Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/ I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about it. But this took decades of conceptual work by people like van der Kolk, crystallizing some ideas and hacking away at others until they ended up with something legible to the Establishment. Before that there was nothing. It was absolutely shocking how much nothing there was. As soon as the APA officialy recognized PTSD as a diagnosis in 1980, Bessel and his friends applied for a grant from the VA to study it. The grant was rejected on the grounds that (actual quote from the rejection letter) "it has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration". So the first step in raising awareness of PTSD was – amazingly – convincing the US military that some people might get PTSD from combat. After the military relented, the next step was convincing everyone else. PTSD was temporarily pigeonholed as "the thing veterans get when they come back from a war". The next push was convincing people that civilian trauma could have similar effects. It was simple to extend the theory to sudden disasters like fires or violent crimes. But van der Kolk and his colleagues started noticing that a history of child abuse, and especially childhood sexual abuse, correlated with a lot of psychiatric problems later on.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ Aeon: Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoron And It is Dangerous: There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is 'post-empirical' science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous. It's not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we're 'Inside the Mirrorverse'. Its editors bid us 'Welcome to the parallel reality that's hiding in plain sight'. […] [Some physicists] claim that neutrons [are] flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are 'low', or even 'zero', but it doesn't really matter. When it comes to grabbing attention, inviting that all-important click, or purchase, speculative metaphysics wins hands down. These theories are based on the notion that our Universe is not unique, that there exists a large number of other universes that somehow sit alongside or parallel to our own. For example, in the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them. And, as it seems we can't ever experience these other universes, there will never be any evidence for them. As Broussard explained, these theories are sufficiently slippery to duck any kind of challenge that experimentalists might try to throw at them, and there's always someone happy to keep the idea alive. Is this really science? The answer depends on what you think society needs from science. In our post-truth age of casual lies, fake news and alternative facts, society is under extraordinary pressure from those pushing potentially dangerous antiscientific propaganda – ranging from climate-change denial to the anti-vaxxer movement to homeopathic medicines. I, for one, prefer a science that is rational and based on evidence, a science that is concerned with theories and empirical facts, a science that promotes the search for truth, no matter how transient or contingent. I prefer a science that does not readily admit theories so vague and slippery that empirical tests are either impossible or they mean absolutely nothing at all. As always, a single quote doesn't do the argument justice, so go read the article. But I think this captures the basic argument: multiverse theories are bad, because they're untestable, and untestable science is pseudoscience. Many great people, both philosophers of science and practicing scientists, have already discussed the problems with this point of view. But none of them lay out their argument in quite the way that makes the most sense to me. I want to do that here, without claiming any originality or special expertise in the subject, to see if it helps convince anyone else. II. Consider a classic example: modern paleontology does a good job at predicting dinosaur fossils. But the creationist explanation – Satan buried fake dinosaur fossils to mislead us – also predicts the same fossils (we assume Satan is good at disguising his existence, so that the lack of other strong evidence for Satan doesn't contradict the theory). What principles help us realize that the Satan hypothesis is obviously stupid and the usual paleontological one more plausible? One bad response: paleontology can better predict characteristics of dinosaur fossils, using arguments like "since plesiosaurs are aquatic, they will be found in areas that were underwater during the Mesozoic, but since tyrannosaurs are terrestrial, they will be found in areas that were on land", and this makes it better than the Satan hypothesis, which can only retrodict these characteristics. But this isn't quite true: since Satan is trying to fool us into believing the modern paleontology paradigm, he'll hide the fossils in ways that conform to its predictions, so we will predict plesiosaur fossils will only be found at sea – otherwise the gig would be up! A second bad response: "The hypothesis that all our findings were planted to deceive us bleeds into conspiracy theories and touches on the problem of skepticism. These things are inherently outside the realm of science." But archaeological findings are very often deliberate hoaxes planted to deceive archaeologists, and in practice archaeologists consider and test that hypothesis the same way they consider and test every other hypothesis. Rule this out by fiat and we have to accept Piltdown Man, or at least claim that the people arguing against the veracity of Piltdown Man were doing something other than Science. A third bad response: "Satan is supernatural and science is not allowed to conside

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. "Not interested," I said, preparing to slam the door in his face. "Please," said the acolyte. Before I could say no he'd jammed a wad of $100 bills into my hand. "If this will buy a few moments of your time." It did, if only because I stood too flabbergasted to move. Surely they didn't have enough money to do this for everybody. "There is no everybody," said the acolyte, when I expressed my bewilderment. "You're the last one. The last unenlightened person in the world." And it sort of made sense. Twenty years ago, a group of San Francisco hippie/yuppie/techie seekers had pared down the ancient techniques to their bare essentials, then optimized hard. A combination of drugs, meditation, and ecstatic dance that could catapult you to enlightenment in the space of a weekend retreat, 100% success rate. Their cult/movement/startup, the Order Of The Golden Lotus, spread like wildfire through California – a state where wildfires spread even faster than usual – and then on to the rest of the world. Soon investment bankers and soccer moms were showing up to book clubs talking about how they had grasped the peace beyond understanding and vanquished their ego-self.