Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ I. It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets. False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It's the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own. Zechariah predicted the Israelites would rebel against God; they did so by killing His prophet Zechariah. Jocasta heard a prediction that she would marry her infant son Oedipus, so she left him to die on a mountainside – ensuring neither of them recognized each other when he came of age. Unfortunately for him, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord is a true prophet. He spent years writing his magnum opus The Precipice, warning that humankind was unprepared for various global disasters like pandemics and economic collapses. You can guess what happened next. His book came out March 3, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse. He couldn't go on tour to promote it, on account of the pandemic. Nobody was buying books anyway, on account of the economic collapse. All the newspapers and journals and so on that would usually cover an exciting new book were busy covering the pandemic and economic collapse instead. The score is still gods one zillion, prophets zero. So Ord's PR person asked me to help spread the word, and here we are.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/ Content warning: this is a complicated analysis of something people care about a lot right now. I'm not confident in my analysis, the post comes to no clear conclusion and there are no easy answers about how to proceed. If I see this on Twitter with some headline about it DESTROYING somebody, I am going to be so mad.] The New York Times says that It's Time To Make Your Own Face Mask. But MacIntyre et al (2015) says it isn't. The surgical masks used in hospitals are made out of non-woven fabrics that are pretty different from anything you have at home. But in some developing countries, health care workers instead use masks made of normal cloth. Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles. Respirators and real surgical masks block 95%+, but 60-80% still seems better than nothing. And most of the masks ordinary people wear in Asian countries are cloth, and they seem to do pretty well. So there's some circumstantial evidence that these cloth masks might be helpful. Most experts in the early 2000s agreed that these masks were probably better than nothing. In 2015, an Australian team set out to prove it with a randomized controlled trial.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/ [with apologies to the real Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. See also the List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA] I. The Clamzorians are animists. They believe every rock and tree and river has its own spirit. And those spirits are legal people. This on its own is not unusual – even New Zealand gives rivers legal personhood. But in Clamzoria, if a flood destroys your home, you sue the river. If you win, then the river is in debt to you. The government can assign a guardian to the river to force it to pay off its debts, and that guardian gets temporary custody of all the river's property. He or she can collect a toll from boats, sell water to reservoirs, and charge rent to hydroelectric dams. Once the river has paid off its debt, the guardian is discharged, and the river becomes free to use once again. Clamzorian precedent governs when you may or may not sue objects. If you swim in the freezing river in the dead of winter, and catch cold, that's on you. But if a hurricane destroys your property, you can absolutely sue the wind for damages, and collect from windmills. Suits against earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like are dead common. Suits against diseases happen occasionally. Sometimes someone will sue something even more abstract – a custom, an emotion, a concept.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/27/coronalinks-3-27-20/ The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China, marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. Hammer and dance Most of the smart people I've been reading have converged on something like the ideas expressed in The Hammer And The Dance – see this Less Wrong post for more. Summary: Asian countries have managed to control the pandemic through mass testing, contact tracing, and travel bans, without economic shutdown. The West lost the chance for a clean win when it bungled its first month of response, but it can still recover its footing. We need a medium-term national shutdown to arrest the spread of the virus until authorities can get their act together – manufacture lots of tests and face masks, create a testing infrastructure, come up with policies for how to respond when people test positive, distribute the face masks to everyone, etc. With a lot of work, we can manage that in a month or so. After that, we can relax the national shutdown, start over with a clean slate, and pursue the Asian-style containment strategy we should have been doing since the beginning.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ There's been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and not recommended. They've recently been challenged, for example by Professor Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times and by Jim and Elizabeth on Less Wrong. There was also some debate in the comment section here last week, so I promised I'd look into it in more depth. As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points. They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected. They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don't know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease. They also agree that there's currently a shortage of both surgical masks and respirators, so for altruistic reasons people should avoid hoarding them and give healthcare workers first dibs.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/ As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice. How many real cases? As of today, the US has almost 10,000 official cases. How many real cases per official case? One epidemiologist says 8x. In this US News article, scientists estimate 9000 true cases back when the official count was 600, suggesting 15x, and BBC estimates 10,000 real cases in the UK to 500 official ones, suggesting 20x. A study in Science (article, paper) estimates 86% are undetected, for about 7x. So it seems like most people are converging around 5 – 20. Probably this number is different in every country, depending on their test rates. You're probably all already following the map of cases per country, but you can supplement with this map of how many tests each country is running per million people (h/t curryeater259 from the subreddit) What about the evidence from famous people? If only 100,000 Americans are infected, it's pretty weird that it would hit both Tom Hanks and Idris Elba (also, Tormund from Game of Thrones). The Atlantic makes this case more formally. Given that Iran's vice-president is affected, what are the chances that only 1/12,000 of Iranians had the virus? Some people calculated it out and found that hundreds of thousands of Iranians must be affected for the prevalence among politicians to make sense, suggesting ratios of 100x or even 1000x.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/ You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy. How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims "the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history"? To find out, I picked up Whyte's Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times. Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks. His father dies when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover's various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ I. In the 1800s, the average US man weighed about 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195. The change is even starker at the extremes. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Back then, about 1% of men were obese. Today, about 25% are. This puts a lot of modern dietary advice into perspective. For example, lots of people think low-carb is the solution to everything. But people in the 1800s ate almost 50% more bread than we do today, and still had almost no obesity. Other people think paleo is the solution to everything, but Americans in the 1800s ate a diet heavy in bread, milk, potatoes, and vegetables, and relatively low in red meat and other more caveman-recognizable foods. Intermittent fasting – again, cool idea, but your great-grandfather wasn't doing that, and he had a 1% obesity risk. This isn't to say those diets can't work. Just that if they work, they're hacks. They treat the symptoms, not the underlying problem. Something went terribly wrong in US nutrition between 1900 and today, and all this talk about low-carb and intermittent fasting and so on are skew to that thing. Given that 1800s Americans seem to have effortlessly maintained near-zero obesity rates while eating foods a lot like the ones we eat today, maybe we should stop trying to figure out what cavemen were doing, and start trying to figure out what Great-Grandpa was doing, which sounds a lot easier.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ [Related to: It's Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut myself on Knowledge. I imagine meeting a time traveler from 2500, who takes pity on me and gives me a book from the future where all my questions have been answered, one after another. What's consciousness? That's in Chapter 5. How did something arise out of nothing? Chapter 7. It all makes perfect intuitive sense and is fully vouched by unimpeachable authorities. I assume something like this is how everyone spends their first couple of days in Heaven, whatever it is they do for the rest of Eternity. And every so often, my fantasy comes true. Not by time travel or divine intervention, but by failing so badly at paying attention to the literature that by the time I realize people are working on a problem it's already been investigated, experimented upon, organized into a paradigm, tested, and then placed in a nice package and wrapped up with a pretty pink bow so I can enjoy it all at once. The predictive processing model is one of these well-wrapped packages. Unbeknownst to me, over the past decade or so neuroscientists have come up with a real theory of how the brain works – a real unifying framework theory like Darwin's or Einstein's – and it's beautiful and it makes complete sense. Surfing Uncertainty isn't pop science and isn't easy reading. Sometimes it's on the

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/ Imagine an kid in school first hearing about germ theory. The conversation might go something like this: Teacher: Many diseases like the common cold are spread by germs, when one infected person contacts another. Student: But I got a cold a few weeks ago, and I never touch anyone except my family members. And none of them were sick. Teacher: You don't need to actually touch someone. Sometimes it can spread through mucus droplets in the air. Student: And one time I was camping in the woods for a month, and then I got a cold, even though I hadn't been around anybody. Teacher: If it was spring, you might have gotten allergies. Allergies can feel a lot like a cold, but they aren't spread by germs. Student: It was fall.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/ [Epistemic status: Very weak – I'm still trying to figure all of this out. Some things in here will almost certainly be wrong. Please don't let this overrule what government agencies or your common sense are telling you. For a more careful guide to the coronavirus and what to do about it, see here.] Prepping For a description of why you might want to prep, see Putanumonit: Seeing The Smoke. For a description of how to prep, see this article by Kelsey. For a really intense guide by a professional prepper, see here. But there's such a thing as being too intense. You probably won't need to store water – the water kept running in Wuhan. You probably won't need a generator – Wuhan has electricity. The most important thing seems to be food (and toiletries, and other necessities). If the epidemic gets bad, you'll want food so you can avoid going out to coronavirus-filled supermarkets. And if you get the coronavirus and are feeling sick, you'll want food at home so you don't have to get too far out of bed.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/ I. John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess: When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group — or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy — retained these benefits. A while ago, Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples. Gottman decided the field needed statistical rigor, and that he – a former MIT math major – was exactly the guy to enforce it. He set up a model apartment in his University of Washington research center – affectionately called "the Love Lab", and invited hundreds of couples to spend a few days there – observed, videotaped, and attached to electrodes collecting information on every detail of their physiology. While at the lab, the couples went through their ordinary lives. They experienced love, hatred, romantic dinners, screaming matches, and occasionally self-transformation. Then Gottman monitored them for years, seeing who made things work and who got divorced. Did you know that if a husband fails to acknowledge his wife's feelings during an argument, there is an 81% chance it will damage the marriage? Or that 69% of marital conflicts are about long-term problems rather than specific situations? John Gottman knows all of this and much, much more.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/24/book-review-just-giving/ I. Traditional book reviews tend to focus on a single book, such as Just Giving by Rob Reich. We ought, however, to be reviewing a broader question: what is the role of books in a liberal democratic society? And what role should they play? Books were first invented during the early Bronze Age. Plato states people fiercely opposed the first books; in his dialogue Phaedrus, he recalls the Egyptian priests' objection to early writing: [Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Contrast the Egyptian scribes' reception with the ceaseless praise given to the authors of our age. Rather than asking about the purposes of writing and the power of authors, we tend instead to celebrate writers, large and small, for their brilliance. But in our age, these are questions we should pose with greater urgency. Scholarly literature like Just Giving is an unaccountable, nontransparent, and perpetual exercise of power. It deserves more criticism than it has received.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/17/sleep-support-an-individual-randomized-controlled-trial/ I worry my sleep quality isn't great. On weekends, no matter when I go to bed, I sleep until 11 or 12. When I wake up, I feel like I've overslept. But if I try to make myself get up earlier, I feel angry and want to go back to sleep. A supplement company I trust, Nootropics Depot, recently released a new product called Sleep Support. It advertises that, along with helping you fall asleep faster, it can "improve sleep quality" by "improv[ing] sleep architecture, allowing you to achieve higher quality and more refreshing sleep." I decided to try it. The first night I took it, I woke up naturally at 9 the next morning, with no desire to go back to sleep. This has never happened before. It shocked me. And the next morning, the same thing happened. I started recommending the supplement to all my friends, some of whom also reported good results. I decided the next step was to do a randomized controlled trial. I obtained sugar pills, and put both the sugar pills and the Sleep Support pills inside bigger capsules so I couldn't tell which was which. The recommended dose was two Sleep Support pills per night, so for my 24 night trial I created 12 groups of two Sleep Support pills and 12 groups of two placebo pills.