality by (among other things) fanning the flames of tribalism. Wright thinks that mindfulness meditation is the real-world equivalent of the red pill. The book attempts to justify this claim, aiming for a grand synthesis of Buddhism and psychology. Wright argues that psychology vindicates two venerable Buddhist theses: not-self (our experience of an "I" is in some sense an illusion) and emptiness (the world is in some sense "empty" or devoid of "essence"). Furthermore, mindfulness meditation allows us to see the truth of these theses in an experiential way which frees us of our evolutionary bondage. Enlightenment, the end-goal of meditation, is the state of full liberation from this bondage.

[This is the fourth of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA] Book Review - Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are is ostensibly a book about a subfield of ethology - animal cognition. It turns out to actually be about a lot more things than that, as "animal cognition" and the history of its study touches on a lot of different scientific fields and the various approaches, methodologies, and ideologies they've had in the past. Before we jump into talking about how the book is useful an

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history This book is subtitled "A Very Short Introduction" and is one of the smallest books I've ever seen, about three ounces. Three ounces is exactly the amount of global economic history that my brain can absorb before turning to mush, so I was glad to find it. Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why have some non-Western countries (Japan, China) come from behind and mostly caught up? Why have others failed to replicate the West's trajectory and stayed underdeveloped despite seemingly having enough time to catch up? GEH:VSI tries to answer these questions. It explicitly disavows explanations that lean too heavily on some populations being better (smarter, harder working, etc) than others, or on narratives of colonial exploitation - sorry if you were looking for anything too juicy. Given its brevity, it can only gesture at justifications for this choice. It's skeptical of the Protestant work ethic because, however much it matched experience in 18-whatever, today "Catholic Italy [is richer than] Protestant Britain" (is this true? Britain has higher GDP today, but Italy was higher when this book was written) It's skeptical of ideas that some countries are "traditionalist" and resistant to change because of [long list of those countries adopting various profitable innovations] - for example African farmers now mostly grow more productive New World crops (but couldn't countries be willing to change in some ways but traditionalist in others?). The reluctance to invoke colonialism too heavily is even less well-explained, but I think it relies on differences between never-colonized countries - for example, Russia and the Ottomans lagged behind the West in much the same way as Asia and Latin America, and even Austria lagged Britain (GEH:VSI does talk about particular problems with colonial policies when they come up, as part of its general policy survey). Overall I think of these exclusions more as a commitment to a paradigm: what would it look like to pursue a project of understanding global economic history without invoking either of these tempting but curiosity-stopping explanations?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/no-really-why-are-so-many-christians I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article, subtitled Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism? It had good interviews and beautiful photos. The only thing it lacked was any explanation of why so many Christians in Colombia were converting to Orthodox Judaism, unless you count explanations like these: "I wanted to find the truth," Rivka Espinosa (formerly Loida Espinosa), who converted from evangelicalism, told me. "I began to study, more and more, and ask myself deep questions: What was my mission in this world? Why was I here? And what did I need to do?" She said her father was the pastor of an evangelical church where she was a member. He also converted. "It was a calling of the soul," Devorah Guilah Koren, who converted from Catholicism with her husband and two children, told me. "More than a religion, [Orthodox Judaism] was a way of thinking and conduct that satisfied all of our needs." This is all very nice, but it doesn't seem like an explanation. Why are more people converting in Colombia than, say, Greece or Thailand? Don't Greek people sometimes want to find the truth? Don't Thais ever feel callings of the soul?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-grading-my-trump-predictions I had many opinions on Donald Trump. I tried to back some of those opinions up with predictions about what would happen during his administration. Now that the dust has cleared, it's time to see how I did. The summary: Of 48 specific predictions about Trump, I got 37 directionally right, although this is kind of meaningless. I got an average log error score of -0.48 (where getting everything right is 0 and guessing 50-50 for everything is -0.69) although this is also kind of meaningless. I quadrupled my money on prediction markets, which I think is meaningful. In terms of my more qualitative/implied predictions, got at least one important trend right before anyone else, but also made some embarrassing unforced errors. Going through all my predictions post by post, and giving each a letter grade: 1: 10-23-2015: Trump's base is/will be surprisingly racially diverse (A-) As far as I know, the first post I wrote about Trump was this one, where I argued against the prevailing narrative that Trump was practicing "the politics of white insecurity" or had an unusually white base of support (for a Republican). I wrote that Trump seemed to be doing pretty well (for a Republican) among blacks and Hispanics, and concluded that: There are too few data to say anything for sure. But all of the data that exist suggest that if the Republican primary were held today and restricted to non-whites, Trump would still win. And if Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him. In other words, the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data. I was right. In the general election a year later, Trump did better than Romney had among non-white voters. He made large gains among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least five percentage points over Romney's numbers was whites. As I pointed out at the time, the narrative that Trump was especially appealing to white voters was bizarre and not truth-based, motivated primarily by a demand for racist Republicans on the part of increasingly woke narrative-consumers.