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ I. About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of Dr. Zamboni posited the theory that multiple sclerosis was caused by blockages in venous return from the brain causing various complicated downstream effects which eventually led to the immune system attacking myelinated cells. The guy was a good surgeon, nothing about the theory contradicted basic laws of biology, and no one else had any better ideas, so lots of people got excited. As far as I can tell, the medical community responded exactly one hundred percent correctly. They preached caution, urging multiple sclerosis patients not to develop false hope. But at the same time, they quickly launched studies investigating Zamboni's experiments and used newly gathered data to test the theory. All the results that came back made the idea look less and less likely, so that to my understanding by now it is pretty much discredited. Having successfully spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to empirically disconfirm Zamboni's hypothesis, we can now reflect at leisure on the reasons it was kind of dumb and we should have realized it all along.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ Thucydides predicted that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations. This is how I feel about New Atheism. If I were to describe the power of New Atheism over online discourse to a teenager, they would never believe me. Why should they? Other intellectual movements have left indelible marks in the culture; the heyday of hippiedom may be long gone, but time travelers visiting 1969 would not be surprised by the extent of Woodstock. But I imagine the same travelers visiting 2005, logging on to the Internet, and holy @#$! that's a lot of atheism-related discourse what is going on here? My first forays onto the Internet were online bulletin boards about computer games. They would have a lot of little forums about various aspects of the games, plus two off-topic forums. One for discussion of atheism vs. religion. And the other for everything else. This was a common structure for websites in those days. You had to do it, or the atheism vs. religion discussions would take over everything. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal. In 2005, a college student made a webpage called The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was a joke based on the idea that there was no more scientific evidence for God or creationism than for belief in a flying spaghetti monster. The monster's website received tens of millions of visitors, 60,000 emails ("about 95 percent" supportive), and was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Daily Telegraph. Six publishing companies entered a bidding war for the rights to the spaghetti monster's "gospel", with the winner, Random House, offering an $80,000 advance. The book was published to massive fanfare, sold over 100,000 copies, and was translated into multiple languages. Putin's thugs broke up a pro-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster demonstration in Russia. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/ NYT: Economic Incentives Don't Always Do What We Want Them To (h/t MR). For the first time in history, the title actually understates the article, which argues that incentives can be surprisingly useless: Economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be. The article starts with some surprising facts. Increased taxes on the rich don't make rich people work much less. Salary caps on athletes don't decrease athletic performance. Increased welfare doesn't make poor people work less. Decreased job opportunities in one area rarely cause people to move elsewhere. Then it presents a neat chart showing that most people believe others would respond to an incentive, but deny responding to that incentive themselves. For example, 60% of people say a Medicaid program with no work requirement would prevent many people from seeking work, but only 10% of people say they themselves would stop seeking work with such a program.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/ (original post) Alex M writes: I think one of the main problems with the current state of rationalism (and many other fake "sciences" such as economics or sociology) is fuzzy thinking and lack of falsifiable empirical testing. So somebody claims to be "enlightened." Does a smart person take that at face value? Of course not. Once you just start believing random shit, you're no better than a superstitious primitive cargo-cult. You have to TEST all claims. For example, I don't just take it at face value that economics is a real science just because a bunch of IYIs tell me so. I analyze economist predictions, see that their track record of successful predictions is atrocious, and then make the totally RATIONAL choice to discard my priors and treats economics as the laughable hocus-pocus that it is – because when you genuinely have an accurate view of reality, it doesn't collapse under scrutiny. We should treat mystical claims exactly the same way. So somebody claims to be enlightened? Fine. How can they substantiate it? Can they do things that unenlightened people can't, like clairvoyance, predicting the future, or sending messages through the collective subconscious in order to significantly impact world events? Do you see what I'm saying? Enlightenment should have some objectively quantifiable impact beyond just having a different internal narrative that is completely subjective and unprovable.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/23/indian-economic-reform-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ From a recent Charter Cities Institute report: From India's independence from the British Raj in 1947 to the early 1990s, the country's economic policy was largely socialist. In the 1980s some early steps were taken to open the Indian economy to increased trade, reduce controls over industry, and set a more realistic exchange rate. In 1991, more widespread economic reforms were introduced. These reforms included the end of government monopolies over certain sectors of the economy, reductions in barriers to entry for new firms, increased foreign investment was allowed, and tariffs and other barriers to trade were reduced or eliminated. After liberalization, exports increased substantially, and various service sector industries saw significant growth. India's growth has not just been good for the more educated segment of the population. Datt, Ravallion, and Murgai (2016) argue that India has made substantial progress in reducing the incidence of absolute poverty, and that this trend exists in both urban and rural areas. Historically higher rates of rural poverty have been converging with urban rates of poverty, and the overall poverty rate has been declining at an accelerating rate in the post-1991 reform era. In the 1970s over 60 percent of Indians were living in extreme poverty. As of 2011, only 20 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty. Between 2005 and 2016, an estimated 271 million Indians rose out of multidimensional poverty, which accounts for various health, education, and living standard indicators rather than just income (UNDP and OPHI 2018). Infant mortality has fallen from 161.4 deaths per 1,000 births in 1960 to just 32 deaths per 1,000 births in 2017, and India should soon converge with the world average if the current trend continues. Life expectancy has also improved dramatically, rising from 41 years in 1960 to nearly 69 years today.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/ I've mentioned this a few times, but it's worth going over in detail. The full title is Clusters Of Individual Experiences Form A Continuum Of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences In Adults by Jeffery Martin, with "persistent non-symbolic experience" (PNSE) as a scientific-sounding culturally-neutral code word for "enlightenment". Martin is a Reiki practitioner associated with the "Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness", so we're not getting this from the most sober of skeptics, but I still find the project interesting enough to deserve a look. Martin searched various religious and spiritual groups for people who both self-reported enlightenment and were affiliated with "a community that provided validity to their claims". He says he eventually found 1200 such people who were willing to participate in the study, but that "the data reported here comes primarily from the first 50 participants who sat for in-depth interviews…based on the overall research effort these 50 were felt to be a sufficient sample to represent what has been learned from the larger population". Although Martin says he tried to get as much diversity as possible, the group was mostly white male Americans. Martin's research was mostly qualitative, based on in-depth interviews, so we're mostly going with his impressions. But his impression was that most people who self-described as enlightened had similar experiences, which could be be plotted on:

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/ Last year I reviewed The Mind Illuminated, a meditation guide by Buddhist teacher Upasaka Culadasa. Last month, Culudasa's Buddhist community accused him of cheating on his wife with prostitutes for many years. Culadasa doesn't seem to agree with the exact details of the accusations, but he also doesn't seem to deny that there was something in that general category of thing. What can this teach us about enlightenment? Culadasa has been meditating and studying Buddhism for over forty years and trained under some of the greatest teachers of his generation. I don't know if he's claimed to "be enlightened" in so many words, but he's written books that describe how to reach enlightenment and that assert you can do it in a few years if you follow his advice, which sounds a lot like claiming enlightenment by implication. Other self-proclaimed enlightened Buddhist teachers seem to respect him and treat him as being at around their level. And if Culudasa wasn't enlightened, there's a long list of other Buddhist masters with similar misdeeds. The Atlantic points out that three of the four great founders of American Zen "caused major public sex scandals"; the fourth, Shunryu Suzuki, was spotless, but his successor Richard Baker caused a major public sex scandal. The two most famous US teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, Chongyam Trungpa and Sogyal Rinpoche, both caused major public sex scandals. Trungpa's immediate successor Ösel Tendzin caused a particularly horrifying major public sex scandal, and the current head of Shambhala Buddhism, Sakyong Rinpoche, also caused a major public sex scandal. These teachers were among the most accomplished of our time. Many were officially certified as enlightened by

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let's say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn't tell you much until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn't work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven't found anything. On the meta-level, you're studying some phenomenon and you get some positive findings. That doesn't tell you much until you take some other researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn't exist – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon, you haven't found anything. Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You'd have to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn't exist, somehow convince a whole community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study it for a couple of decades without them figuring it out. Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people believe don't exist, but which a community of practicing scientists believes in and publishes papers on all the time.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/ Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott's Against The Grain as "basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist". I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, "fascist" isn't quite the right aspersion to use here. Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott's most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as "progress" towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn't make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was "progress" only from a state's-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids. Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, "The Devil was the first Whig", Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist. Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; "as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year". Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry: "There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn't step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn't the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has. Okay, but I can think of something worse than that. Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that identity doesn't exist, and therefore the same argument against private property as made above. Flummoxed, they're unable to think of a response before he rides off into the sunset. But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity for something – maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for the next while – all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else. (actually, I can think of something even worse than that, which is a TV western based on this premise, where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas. The climax is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main Street, revolver in hand, saying "There's a new sheriff in town." And Parmenides gruffly responds "No, I'm pretty sure that's impossible.") At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career paths. The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively. Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent. But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people's cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.