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/14/addendum-to-targeting-meritocracy/ I've always been dissatisfied with Targeting Meritocracy and the comments it got. My position seemed so obvious to me – and the opposite position so obvious to other people – that we both had to be missing something. Reading it over, I think I was missing the idea of conflict vs mistake theory. I wrote the post from a mistake theory perspective. The government exists to figure out how to solve problems. Good government officials are the ones who can figure out solutions and implement them effectively. That means we want people who are smart and competent. Since meritocracy means promoting the smartest and most competent people, it is tautologically correct. The only conceivable problem is if we make mistakes in judging intelligence and competence, which is what I spend the rest of the post worrying about.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/confirmation-bias-as-misfire-of-normal-bayesian-reasoning/ From the subreddit: Humans Are Hardwired To Dismiss Facts That Don't Fit Their Worldview. Once you get through the preliminary Trump supporter and anti-vaxxer denunciations, it turns out to be an attempt at an evo psych explanation of confirmation bias: Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one's tribe required assimilation into the group's ideological belief system. An instinctive bias in favor of one's in-group" and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology. I think the article as a whole makes good points, but I'm increasingly uncertain that confirmation bias can be separated from normal reasoning. Suppose that one of my friends says she saw a coyote walk by her house in Berkeley. I know there are coyotes in the hills outside Berkeley, so I am not too surprised; I believe her.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/welcome-infowars-readers/ Hello to all the new readers I've gotten from, uh, Paul Watson of Infowars. Before anything else, consider reading this statement by the CDC about vaccines. Still here? Fine. Infowars linked here with the headline Survey Finds People Who Identify As Left Wing More Likely To Have Been Diagnosed With A Mental Illness. This is accurate only insofar as the result uses the publicly available data I provide. The claim about mental illness was made by Twitter user Philippe Lemoine and not by me. In general, if a third party analyzes SSC survey data, I would prefer that media sources reporting on their analysis attribute it to them, and not to SSC. As far as I can tell, Lemoine's analysis is accurate enough, but needs some clarifications: 1. Both extreme rightists and extreme leftists are more likely than moderates to have been diagnosed with most conditions.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/ "Autogynephilia" means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a woman. "Autoandrophilia" means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a man. There's no term that describes both, but we need one, so let's say autogenderphilia. These conditions are famous mostly because a few sexologists, especially Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey, speculate that they are the most common cause of transgender. They point to studies showing most trans women endorse autogynephilia. Most trans people disagree with this theory, sometimes very strongly, and accuse it of reducing transgender to a fetish. Without wading into the moral issues around it, I thought it would be interesting to get data from the SSC survey. The following comes partly from my own analyses and partly from wulfrickson's look at the public survey data on r/TheMotte. The survey asked the following questions:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/05/suicide-hotspots-of-the-world/ [Content warning: suicide, rape, child abuse. Thanks to MC for some help with research.] I. Guyana has the highest national suicide rate in the world, 30 people per year per 100,000. Guyana has poverty and crime and those things, but no more so than neighboring Brazil (suicide rate of 6) or Venezuela (suicide rate of 4). What's going on? One place to start: Guyana is a multi-ethnic country. Is its sky-high suicide rate focused in one ethnic group? The first answer I found was this article by a social justice warrior telling us it constitutes racial "essentialism" to even ask the question. But in the process of telling us exactly what kind of claims we should avoid, she mentions someone bringing up that "80% of the reported suicides are carried out by Indo-Guyanese". I feel like one of those classicists who has reconstructed a lost heresy through hostile quotations in Irenaeus. Indo-Guyanese aren't American Indians; they're from actual India. Apparently thousands of Indians immigrated to Guyana as indentured laborers in the late 1800s. Most went to Guyana, and somewhat fewer went to neighboring Suriname. Suriname also has a sky-high suicide rate, but slightly less than Guyana's, to the exact degree that its Indian population is slightly less than Guyana's. Basically no Indians went anywhere else in South America, and nowhere else in South America has anywhere near the suicide rate of these two countries. The most Indian regions of Guyana also have the highest suicide rate. Hmmm. Does India itself have high suicide rates? On average, yes. But India has a lot of weird suicide microclimates. Statewide rates range from from 38 in Sikkim (higher than any country in the world) to 0.5 in Bihar (lower than any country in the world except Barbados). Indo-Guyanese mostly come from Bihar and other low-suicide regions. While I can't rule out that the Indo-Guyanese come from some micro-micro-climate of higher suicidality, this guy claims to have traced them back to some of their ancestral villages and found that those villages have low suicide rates.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/ I. Clarke's First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he's a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen. I'm only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what's inside, the two defy easy comparison. S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn't count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear. HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it's by a famous professor! I'm sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It's just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It's not that it's dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell's life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It's not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they're all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how "the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria". But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/ Introduction Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. If highly analytical tech workers have more autism risk genes than the general population, assortative mating could put their children at very high risk of autism. How concerned should this make us? Methods / Sample Characteristics I used the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey to investigate this question. It had 8,043 respondents selected for being interested in a highly analytical blog about topics like science and economics. The blog is associated with – and draws many of its readers from – the rationalist and effective altruist movements, both highly analytical. More than half of respondents worked in programming, engineering, math, or physics. 79% described themselves as atheist or agnostic. 65% described themselves as more interested in STEM than the humanities; only 15% said the opposite. According to Kogan et al (2018), about 2.5% of US children are currently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. The difference between "autism" and "autism spectrum disorder" is complicated, shifts frequently, and is not very well-known to the public; this piece will treat them interchangeably from here on. There are no surveys of what percent of adults are diagnosed with autism; it is probably lower since most diagnoses happen during childhood and the condition was less appreciated in past decades. These numbers may be affected by parents' education level and social class; one study shows that children in wealthy neighborhoods were up to twice as likely to get diagnosed as poorer children.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/ Little Soldiers is a book by Lenora Chu about the Chinese education system. I haven't read it. This is a review of Dormin111's review of Little Soldiers. Dormin describes the "plot": The author is a second-generation Chinese-American woman, raised by demanding Asian parents. Her parents made her work herself to the bone to get perfect grades in school, practice piano, get into Ivy League schools, etc. She resisted and resented the hell she was forced to go through (though she got into Stanford, so she couldn't have resisted too hard). Skip a decade. She is grown up, married, and has a three year old child. Her husband (a white guy named Rob) gets a job in China, so they move to Shanghai. She wants their three-year-old son to be bilingual/bicultural, so she enrolls him in Soong Qing Ling, the Harvard of Chinese preschools. The book is about her experiences there and what it taught her about various aspects of Chinese education. Like the lunches: During his first week at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey began complaining to his mom about eating eggs. This puzzled Lenora because as far as she knew, Rainey refused to eat eggs and never did so at home. But somehow he was eating them at school. After much coaxing (three-year-olds aren't especially articulate), Lenora discovered that Rainey was being force-fed eggs. By his telling, every day at school, Rainey's teacher would pass hardboiled eggs to all students and order them to eat. When Rainey refused (as he always did), the teacher would grab the egg and shove it in his mouth. When Rainey spit the egg out (as he always did), the teacher would do the same thing. This cycle would repeat 3-5 times with louder yelling from the teacher each time until Rainey surrendered and ate the egg.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/ Thanks to the 8,043 people who took the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey. See the questions for the SSC survey See the results from the SSC Survey (click "see previous responses" on that page) Some people expressed concern about privacy on the survey. Originally, respondents could see aggregate responses, including the responses of people who marked their answers private. I figured this was okay because nobody's responses could be connected – ie you could see that one person put their age as 83, and another person put their country as Canada, but because the table order wasn't the same you couldn't link these together to form a coherent picture of an 83 year old Canadian. Some people still expressed concern about a few of the long answers, since some people might have put personal information in there. There's no way for me to eliminate only the private people's responses from Google Forms and still display the information to you like this, so instead I've removed all long answer questions. If you're interested in those, you can find them in the downloadable data files. Sorry for not doing this earlier, and I hope this compromise is okay to everyone. I'll try to get a clearer picture of what people want before the next survey. I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. The public datasets will not exactly match the full version, some overly identifiable questions (eg age) will be binned, and a few sensitive subjects will not be included. Download the public data (.xlsx, .csv)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/ I. In 2006, Bryan Caplan wrote a critique of psychiatry. In 2015, I responded. Now it's 2020, and Bryan has a counterargument. I'm going to break the cycle of delay and respond now, and maybe we'll finish this argument before we're both too old and demented to operate computers. Bryan writes: 1. With a few exceptions, Scott fairly and accurately explains my original (and current) position. 2. Scott correctly identifies several gray areas in my position, but by my count I explicitly acknowledged all of them in my original article. 3. Scott then uses those gray areas to reject my whole position in favor of the conventional view. 4. The range of the gray areas isn't actually that big, so he should have accepted most of my heterodoxies. 5. If the gray areas were as big as Scott says, he should reject the conventional view too and just be agnostic. I think the gray areas are overwhelming and provide proof that Bryan's strict dichotomies don't match the real world.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/13/2019-adversarial-collaboration-winners/ Thanks to everyone who participated and/or voted in the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest. And the winner is… … … Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese, for Does Calorie Restriction Slow Aging?. An extraordinarily close second place (26.9% vs. 26.2% of votes) goes to David G and Froolow, for Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?. Both of these did great research and were written up well. I especially like them as winners because they have such different strengths. The calorie restriction collaboration was carefully focused on a factual question. I think this is a promising model for adversarial collaborations, and that others failed the further they deviated from this. For example, the circumcision collaboration did a good job assessing the quantifiable benefits and harms of the practice, but it turned out that most people who disagreed about it weren't disagreeing because they assessed quantifiable benefits and harms differently. The abortion collaboration ended up in a similar place. By focusing on a topic where there really was debate about what the research showed, and by hitting the lit review portion out of the park, Adrian and Calvin helped deconfuse a lot of previously confused people.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/08/what-intellectual-progress-did-i-make-in-the-2010s/ One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned. I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It's Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too). Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris' Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn't directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that "psychedelic insight" was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don't feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/06/a-very-unlikely-chess-game/ Almost 25 years after Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, another seminal man vs. machine matchup: Neither competitor has much to be proud of here. White has a poor opening. Black screws up and loses his queen for no reason. A few moves later, white screws up and loses his rook for no reason. Better players will no doubt spot other humiliating mistakes. But white does eventually eke out a victory. And black does hold his own through most of the game. White is me. My excuse is that I only play chess once every couple of years, plus I'm entering moves on an ASCII board I can barely read. Black is GPT-2. Its excuse is that it's a text prediction program with no concept of chess. As far as it knows, it's trying to predict short alphanumeric strings like "e2e4" or "Nb7". Nobody told it this represents a board game. It doesn't even have a concept of 2D space that it could use to understand such a claim. But it still captured my rook! Embarrassing!

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/05/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate-2020/ [Previously: Hardball Questions (2016), More Hardball Questions (2016). I stole parts of the Buttigieg question from Twitter, but don't remember enough details to give credit, sorry] Mr. Biden: Your son Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during your vice-presidential term. The Ukrainian government was investigating Burisma for misdeeds, and Hunter was allegedly one of the targets of the investigation. President Trump alleges that you used your clout as VP to shut down the investigation into Hunter, which if true would constitute an impeachable abuse of power. My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer? Mr. Bloomberg: You've been criticized as puritanical and self-righteous for some of your more restrictive policies, like a ban on large sodas. You seem to lean into the accusation, stating in a 2014 interview that: I am telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven I'm not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It's not even close. Let's not focus on what this says about your humility, or about your religious beliefs. I want to focus on a different issue. Despite spending $100 million in the first month of your presidential campaign, you are currently placed fifth – behind two socialists, a confused old man, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. In, let's not forget, an increasingly shaky effort to prevent President Donald J. Trump from winning a second term. So my question for you is: what makes you so sure you're not in Hell already?

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/02/why-doctors-think-theyre-the-best/ Ninety percent of drivers think they're above-average drivers, ninety percent of professors think they're above-average professors etc. The relevant studies are paywalled, so I don't know if I should trust them. Our recent discussion of therapy books would make more sense if ninety percent of therapists believed they were above-average therapists. I don't know about that one either. But I am pretty sure ninety percent of doctors believe they're above-average doctors. Here are some traps I've noticed myself falling into that might help explain why: 1. Your patients' last doctor was worse than you. Think about it; if somebody has a good doctor, they'll stay with them, and you will never see that patient. If somebody has a bad doctor, they'll go see another doctor instead. That other doctor might be you. So your current patients' last doctor will be worse than average. But this is where most of your chance to compare yourself with other doctors comes from: "my patient's last doctor misdiagnosed them, but I got it right" or "my patient hated their last doctor but says I'm much better". See also You Are Not Hiring The Top 1%.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/30/please-take-the-2020-ssc-survey/ Please take the 2020 Slate Star Codex Survey. The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me with useful informal research data for questions I'm interested it, which I then turn into interesting posts. My favorite was 2018's Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, which I think made a real contribution to individual differences psychology and which could not have happened without your cooperation. But last year I also got to debunk a myth about how mathematicians eat corn, fail to replicate supposed dangers of beef jerky, and test a theory of how fetishes form. I expect this year's research to be even more interesting. The survey is open to anyone who has ever read a post on this blog before December 30 2019. Please don't avoid taking the survey just because you feel like you're not enough of a "regular". It will ask you how much of a "regular" you are, so there's no risk you'll "dilute" the results. The survey will stay open until mid-January, and I will probably be begging and harassing you to take it about once a week or so until then.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/26/please-vote-for-acc-winner/ I've now posted all eight adversarial collaborations. In case you missed any, you can find a list of them (with links) here. If you have read all the collaborations, please vote on your favorite. This year I will decide the winner by popular vote; I don't feel like putting my finger on the scale this time. I will give $2000 to the first place winner and $500 to second place. You can vote for your favorite collaboration here. No, you may not vote for the Grinch. Thanks again to all participants, readers, and voters.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/25/acc-how-much-significance-should-we-ascribe-to-spiritual-experiences/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Jeremiah Gruenberg and Seth Schoen] 1. Introduction This project seeks to explore the viability of spiritual or religious experiences as empirical evidence for a component of reality that transcends or is radically different from our ordinary experience. The question at hand is not the existence of God or higher powers, nor the failures, successes, or benefits of religion, but rather the role of spiritual experience in the human understanding of the nature of reality. We formulated the topic in controversy this way: The empirical study of the content and nature of people's personal spiritual experiences justifies taking them seriously as evidence of an important component of human life deserving of individual and collective exploration. Our fellow human beings have always had unusual experiences that they found special and meaningful, but often struggled to interpret or place in the context of their ordinary lives. These experiences and their interpretation have aroused intense controversy, both because people have deployed them as support for their views on contested issues about the nature of reality, and because they may arise in settings where one could easily question whether the brain's altered perceptions and understandings are enhanced or impaired. Another source of debate is how radically different individuals' experiences—and their personal interpretations of the origins and meanings of those experiences—can be. Finally, spiritual experiences are often reported through a cultural lens that leads to questions about how accurately and objectively people could perceive and describe the unusual things that they perceived. We emphasize that there is no question, even from the most skeptical perspective, of insisting that individuals alter their own views or memories of what they have witnessed (although we encourage people to question their interpretations and to become aware of factors that could raise doubts about those interpretations). What is rational or plausible for each person to believe at a particular moment can be different, and in any case the way that people interpret their own experience and history will be different. If you have had a spiritual experience whose nature and meaning you find evident and certain, others may offer you alternative interpretations and evidence against your view, but can't demand that you change it. However, we find it interesting to consider what lessons others can draw from accounts of unusual experiences and perceptions: not so much what sort of evidence your own spiritual experiences may constitute for you, but rather what sort of evidence your accounts of them may constitute for others. Can we collectively learn anything from these experiences?

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/24/acc-should-you-have-a-merry-christmas/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Cindy Lou Who and the Grinch] Christmas Day is a a time full of laughter and cheer which is held in the West at the end of each year. Believers in Jesus traditionally think the day marks his birth; scientists disagree. They point to the shepherds; when carolers sing about fields full of sheep, that occurs in the spring. The Star of the Magi provides further doubt. Simulations can tell us what star it's about: it was most likely Jupiter shining near Saturn, but it's only in autumn one sees such a pattern. It is proven in space and it's proven on Earth – Christmas isn't the real time of Jesus' birth. One of the most popular Yule celebrations is handing out gifts to one's friends and relations. Parents offer the story these presents appeared due to Santa, a jolly old man with a beard. Originally a historical saint, his tale was embellished, with little restraint. He flies through the air in a reindeer-pulled sleigh, and visits all households on Earth in a day. This tradition seems pagan, with some scholars noting the details are pulled from a legend of Odin. Though sources like NORAD appear to support Santa's presence, we think that their data fall short. After reading the pros and the cons, we both feel the consensus perspective is Santa's not real. And what are these gifts' economics effects? According to Goeddeke and Birg, it's complex. Since presents are valuable, one might assume that their giving would cause stores and markets to boom. You give to your parents! You give to your boss! But economists say it is all deadweight loss. You would spend the same money on something, you see, and presents are chosen incompetently. Others' preferences aren't as clear as our own, so when we buy for others, their needs are unknown. Presents don't increase welfare and don't increase growth; all the papers agree they are harmful to both.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/23/acc-will-automation-lead-to-economic-crisis/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Doug Summers-Stay and Erusian] Adversarial collaboration on the question: "Automation/AI will not lead to a general, sustained economic crisis within our lifetimes or for the foreseeable future. Automation/AI's effects into the future will have effects similar to technology's effects in the past and, on the whole, follow the general trend." Defending the proposition: Erusian Challenging the proposition: Doug Summers-Stay tldr: Until the pace of automation increases faster than new jobs can be created, AI shouldn't be expected to cause mass unemployment or anything like that. When AI can pick up a new job as quickly and cheaply as a person can, then the economy will break (but everything else will break too, because that would be the Singularity). Introduction As software and hardware grow more capable each year, many are concerned that automation of jobs will lead to some sort of economic crisis. This could take the form of permanent high levels of unemployment, wages that drop below subsistence levels for many workers, or an abrupt change to a different economic system in response to these conditions.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/22/a-maximally-lazy-guide-to-giving-to-charity-in-2019/ [Sorry for the interruption; we will return to our regularly scheduled Adversarial Collaboration Contest tomorrow.] [Epistemic status: I'm linking evaluations made by people I mostly trust, but there are many people who don't trust these, I haven't 100% evaluated them perfectly, and if your assumptions differ even a little from those of the people involved these might not be very helpful. If you don't know what effective altruism is, you might want to find out before supporting it. Like I said, this is for maximally lazy people and everyone else might want to investigate further.] If you're like me, you resolved to donate money to charity this year, and are just now realizing that the year is going to end soon and you should probably get around to doing it. Also, you support effective altruism. Also, you are very lazy. This guide is for you. The maximally lazy way to donate to effective charity is probably to donate to EA Funds. This is a group of funds run by the Center for Effective Altruism where they get experts to figure out what are the best charities to give your money to each year. The four funds are Global Health, Animal Welfare, Long-Term Future, and Effective Altruism Meta/Community. If you are truly maximally lazy, you can just donate an equal amount to all four of them; if you have enough energy to shift a set of little sliders, you can decide which ones get more or less.

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).

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/18/acc-should-gene-editing-technologies-be-used-in-humans/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Nita J and Patrick N.] Introduction In October 2018, the world's first genetically edited babies were born, twin girls given the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana; Chinese scientist He Jiankui used CRISPR technology to edit the CCR5 gene in human embryos with the aim of conferring resistance to HIV. In response to the international furor, China began redrafting its civil code to include regulations that would hold scientists accountable for any adverse outcomes that occur as the result of genetic manipulation in human populations. Now, reproductive biologists at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City are conducting their own experiment designed to target BRCA2, a gene associated with breast cancer, in sperm cells. While sometimes considered controversial, gene editing has been used as a last resort to cure some diseases. For example, a precursor of CRISPR was successfully used to cure leukemia in two young girls when all other treatment options had failed. Due to its convenience and efficiency, CRISPR offers the potential to fight cancer on an unprecedented level and tackle previously incurable genetic diseases. However, before we start reinventing ourselves and mapping out our genetic futures, maybe we should take a moment to reevaluate the risks and repercussions of gene editing and rethink our goals and motives.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Nick D and Rob S.] I. Nick Bostrom defines existential risks (or X-risks) as "[risks] where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Essentially this boils down to events where a bad outcome lies somewhere in the range of 'destruction of civilization' to 'extermination of life on Earth'. Given that this has not already happened to us, we are left in the position of making predictions with very little directly applicable historical data, and as such it is a struggle to generate and defend precise figures for probabilities and magnitudes of different outcomes in these scenarios. Bostrom's introduction to existential risk​ provides more insight into this problem than there is space for here. There are two problems that arise with any discussion of X-risk mitigation. Is this worth doing? And how do you generate the political will necessary to handle the issue? Due to scope constraints this collaboration will not engage with either question, but will simply assume that the reader sees value in the continuation of the human species and civilization. The collaborators see X-risk mitigation as a "​Molochian​" problem, as we blindly stumble into these risks in the process of maturing our civilisation, or perhaps a twist on the tragedy of the commons. Everyone agrees that we should try to avoid extinction, but nobody wants to pay an outsized cost to prevent it. Coordination problems have been solved throughout history, and the collaborators assume that as the public becomes more educated on the subject, more pressure will be put on world governments to solve the issue.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12/acc-does-calorie-restriction-slow-aging/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by the delightfully-pseudonymous Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese.] About the Authors: Adrian Liberman is currently a PhD student in biology at a university in the mid-Atlantic. He previously worked at the National Institute of Aging and remains actively interested in gerontology and the biological study of aging. Calvin Reese is an author with a BS in Biology. He has always been interested in the possibility of life extension by calorie restriction. Recently, he has reexamined the subject after undertaking a series of intermittent fasts for weight loss reasons. Calvin believes CR extends life; Adrian has long been skeptical. Introduction: Is food making us old? We all agree that food is delicious, and we also all agree that too much food is bad for us, but exactly how bad is it? Various academics have proposed that too much food actually accelerates the aging process, and reducing our food intake via calorie restriction (CR) is one of the most accessible and available methods of extending human life. While billionaires pump vast fortunes into increasingly far-fetched stem cell treatments and consciousness transfers, CR advocates contend that they can get a 10-20% increase in their natural lifespans simply by eating a little less. If true, CR raises a question of enormous significance to gerontology and the science of aging: are our diets aging us one calorie at a time? And if so, can we stop it?

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by David G and Froolow. Please also note my correction to yesterday's entry.] Introduction Many people around the world have strong convictions about eating animals. These are often based on vague intuitions which results in unproductive swapping of opinions between vegetarians and meat eaters. The goal of this collaboration is to investigate all relevant considerations from a shared frame of reference. To help ground this discussion we have produced a decision aid making explicit everything discussed below. You can download it here and we encourage you to play around with it. The central question is whether factory farmed animal lives are worth living; the realistic alternative to meat eating is not a better life but for those animals to not exist in the first place. We begin by investigating which animals are conscious. Then, we compare the happiness literature to the conditions under which animals are factory farmed to figure out if from their perspective non-existence is preferable. And finally, we survey the more easily measurable impacts of meat eating on environment, finance, and health.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumcision-ethical/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Joel P and Missingno] "They practise circumcision for cleanliness' sake; for they would rather be clean than more becoming." – Herodotus, The Histories – 2.37 The debate over circumcision in the Western world today is surprisingly similar to the conflict that Greeks and Egyptians faced 2500 years ago. Supporters tend to emphasize its hygiene and health benefits; opponents tend to call it cruel or to emphasize its deviation from the natural human form. In this adversarial collaboration we address medical aspects, sensitivity and pleasure, and ethical aspects of infant circumcision. Effect on penile cancer Circumcision greatly reduces the relative rate of penile cancer, a relatively uncommon malignancy in developed nations which kills a little over 400 American men each year. Denmark, while it has one of the lowest rates of penile cancer for a non-circumcising country, nevertheless has 10x the rate of penile cancer as Israel – where almost all men are circumcised. Likewise, a Kaiser Permanente study of patients with penile cancer found that 16% of patients with carcinoma in situ had been circumcised; only 2% of patients with invasive penile cancer had been circumcised. Since the circumcision rate of Kaiser patients of the appropriate age was ~50%, this is in line with the 90% reduction.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-collaboration-entries/ Thanks to everyone who sent in entries for the 2019 adversarial collaboration contest. Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it's a good way to make sure you hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate between experts, except all the debate and rhetoric and disagreement have already been done by the time you start reading, so you're just left with the end result. See the 2018 entries for examples. Six teams submitted collaborations for this year's contest. I'll list them here for now, and the names will turn into links as I post them over the next two weeks. They are: 1. "Is infant circumcision ethical?" by Joel P and Missingno 2. "Is eating meat a net harm?" by David G and Froolow 3. "Does calorie restriction slow aging?" by Adrian L and Calvin R 4. "Should we colonize space to mitigate x-risk?" by Nick D and Rob S 5. "Should gene editing technologies be used in humans" by Nita J and Patrick N 6. "Will automation lead to economic crisis?" by Doug S and Erusian (if any of you are unhappy with how I named you or titled your piece, let me know) At the end of the two weeks, I'll ask readers to vote for their favorite collaboration, so try to remember which ones impress you. I think we're all winners by getting to read these – but the actual winners get that plus $2500 in prize money. Thanks again to everyone who donates to the Patreon for making that possible. Please put any comments about the contest itself here, not on the individual entries.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/ On my recent post on autism, several people chimed in to say that "autism" wasn't a unitary/homogenous category. It probably lumps together many different conditions with many different causes. It's useless to speculate on the characteristics of "autism" until it can be separated out further. I get this every time I talk about a psychiatric condition. The proponents of this view seem to think they're speaking a shocking heresy that overturns the psychiatric establishment. But guys, we know this kind of stuff. Psychiatric diagnoses don't have to perfectly match underlying root causes to be useful. Suppose a patient comes to you with difficulty breathing, excessive sweating, anxiety, and extreme discomfort when lying down flat. You recognize these as potential signs of pulmonary edema, ie fluid in the lungs. You do an x-ray, confirm the diagnosis, and prescribe symptomatic treatment – in this case, supplemental oxygen. All of this is good work. But you can have fluid in your lungs for lots of different reasons. Most of the time it's heart failure, but sometimes it's kidney failure, pneumonia, drug overdose, smoke inhalation, or altitude sickness. Some of these causes will have slightly different symptoms, which an alert doctor can notice.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/ Slate Star Codex has regular weekly-to-monthly meetups in a bunch of cities around the world. Earlier this autumn, we held a Meetups Everywhere event, hoping to promote and expand these groups. We collected information on existing meetups, got volunteers to create new meetups in cities that didn't have them already, and posted times and dates prominently on the blog. During late September and early October, I traveled around the US to attend as many meetups as I could. I hoped my presence would draw more people; I also wanted to learn more about meetups and the community and how best to guide them. Buck Shlegeris and a few other Bay Area effective altruists came along to meet people, talk to them about effective altruism, and potentially nudge them into the recruiting pipeline for EA organizations. Lots of people asked me how my trip was. In a word: exhausting. I got to meet a lot of people for about three minutes each. There were a lot of really fascinating people with knowledge of a bewildering variety of subjects, but I didn't get to pick their minds anywhere as thoroughly as I would have liked. I'm sorry if I talked to you for three minutes, you told me about some amazing project you were working on to clone neuroscientists or eradicate bees or convert atmospheric CO2 into vegan meat substitutes, and I mumbled something and walked away. You are all great and I wish I could have spent more time with you. I finally got to put faces to many of the names I've interacted with through the years. For example, Bryan Caplan is exactly how you would expect, in every way. Also, in front of his office, he has a unique painting, which he apparently got by asking a Mexican street artist to paint an homage to Lord of the Rings. The artist had never heard of it before, but Bryan described it to him very enthusiastically, and the completely bonkers result is hanging in front of his office. This is probably a metaphor for something.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj's review is better. He begins: UtEB's premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions to occur. The brain then uses those models to guide our future behavior. Emotional issues and seemingly irrational behaviors are generated from implicit world-models (schemas) which have been formed in response to various external challenges. Each schema contains memories relating to times when the challenge has been encountered and mental structures describing both the problem and a solution to it. So in one of the book's example cases, a man named Richard sought help for trouble speaking up at work. He would have good ideas during meetings, but felt inexplicably afraid to voice them. During therapy, he described his narcissistic father, who was always mouthing off about everything. Everyone hated his father for being a fool who wouldn't shut up. The therapist conjectured that young Richard observed this and formed a predictive model, something like "talking makes people hate you". This was overly general: talking only makes people hate you if you talk incessantly about really stupid things. But when you're a kid you don't have much data, so you end up generalizing a lot from the few examples you have.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ I. All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results. Our form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms. Our form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root! All psychotherapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are "nonspecific factors" like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests our form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using our form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using our form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that our form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use our form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of our form of therapy. But when they do, it's going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of our form of therapy is going to be!

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/ [Followup to: Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science] I. In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water, and a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is taught to every schoolchild as an important chemical fact. You approach their chemists and protest: why include the part about the star going supernova? Why not just say an acid and a base make salt and water? The chemists find your question annoying: your new "supernova-less" chemistry makes exactly the same predictions as the standard model! You're just splitting hairs! Angels dancing on pins! Stop wasting their time! "But the part about supernovas doesn't constrain expectation!" Yes, say the chemists, but removing it doesn't constrain expectation either. You're just spouting random armchair speculation that can never be proven one way or the other. What part of "stop wasting our time" did you not understand? Moral of the story: It's too glib to say "There is no difference between theories that produce identical predictions". You actually care a lot about which of two theories that produce identical predictions is considered true. II.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on? First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. If genes for autism (without autism itself) increase intelligence, we should expect these people to be unusually smart. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. About 13% of autistic children (in this sample from whatever social stratum they took their sample from) have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of (presumably well-matched?) control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ I. LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders. Lovaza is fish oil. "Come on," you say, "surely there's some difference between Lovaza and the fish oil I buy at my local health food store for a couple of tenners per Giant Jar?" And you're right. The difference is, Lovaza costs $300 a month.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/ Ramelteon isn't a bad drug. It's just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system. All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between "idiotically dangerous" and "laughably ineffective", and Ramelteon manages better than most. It outperforms placebo, it's not addictive, it won't sap your ability to sleep without it, and it doesn't screw up your brain so badly that its unofficial mascot is a hallucinatory walrus. How does it do it? Ramelteon is the first melatonergic drug, selectively binding to MT-1 and MT-2 melatonin receptors. Binding to melatonin receptors presumably mimics the effect of the natural hormone melatonin which is believed to serve a sleep-promoting role. Now, you might ask yourself – the natural hormone melatonin is available as an over-the-counter supplement costing a couple cents per pill in every drug store, and provably quite safe and effective. Why would anyone go through the trouble of creating a drug that mimics its action? Especially if a month's supply of the drug costs around $100 – which it does.