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty [This is the third of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA] In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George, his answer came in the form of a book called Progress & Poverty, and this is a review of that book. Henry George is variously known for leading an early movement that popularized Universal Basic Income, sporting a fancy beard while shouting "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" and inspiring a popular board game that was shamelessly ripped off and repackaged as Monopoly. But he didn't just write a book. He also ran for Mayor of New York city in 1886, beating out some rando Republican named "Theodore Roosevelt," but ultimately losing to the favored candidate of Tammany Hall, who saw George's radical economic ideas as a threat to their well-oiled political machine (Andrew Yang take note). He ran again in 1897 but died just 4 days before the election, prompting a national outpouring of mourning. According to Ralph Gabriel's Course of American Democratic Thought, in New York alone 200,000 people came to see his body lying in repose, half of which had to be turned away. For context, that one crowd was roughly the size of 1% of the entire population of New York at the time. I'm writing this book review for three reasons: George's arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about "Capitalism" and "Socialism" (and whatever we mean by those on any given day) The book has timeless advice for navigating modern crises such as ever-rising rents, homelessness, and the NIMBY vs. YIMBY wars. This is a golden opportunity to shamelessly over-use the catchy phrase "By George!"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera Who among us hasn't looked out at the great edifice of human civilization in all its complexity, and thought "Yeah okay but I could do it better"? Centuries of utopian communes, micronations, and seasteads have dreamed of rebuilding society from first principles, free from entrenched interests and the debris of the past. If you got all the laws and values just right, maybe you could prevent poverty and corruption from finding their first footholds. Do the "liberty and justice for all" thing, but for real. And who among us, having had the dream, hasn't entered into multi-year negotiations with the government of Honduras? Taken advantage of a clause in the Honduras-Kuwait Treaty Of Reciprocal Investment guaranteeing them their right to pursue their vision unmolested? Raised millions in venture capital and bought land on a Caribbean island to turn it into a reality? Not Erick Brimen, and not Honduras Próspera Inc. You might have read about them last month in Bloomberg: A Private Tech City Opens For Business In Honduras. Or in NACLA: A Private Government In Honduras Moves Forward. Or FT: An Investor's Prosperity Vision For Honduras. I read all of this and still didn't feel like I quite understood what was going on. Then a fortuitious mistake led me to an email exchange with Trey Goff, Próspera's extremely open and thorough Chief of Staff, who kindly let me grill him on all the stuff I didn't understand. The result is this post. It's all the information I could collect on Próspera from basically every public source, plus some non-public ones. It's about a private tech city and a prosperity vision and all that. But it's also about - - - well, people talk a lot these days about "systemic change". But usually that means something like fiddling with tax rates or ending the filibuster. What if you could actually change the system? Say "this system we have, the one that's letting all these people starve and suffer violence and die of preventable diseases - I don't care for it. Let's try something else"? Yes, this is about startup governments and investment opportunities and blah blah blah, but it's also about trying to fight global poverty by radically changing the rules of the game that makes it possible.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-unifying-predictive-coding-with [epistemic status: I know a little about the predictive coding side of this, but almost nothing about backpropagation or the math behind the unification. I am posting this mostly as a link to people who know more.] This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr, Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation, itself about a recent paper Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary Computation Graphs. Predictive coding is the most plausible current theory of how the brain works. I've written about it elsewhere, especially here.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april [Remember, I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] 1: A link between childhood "screen time" and attention problems has - say it with me - failed to replicate. The paper is especially interesting for using a "multiverse analysis": We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices. If I had the energy to look through 848 models and see which ones got significant findings and which ones didn't, I bet I would become enlightened by the end of it. 2: Seen on architecture Twitter:

[This is the second of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA] I. If you're looking for the whipping boy for all of medicine, and most of science, look no further than Galen of Pergamon. As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the "specious causes" that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it's pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters. Centuries went by, but not much changed. Charles Richet, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said that Galen and "all the physicians who followed [him] during sixteen centuries, describe humours which they had never seen, and which no one will ever see, for they do not exist." Some of the 'humors' exist, he says, like blood and bile. But of the "extraordinary phlegm or pituitary accretion" he says, "where is it? Who will ever see it? Who has ever seen it? What can we say of this fanciful classification of humours into four groups, of which two are absolutely imaginary?" And so on until the present day. In Scott's review of Superforecasting, he quotes Tetlock's comment on Galen:

[This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It's not by me - it's by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I'll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you've read all of them, I'll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack's, so please don't hold it against this entry. Oh, and I promise not all of them are this long. - SA] Shasta County Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open. If you ask why, they'll tell you it's because of what happens if a motorist hits one of their herd. In open range, the driver should have been more careful; "the motorist buys the cow". In closed range, the rancher should have been sure to fence his animals in; he compensates the motorist.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders. His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example: Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argument for why other than that people traditionally trained this way. The real reason was probably that bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods. Later the idea of chasing the pump was rationalized into the theory of metabolic stress. Yet there wasn't a single study to support that shorter rest periods actually benefit muscle growth.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis I. Start with Lior Pachter's Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial". The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn't. But there was some controversy over the randomization, which looked like this Remember, we want to randomly create two groups of similar people, then give Vitamin D to one group and see what happens. If the groups are different to start with, then we won't be able to tell if the Vitamin D did anything or if it was just the pre-existing difference. In this case, they checked for fifteen important ways that the groups could be different, and found they were only significantly different on one - blood pressure. Jungreis and Kellis, two scientists who support this study, say that shouldn't bother us too much. They point out that because of multiple testing (we checked fifteen hypotheses), we need a higher significance threshold before we care about significance in any of them, and once we apply this correction, the blood pressure result stops being significant. Pachter challenges their math - but even aside from that, come on! We found that there was actually a big difference between these groups! You can play around with statistics and show that ignoring this difference meets certain formal criteria for statistical good practice. But the difference is still there and it's real. For all we know it could be driving the Vitamin D results.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I'm very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. Usually I use strikethrough for things that didn't happen, but since Substack doesn't let me strikethrough text or change its color or do anything interesting, I've had to turn the ones that didn't happen into links. Italicized are getting thrown out because they were confusing or conditional on something that didn't happen. I can't decide if they're true or not. All of these judgments were as of December 31 2020, not as of now. (Remember, link means something that didn't happen, not something I was wrong about. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.)

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are statistically more likely to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authoritarian: The Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure. It discusses studies finding that consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous) are more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios. The authors link this to a construct called "need for cognitive closure", ie being very sure you are right and unwilling to consider alternate perspectives. They argue that something about the interaction of brain hemispheres regulates cognitive closure, and that ambidextrous people, with their weak hemispheric dominance, get less of it. They study 235 undergraduates and find results that generally confirm this hypothesis: their ambidextrous subjects support less authoritarian and racist beliefs, and this is partly

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ [Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it's so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high only appears in 1/10,000 people or so, it beggars coincidence to believe this represents anything but a very strong filter for IQ (or something correlated with it) in reaching that level. If you saw a group of dozens of people who were 7'0 tall on average, you'd assume it was a basketball team or some other group selected for height, not a bunch of botanists who were all very tall by coincidence. A lot of people find this pretty depressing. Some worry that taking it seriously might damage the "growth mindset" people need to fully actualize their potential. This is important and I want to discuss it eventually, but not now. What I want to discuss now is people who feel personally depressed. For example, a comment from last week: I'm sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying I. What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)? The official FDA packet insert recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to. But Jakubovski et al's Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors tries to figure out which doses of which antidepressants are equivalent to each other, and comes up with the following suggestion (ignore the graph, read the caption) 16.7 mg Lexapro equals 20 mg of paroxetine (Paxil) or fluoxetine (Prozac). But the maximum approved doses of those medications are 60 mg and 80 mg, respectively. If we convert these to mg imipramine equivalents like the study above uses, Prozac maxes out at 400, Paxil at 300, and Lexapro at 120. So Lexapro has a very low maximum dose compared to other similar antidepressants. Why? Because Lexapro (escitalopram) is a derivative of the older drug Celexa (citalopram). Sometime around 2011, the FDA freaked out that high doses of citalopram might cause a deadly heart condition called torsade de pointes, and lowered the maximum dose to prevent this. Since then it's been pretty conclusively shown that the FDA was mostly wrong about this and kind of bungled the whole process. But they forgot to ever unbungle it, so citalopram still has a lower maximum dose than every other antidepressant. When escitalopram was invented, it inherited its parent chemical's unusually-low maximum dose, and remains at that level today [edit: I got the timing messed up, see here]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower I. What is willpower? Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense. Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it's a way of minimizing opportunity costs. But how come my brain is convinced that playing Civilization for ten hours has no opportunity cost, but spending five seconds putting away dishes has such immense opportunity costs that it will probably leave me permanently destitute? I can't find any correlation between the subjective phenomenon of willpower or effort-needingness and real opportunity costs at all.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism In yesterday's review of Antifragile, I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility. I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I've got. Suppose that Distribution 1 represents nuclear plants. It has low variance, so all the plants are pretty similar. Plant A is slightly older and less fancy than Plant B, but it still works about the same. Now we move to Distribution 2. It has high variance. Plant B is the best nuclear plant in the world. It uses revolutionary new technology to squeeze extra power out of each gram of uranium, its staff are carefully-trained experts, and it's won Power Plant Magazine's Reactor Of The Year award five times in a row. Plant A suffers a meltdown after two days, killing everybody. If you live in a region with lots of nuclear plants, you'd prefer they be on the first distribution, the low-variance one. Having some great nuclear plants is nice, but having any terrible ones means catastrophe. Much better for all nuclear plants to be mediocre.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of Antifragile as: Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty [and antifragility is what gains from it]. The glass on the table is short volatility. The glass is fragile: the less you disrupt it, the better it does. A rock is "robust" - neither fragile nor antifragile - it will do about equally well whether you disrupt it or not. What about antifragile? Taleb's first (and cutest) example is the Hydra, which grows more and more heads the more a hero tries to harm it. What else is like this? Buying options is antifragile. Suppose oil is currently worth $10, and you pay $1 for an option to buy it at $10 next year. If there's a small amount of variance (oil can go up or down 20%), it's kind of a wash. Worst-case scenario, oil goes down 20% to $8, you don't buy it, and you've lost $1 buying the option. Best-case scenario, oil goes up 20% to $12, you exercise your option to buy for $10, you sell it for $12, and you've made a $1 profit - $2 from selling the oil, minus $1 from buying the option. Overall you expect to break even. But if there's large uncertainty - the price of oil can go up or down 1000% - then it's a great deal. Worst-case scenario, oil goes down to negative $90 and you don't buy it, so you still just lost $1. Best case scenario, oil goes up to $110, you exercise your option to buy for $10, and you make $99 ($100 profit minus $1 for the option). So the oil option is antifragile - the more the price varies, the better it will do. The more chaotic things get, the more uncertain and unpredictable the world is, the more oil options start looking like a good deal.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion [warning: boring inside baseball post] From The Hypothesis: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well. It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other writers doing the same) when really the big money comes from Substack paying a pre-selected group money directly. Other people have said it's Substack exercising editorial policy to attract a certain type of person to their site, usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic. I'm one of the writers Substack paid, which gives me some extra information on how this went down. Here's a stylized interpretation of the email conversation that got it started: SUBSTACK: You should join our new blogging thing! ME: No. SUBSTACK: It's really good!

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan I. If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan". If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years. I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how. As an analysis of the rise of a dictator, this book fails a pretty basic desideratum: it seems less than fully convinced the dictator's rise was bad. Again and again I found myself checking to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked up a pro-Erdogan book. I didn't; author Soner Cagaptay is a well-respected Turkey scholar in a US think tank who's written other much more critical things. The fact is, Erdogan's rise is inherently a pretty sympathetic story. If he'd died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice, a scrappy kid who overcame poverty and discrimination to become a great and unifying leader.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay awake to check, and the answer is: they feel great! About 70% of cases of treatment-resistant depression go away completely if the patient stays awake long enough. This would be a great depression cure, except that the depression comes back as soon as they go to sleep. There's a lot of great work going on to figure out how to make cure-by-sleep-deprivation last longer - see the Chronotherapeutics Manual for more details. But forget the practical side of this for now. It looks like sleep is somehow renewing these people's depressions. As if depression is caused by some injury during sleep, heals part of the way during an average day (or all the way during an extra-long day of sleep deprivation) and then the same injury gets re-inflicted during sleep the next night.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-mantic-matt-y The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week. You don't want a rule that if a pundit ever gets anything wrong, we stop trusting them forever. Warren Buffett gets some things wrong, Zeynep Tufecki gets some things wrong, even Nostradamus would have gotten some things wrong if he'd said anything clearly enough to pin down what he meant. The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now. But not pundits. We never did get the world where pundits, bloggers, and other commentators post predictions clearly in a way where they can check up on them later.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/richard-nixon-vs-cool In the highlights post on class, I wrote: When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it's possible to win these things. So why don't they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the [cultural] upper class. IR responded in the comments: In Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It's a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google's low female representation wasn't a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long before either gender thinks about joining Google. Grant says that gender differences are small and irrelevant to the current issue. I disagree. Grant writes: It's always precarious to make claims about how one half of the population differs from the other half—especially on something as complicated as technical skills and interests. But I think it's a travesty when discussions about data devolve into name-calling and threats. As a social scientist, I prefer to look at the evidence.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem Introduction and review Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al's work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases. To review: the brain combines raw experience (eg sensations, memories) with context (eg priors, expectations, other related sensations and memories) to produce perceptions. You don't notice this process; you are only able to consciously register the final perception, which feels exactly like raw experience. A typical optical illusion. The top chess set and the bottom chess set are the same color (grayish). But the top appears white and the bottom black because of the context (darker vs. lighter background). You perceive not the raw experience (grayish color) but the final perception modulated by context; to your conscious mind, it just seems like a brute fact that the top is white and the bottom black, and it is hard to convince yourself otherwise. Or: maybe you feel like you are using a particular context independent channel (eg hearing). Unbeknownst to you, the information in that channel is being context-modulated by the inputs of a different channel (eg vision). You don't feel like "this is what I'm hearing, but my vision tells me differently, so I'll compromise". You feel like "this is exactly what I heard, with my ears, in a way vision didn't affect at all".

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much worse. That's why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary people doing ordinary things. An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy the people's cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class To my surprise, we have some genuine upper-class people reading this blog. Here's what they thought, starting with Cabayun: While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money. I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed. And Crotchety Crank: I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper [and] both generations above mine have already read [Fussell's book]! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread. And Arrow63: Upper class here, which is definitely middle class to say but I think it's ok since I'm anonymous. I would say that the one big change to the class system he outlined is that new money can definitely buy its way to the upper class. This was unthinkable for centuries but in the money obsessed current age is quite doable. Of course there is a world of difference between the my pillow guy and Henry Kravis so it's far from axiomatic that great wealth equals great class prestige. But where you used to see museum, presitigious university and music hall boards stuffed with Cabots and Astors those seats have been completely occupied by billionaires with maybe one or two exceptions for old times' sake. Get on a couple of those and you have risen to the top of the class hierarchy.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march [link back to the original links post: here] On the article about privateers, local naval expert Bean writes: It's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of good work. And yes, it is that stupid. First, privateering is probably illegal today. The US didn't sign the 1856 Paris declaration outlawing it, but the ban is almost certainly considered customary international law today, and thus binding on the US, too. (International law is very weird.) Second, it makes no sense. It was something that people did in an era when the ability of the state to do things was sharply constrained, and it was never all that profitable. These days, the government is a lot more effective, and if it wants to hunt Chinese commerce (never mind the issues about who owns the cargo, which is rather different in the days of worldwide communications and the shipping container) it will make auxiliary commerce raiders of its own. There's definitely no need to have a DDG sit outside a Brazilian port waiting. Take any reasonable civilian ship (big yacht, fishing boat, tug, whatever) and fit it with a couple of 40mm guns and a boarding party. Have it do the waiting instead. And our other defense expert, John Schilling, writes:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march Warning: I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog and may be outdated. 1: From a colonel writing for the US Naval Institute - Unleash The Privateers! "The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea." 2: Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) on what she learned by studying the recession of 1973. "My best guess is that something was going wrong in the US and world economy well before 1971, but the market was not being allowed to adjust. Breaking Bretton Woods took the finger out of the dyke and everything fluctuated wildly for a few years until the world reached a new equilibrium." 3: There's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that hurricanes have gotten stronger in recent years; a new study confirms that the rate at which hurricanes qualify as "major" (winds above 100 knots) goes up by about 8% per decade. 4: Honduras is working on the charter city of Prospera, a "semi-autonomous" "hub for sustainable economic development" on the island of Roatan. See their goals here - eg it takes 17 steps, 32 days, and $12,000 to get a business permit elsewhere in Honduras, but should take only one step, one day, and $200 to get it in Prospera. Some locals seem skeptical and concerned, though the project denies it will use eminent domain. 5: The Ghetto Tarot is an artist's attempt to replicate Tarot cards in the slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. EG: