Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[Epistemic status: Somewhat confident in the medical analysis, a little out of my depth discussing the statistics] For years, we've been warning patients that their sleeping pills could kill them. How? In every way possible. People taking sleeping pills not only have higher all-cause mortality. They have higher mortality from every individual cause studied. Death from cancer? Higher. Death from heart disease? Higher. Death from lung disease? Higher. Death from car accidents? Higher. Death from suicide? Higher. Nobody's ever proven that sleeping pill users are more likely to get hit by meteors, but nobody's ever proven that they aren't. In case this isn't scary enough, it only takes a few sleeping pills before your risk of death starts shooting up. Even if you take sleeping pills only a few nights per year, your chance of dying double or triple. When these studies first came out, doctors were understandably skeptical. First, it seems suspicious that so few sleeping pills could have such a profound effect. Second, why would sleeping pills raise your risk of everything at once? Lung disease? Well, okay, sleeping pills can cause respiratory depression. Suicide? Well, okay, overdosing on sleeping pills is a popular suicide method. Car accidents? Well, sleeping pills can keep you groggy in the morning, and maybe you don't drive very well on your way to work. But cancer? Nobody has a good theory for this. Heart disease? Seems kind of weird. Also, there are lots of different kinds of sleeping pills with different biological mechanisms; why should they all cause these effects?

There's a silly subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like "SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN" or something like that. There's another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output. Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.

I. Did cultural evolution create sexual purity taboos to prevent the spread of STIs? A few weeks ago, I wrote a post assuming this was obviously true; after getting some pushback, so I want to look into it in more depth. STIs were a bigger problem in the past than most people think. Things got especially bad after the rise of syphilis: British studies find an urban syphilis rate of 8-10% from the 1700s to the early 1900s. At the time the condition was incurable, and progressed to insanity and death in about a quarter of patients. If you've got a 10% local syphilis rate, you are going to want some major sexual purity taboos. It's less clear how bad they were in truly ancient times, but given how easily the extent of syphilis has slipped out of our cultural memory, I'm not ruling out "pretty bad". Here are some things I think of as basic parts of sexual purity taboos. All of these are cross-cultural – which isn't to say they're in every culture, or that some cultures aren't exactly the opposite, just to say that they seem to pop up pretty often. I'm writing this from the male perspective because most of the cultures I know about thought that way: 1. If your wife has sex with another man, you should be angry 2. Preferably you should marry a virgin. If you think your bride is a virgin, but she isn't, you should be angry 3. If you've got to marry a non-virgin, then marrying a widow is okay, but marrying a former prostitute or somebody known for sleeping around a lot is beyond the pale. All of these are plausible ways to prevent the spread of STIs. If your wife has sex with another man, she could catch his STI and give it to you. If your bride isn't a virgin, she might have STIs. If someone's a widow, they probably slept with one known person whose STI status can be guessed at; if they're a prostitute or slept around, they slept with many unknown people and have a higher chance of having STIs.

Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because "society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future". Also, KFC "promises not to let vegans down" with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They'll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with their own vegetarian chicken option. Clearly this is progress. Tobacco-free cigarettes have helped a lot of people quit smoking; meat substitutes have helped a lot of people (recently sort of including me) become vegetarian. I want a smoke-free meatless future. But does it become a mockery when the same companies that provided the smoky meaty past are selling it to us? If they make a fortune being evil, resist change, and lose, should they get to make a second fortune being good? If Hitler, when the war turned against him, quit the Nazism industry and opened a matzah bakery, would you buy his matzah? I think the answer is supposed to be yes. I've heard many smart people argue that we should offer evil dictators a comfortable and lavish retirement, free from any threat of justice. After all, if they take the offer, they'll go off and enjoy their retirement instead of continuing to dictate. But if they expect to be put on trial for war crimes the second they relinquish power, they'll hold on to power forever. If Hitler had been willing to give up and open a bakery when he lost Stalingrad in 1943, think how many lives would have been saved by letting him. And if Kim Jong-Un wants to give up and move to Tahiti, of course you say yes.

Last week I reviewed Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland's Why Are The Prices So D*mn High?. On Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok wrote: SSC does have some lingering doubts and points to certain areas where the data isn't clear and where we could have been clearer. I think this is inevitable. A lot has happened in the post World War II era. In dealing with very long run trends so much else is going on that answers will never be conclusive. It's hard to see the signal in the noise. I think of the Baumol effect as something analogous to global warming. The tides come and go but the sea level is slowly rising I was pretty disappointed by this comment. T&H's book blames cost disease on rising wages in high-productivity sectors, and consequently in education and medicine. My counter is that wages in high productivity sectors, education, and medicine are not actually rising. This doesn't seem like an "area where you could have been clearer". This seems like an existential challenge to your theory! Come on! Since we're not getting an iota of help from the authors, we're going to have to figure this out ourselves. The points below are based on some comments from the original post and some conversations I had with people afterwards. 1. Median wages, including wages in high-productivty sectors like manufacturing, are not rising I originally used this chart to demonstrate:

I. Recently spotted on Tumblr: "This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?" "Can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others?" Ignore the questionable stylistic choices and there's an important point here worth considering. Something like "Yes, the feeling of constantly being outraged and mired in the latest controversy is unpleasant. And yes, it would be nice to get to avoid it and spend time with your family and look at kitten pics or something. But when the controversy is about people being murdered in cold blood, or living in fear, or something like that – then it's your duty as a decent human being to care. In the best case scenario you'll discharge that duty by organizing widespread protests or something – but the absolute least you can do is reblog a couple of slogans." I think Cliff Pervocracy is trying to say something similar in this post. Key excerpt: When you've grown up with messages that you're incompetent to make your own decisions, that you don't deserve any of the things you have, and that you'll never be good enough, the [conservative] fantasy of rugged individualism starts looking pretty damn good. Intellectually, I think my current political milieu of feminism/progressivism/social justice is more correct, far better for the world in general, and more helpful to me since I don't actually live in a perfectly isolated cabin.

Peter Gerdes says: As the examples of the Nicaraguan deaf children left on their own to develop their own language demonstrates (as do other examples) we do create languages very very quickly in a social environment. Creating conlangs is hard not because creating language is fundamentally hard but because we are bad at top down modelling of processes that are the result of a bunch of tiny modifications over time. The distinctive features of language require both that it be used frequently for practical purposes (this makes sure that the language has efficient shortcuts, jettisons clunky overengineered rules etc..) and that it be buffeted by the whims of many individuals with varying interests and focuses. This is a good point, though it kind of equivocates on the meaning of "hard" (if we can't consciously do something, does that make it "hard" even if in some situations it would happen naturally?). I don't know how much of this to credit to a "language instinct" that puts all the difficulty of language "under the hood", vs. inventing language not really being that hard once you have general-purpose reasoning. I'm sure real linguists have an answer to this. See also Tracy Canfield's comments (1, 2) on the specifics of sign languages and creoles. The Secret Of Our Success described how human culture, especially tool-making ability, allowed us to lose some adaptations we no longer needed. One of those was strength; we are much weaker than the other great apes. Hackworth provides an intuitive demonstration of this: hairless chimpanzees are buff:

Why have prices for services like health care and education risen so much over the past fifty years? When I looked into this in 2017, I couldn't find a conclusive answer. Economists Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland have written a new book on the topic, Why Are The Prices So D*mn High? (link goes to free pdf copy, or you can read Tabarrok's summary on Marginal Revolution). They do find a conclusive answer: the Baumol effect. T&H explain it like this: In 1826, when Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010. Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experienced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approximately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826. In other words, one had to give up more other goods and services to produce a music performance in 2010 than one did in 1826. Why? Simply because in 2010, society was better at producing other goods and services than in 1826. Put another way, a violinist can always choose to stop playing violin, retrain for a while, and work in a factory instead. Maybe in 1826, when factory owners were earning $1.14/hour and violinists were earning $5/hour, so no violinists would quit and retrain. But by 2010, factory workers were earning $26.44/hour, so if violinists were still only earning $5 they might all quit and retrain. So in 2010, there would be a strong pressure to increase violinists' wage to at least $26.44 (probably more, since few people have the skills to be violinists). So violinists must be paid 5x more for the same work, which will look like concerts becoming more expensive.

[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success, Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad] When I wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell, my attempt to explain reactionary philosophy, many people complained that it missed the key insight. At the time I had an excuse: I didn't get the key insight. Now I think I might understand it and have the vocabulary to explain, so I want to belatedly add it in. The whole thing revolves around this rather dubious redefinition: RIGHT-WING: Policies and systems selected by cultural evolution LEFT-WING: Policies and systems selected by the marketplace of ideas The second line is ambiguous: which marketplace of ideas, exactly? Maybe better than "the marketplace of ideas" would be "memetic evolution". Policies and systems that are so catchy and convincing that lots of people believe in them and want to fight for them. Under this definition, lots of conventionally right-wing movements get defined as left-wing. For example, Nazism and Trumpism both arose after a charismatic leader convinced the populace to implement them. They won because people liked them more than the alternatives. But "left-wing" is not equivalent to "populist". An idea that spreads by convincing intellectuals and building an academic consensus around itself is still left-wing, because it relies on convincing people. Even ideas like neoliberalism and technocracy are left-wing ideas, if they sound good to intellectuals and they spread by convincing those intellectuals.

[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success. Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn't provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it later, but it probably shouldn't be dropped in here without justification.] I. Years ago, I wrote about symmetric vs. asymmetric weapons. A symmetric weapon is one that works just as well for the bad guys as for the good guys. For example, violence – your morality doesn't determine how hard you can punch; they can buy guns from the same places we can. An asymmetric weapon is one that works better for the good guys than the bad guys. The example I gave was Reason. If everyone tries to solve their problems through figuring out what the right thing to do is, the good guys (who are right) will have an easier time proving themselves to be right than the bad guys (who are wrong). Finding and using asymmetric weapons is the only non-coincidence way to make sustained moral progress. The parts of The Secret Of Our Success that deal with reason vs. cultural evolution raise a disturbing prospect: what if sometimes, the asymmetry is in the wrong direction? What if there are some issues where rational debate inherently leads you astray?

[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success] A rare example of cultural evolution in action: Throughout the Highlands of New Guinea, a group's ability to raise large numbers of pigs is directly related to its economic and social success in competition with other regional groups. The ceremonial exchange of pigs allows groups to forge alliances, re-pay debts, obtain wives, and generate prestige through excessive displays of generosity. All this means that groups who are better able to raise pigs can expand more rapidly in numbers—by reproduction and in-migration—and thus have the potential to expand their territory. Group size is very important in intergroup warfare in small-scale societies so larger groups are more likely to successfully expand their territory. However, the prestige more successful groups obtain may cause the rapid diffusion of the very institutions, beliefs, or practices responsible for their competitive edge as other groups adopt their strategies and beliefs. In 1971, the anthropologist David Boyd was living in the New Guinea village of Irakia, and observed intergroup competition via prestige-biased group transmission. Concerned about their low prestige and weak pig production, the senior men of Irakia convened a series of meetings to determine how to improve their situation. Numerous suggestions were proposed for raising their pig production but after a long process of consensus building the senior men of the village decided to follow a suggestion made by a prestigious clan-leader who proposed that they "must follow the Fore'" and adopt their pig-related husbandry practices, rituals, and other institutions. The Fore' were a large and successful ethnic group in the region, who were renowned for their pig production. The following practices, beliefs, rules, and goals were copied from the Fore', and announced at the next general meeting of the community: 1) All villagers must sing, dance and play flutes for their pigs. This ritual causes the pigs to grow faster and bigger. At feasts, the pigs should be fed first from the oven. People are fed second.

[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. "Culture is the secret of humanity's success" sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Successby anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway. Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough to invent neat tools that help us survive and adapt to unfamiliar environments. Against such theories: we cannot actually do this. Henrich walks the reader through many stories about European explorers marooned in unfamiliar environments. These explorers usually starved to death. They starved to death in the middle of endless plenty. Some of them were in Arctic lands that the Inuit considered among their richest hunting grounds. Others were in jungles, surrounded by edible plants and animals. One particularly unfortunate group was in Alabama, and would have perished entirely if they hadn't been captured and enslaved by local Indians first. These explorers had many advantages over our hominid ancestors. For one thing, their exploration parties were made up entirely of strong young men in their prime, with no need to support women, children, or the elderly. They were often selected for their education and intelligence. Many of them were from Victorian Britain, one of the most successful civilizations in history, full of geniuses like Darwin and Galton. Most of them had some past experience with wilderness craft and survival. But despite their big brains, when faced with the task our big brains supposedly evolved for – figuring out how to do hunting and gathering in a wilderness environment – they failed pathetically.

[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don't like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something after it had been proven to them. And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn't until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went "Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea." I don't think I'm overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of "Look, everything you say fits together and I can't explain why you're wrong, I just know you are!" Or, more plausibly, "Shut up I don't want to talk about this!" And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals. And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn't believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky. And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.

[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I've renamed him here to "Andrew Cord" to protect his identity.] I. Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant hurtful lies: I just find it kind of darkly amusing and sad that the "rationalist community" loves "rationality is winning" so much as a tagline and yet are clearly not winning. And then complain about losing rather than changing their tactics to match those of people who are winning. Which is probably because if you *really* want to be the kind of person who wins you have to actually care about winning something, which means you have to have politics, which means you have to embrace "politics the mindkiller" and "politics is war and arguments are soldiers", and Scott would clearly rather spend the rest of his life losing than do this. That post [the one debunking false rape statistics] is exactly my problem with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it's a worthwhile use of his time, energy and mental effort to download evil people's evil worldviews into his mind and try to analytically debate them with statistics and cost-benefit analyses. He gets *mad* at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense. It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind of thing that "social justice" activists like me *intend* to attack and "trigger" when we use "triggery" catchphrases about the mewling pusillanimity of privileged white allies. In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence. It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I've always secretly suspected them of believing. My natural instinct is to give some of the reasons why I think Andrew is wrong, starting with the history of the "noble lie" concept and moving on to some examples of why it didn't work very well, and why it might not be expected not to work so well in the future. But in a way, that would be assuming the conclusion. I wouldn't be showing respect for Andrew's arguments. I wouldn't be going halfway to meet them on their own terms. The respectful way to rebut Andrew's argument would be to spread malicious lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for them to destroy his reputation. Then if the stress ends up bursting an aneurysm in his brain, I can dance on his grave, singing: ♪ ♬ I won this debate in a very effective manner. Now you can't argue in favor of nasty debate tactics any more ♬ ♪ I'm not going to do that, but if I did it's unclear to me how Andrew could object. I mean, he thinks that sexism is detrimental to society, so spreading lies and destroying people is justified in order to stop it. I think that discourse based on mud-slinging and falsehoods is detrimental to society. Therefore…

I was surprised how many people responded to my APA photo-essay with comments like "Seems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair" or "This proves you should never trust psychiatrists". The mood I was going for was more "let's share a laugh at the excesses of the profession" than "everything must be burned down". Looks like I missed it. I was disappointed to see a lot of the most hostile comments coming from people in tech. It would be easy to write an equally damning report on the tech industry. Just cobble together a few paragraphs about Juicero and Theranos, make fun of whatever weird lifestyle change @jack is supporting at the moment, and something something Zuckerberg something Cambridge Analytica something. You can even throw in something about James Damore (if you're writing for the left) or about the overreaction to James Damore (if you're writing for the right). And there you go! Tech is a malicious cancerous industry full of awful people and everyone should hate it. We've all read this exact thinkpiece a thousand times. I've tried to push back against this line of thinking. A lot of the most visible and famous things in tech are bad, because scum tends to rise to the top. But there's also some extraordinary innovation going on, and some extraordinarily good people involved. "@jack invents new health fad of rolling around naked on glaciers" is a much juicier story than "we can now fit twice as many billions of transistors on a chip as we could last year", but tech journalism that only reports on the former is missing an important part of the story. I feel the same way about psychiatry. There's a lot of cringeworthy stuff going on at conferences, but conferences are designed to be about signaling and we shouldn't expect otherwise. There's also a lot of great people working really hard to help fight mental illness and support the mentally ill. "Most Americans remain alive and basically functional despite record-breaking amounts of depression and anxiety" isn't sexy any more than "Internet continues to connect billions of people around the world at the speed of light" is sexy. But it's a much bigger part of the story than the part where silly people do silly things at conferences.

The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people. Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a knot of foreign-looking people huddled together, their nametags announcing them as the delegation from the Nigerian Psychiatric Association or the Nepalese Psychiatric Association or somewhere else very far away. But however exotic, something about them remains ineffably psychiatrist. The second thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the staircase is shaming you for not knowing enough about Vraylar®. Seems kind of weird. Maybe I'll just take the escalator …no, the escalator is advertising Latuda®, the "number one branded atypical antipsychotic". Aaaaaah! Maybe I should just sit down for a second and figure out what to do next… AAAAH, CAN'T SIT DOWN, VRAYLAR® HAS GOTTEN TO THE BENCHES TOO! Surely there's a non-Vraylar bench somewhere in this 15,000 person convention center!

Enquist et al on lactation fetishes is one of my favorite papers. They wonder – as we've all wondered at one point or another – how people develop fetishes. One plausible hypothesis is "sexual imprinting". During childhood, you have a critical period (maybe ages 1 to 5) where you figure out what sex is. If you see some weird stuff during that time, you could end up with a fetish. For example, a child who sees latex used in a sexualized way (for example, they catch a glimpse of a sexy movie where someone is wearing latex) might grow up with a latex fetish. Enquist et al realize lactation fetishes offer a natural test of this hypothesis. Children with younger siblings will see a lot of breastfeeding going on during their critical window; children without younger siblings will see less. Since it's easy to ask people how many siblings they have, you can see if younger siblings correlate with lactation fetishes. They survey some online lactation fetishist communities and ask everyone how many older and younger siblings they have. Although by chance we would expect an equal number of both, in fact the fetishists have many more younger than older siblings:

Psychologists are split on the existence of "birth order effects", where oldest siblings will have different personality traits and outcomes than middle or youngest siblings. Although some studies detect effects, they tend to be weak and inconsistent. Last year, I posted Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, finding a robust 70-30 imbalance in favor of older siblings among SSC readers. I speculated that taking a pre-selected population and counting the firstborn-to-laterborn ratio was better at revealing these effects than taking an unselected population and trying to measure their personality traits. Since then, other independent researchers have confirmed similar effects in historical mathematicians and Nobel-winning physicists. Although birth order effects do not seem to consistently affect IQ, some studies suggest that they do affect something like "intellectual curiosity", which would explain firstborns' over-representation in intellectual communities. Why would firstborns be more intellectually curious? If we knew that, could we do something different to make laterborns more intellectually curious? A growing body of research highlights the importance of genetics on children's personalities and outcomes, and casts doubt on the ability of parents and teachers to significantly affect their trajectories. But here's a non-genetic factor that's a really big deal on one of the personality traits closest to our hearts. How does it work? People looking into birth order effects have come up with a couple of possible explanations: 1. Intra-family competition. The oldest child choose some interest or life path. Then younger children don't want to live in their older sibling's shadow all the time, so they do something else. 2. Decreased parental investment. Parents can devote 100% of their child-rearing time to the oldest child, but only 50% or less to subsequent children.

There's been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it's worth reviewing whether there's a case for skepticism. I think it would look something like this: 1. Psychedelics have mostly been investigated in small studies run by true believers. These are the conditions that produce a field made of unreplicable results, like the effects of 5-HTTLPR. Some of the most exciting psychedelic findings have already failed to replicate; for example, a study two years ago found that psilocybin did not permanently increase the Openness personality trait. This was one of the most exciting studies and had shaped a lot of my thinking around the issue. Now it's gone. 2. Some of the most impressive stories involve psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, where people who talk with a therapist, while on a substance, obtain true insight and get real closure. But every psychotherapy has amazing success stories floating out there. Back when psychoanalysis was new, the whole world was full of people telling their amazing success stories about how Dr. Freud helped them obtain true insight and get real closure. I think of psychotherapy as a domain where people can get as many amazing success stories as they want whether or not they're really doing anything right, for unclear reasons.

In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46). Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see herefor list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing negative stimuli. In one especially interesting study, it was found to bias how the amygdala processed ambiguous facial expression; in another, it modulated how the emotional systems of the amygdala connected to the attentional systems of the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, 5-HTTLPR was found to directly affect the reactivity of the HPA axis, the stress processing circuit leading from the adrenal glands to the brain. As interest increased, studies began pointing to 5-HTTLPR in other psychiatric conditions as well. One study found a role in seasonal affective disorder, another in insomnia. A meta-analysis of twelve studies found a role (p = 0.001) in PTSD. A meta-analysis of twenty-three studies found a role (p = 0.000016) in anxiety-related personality traits. Even psychosis and Alzheimer's disease, not traditionally considered serotonergic conditions, were affected. But my favorite study along these lines has to be 5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Is Associated With Nostalgia-Proneness. Some people in bad life situations become depressed, and others seem unaffected; researchers began to suspect that genes like 5-HTTLPR might be involved not just in causing depression directly, but in modulating how we respond to life events. A meta-analysis looked at 54 studies of the interaction and found "strong evidence that 5-HTTLPR moderates the relationship between stress and depression, with the s allele associated with an increased risk of developing depression under stress (P = .00002)". This relationship was then independently re-confirmed for every conceivable population and form of stress. Depressed children undergoing childhood adversity. Depressed children with depressed mothers. Depressed youth. Depressed adolescent girls undergoing peer victimization. They all developed different amounts of depression based on their 5-HTTLPR genotype. The mainstream media caught on and dubbed 5-HTTLPR and a few similar variants "orchid genes", because orchids are sensitive to stress but will bloom beautifully under the right conditions. Stories about "orchid genes" made it into The Atlantic, Wired, and The New York Times. In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46). Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see herefor list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing negative stimuli. In one especially interesting study, it was found to bias how the amygdala processed ambiguous facial expression; in another, it modulated how the emotional systems of the amygdala connected to the attentional systems of the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, 5-HTTLPR was found to directly affect the reactivity of the HPA axis, the stress processing circuit leading from the adrenal glands to the brain. As interest increased, studies began pointing to 5-HTTLPR in other psychiatric conditions as well. One study found a role in seasonal affective disorder, another in insomnia. A meta-analysis of twelve studies found a role (p = 0.001) in PTSD. A meta-analysis of twenty-three studies found a role (p = 0.000016) in anxiety-related personality traits. Even psychosis and Alzheimer's disease, not traditionally considered serotonergic conditions, were affected. But my favorite study along these lines has to be 5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Is Associated With Nostalgia-Proneness. Some people in bad life situations become depressed, and others seem unaffected; researchers began to suspect that genes like 5-HTTLPR might be involved not just in causing depression directly, but in modulating how we respond to life events. A meta-analysis looked at 54 studies of the interaction and found "strong evidence that 5-HTTLPR moderates the relationship between stress and depression, with the s allele associated with an increased risk of developing depression under stress (P = .00002)". This relationship was then independently re-confirmed for every conceivable population and form of stress. Depressed children undergoing childhood adversity. Depressed children with depressed mothers. Depressed youth. Depressed adolescent girls undergoing peer victimization. They all developed different amounts of depression based on their 5-HTTLPR genotype. Th

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal. A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal. A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your goals. You can't let it stop you! Destroy it! Destroy the Moon! A marital eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your spouse. You're going to need to practice good communication about the new celestial body in your life if you want your relationship to survive. A capillary eclipse occurs when your hair gets between your eyes and the Sun. Get a haircut.

A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people's moral valuation of different kinds of animals scaled pretty nicely with the animals' number of cortical neurons (see here for more on why we might expect that to be true). A commenter, Tibbar, did a larger survey on Mechanical Turk and got very different results, so I retracted the claim. I wasn't sure why we got such different results, but I chalked it down to chance, or perhaps to my having surveyed an animal-rights-conscious crowd who thinks a lot about this kinds of things vs. Tibbar surveying random MTurkers. Now David Moss, from effective altruist organization Rethink Priorities, has looked into this more deeply and resolved some of the discrepancies. The problem is that I did a terrible job explaining my procedure (I linked to the form I used, but the link was broken when Tibbar did his survey). In particular, I included the line: If you believe [animals have moral value] in general, but think some specific animal I ask about doesn't work this way, feel free to leave the question blank or put in "99999", which I will interpret as "basically infinity"

(Epistemic status: Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.) I. There is a national shortage of buspirone. Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it's in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It's not a very strong medication, but it's safe, it's non-addictive, it's off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years. Now there's a national shortage. My patients can't get it, or have to go hunting from pharmacy to pharmacy until they find one that has it. I've told people find a source to stockpile a supply so they don't run out. It feels like we're living in the Soviet Union. How did this happen? The New York Times writes: The main reason for the buspirone shortage appears to be interrupted production at a Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant in Morgantown, W.Va., which produced about a third of the country's supply of the drug. The Food and Drug Administration had said the facility was dirty and that the company failed to follow quality control procedures.

[Epistemic status: Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most of the good ideas are his, any errors are mine.] I. In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026. This sounds like the plot of a sci-fi book. But it's also the story of Heinz von Foerster, a mid-century physicist, cybernetician, cognitive scientist, and philosopher. His problems started when he became interested in human population dynamics. (the rest of this section is loosely adapted from his Science paper "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026") Assume a perfect paradisiacal Garden of Eden with infinite resources. Start with two people – Adam and Eve – and assume the population doubles every generation. In the second generation there are 4 people; in the third, 8. This is that old riddle about the grains of rice on the chessboard again. By the 64th generation (ie after about 1500 years) there will be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 people – ie about about a billion times the number of people who have ever lived in all the eons of human history. So one of our assumptions must be wrong. Probably it's the one about the perfect paradise with unlimited resources. Okay, new plan. Assume a world with a limited food supply / limited carrying capacity. If you want, imagine it as an island where everyone eats coconuts. But there are only enough coconuts to support 100 people. If the population reproduces beyond 100 people, some of them will starve, until they're back at 100 people. In the second generation, there are 100 people. In the third generation, still 100 people. And so on to infinity. Here the population never grows at all. But that doesn't match real life either.

HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it): One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance, which directly includes low admissions rates, as a measure of how well a school is doing. These rankings and metrics also heavily incentivize having high yield (a large fraction of students that are admitted end up attending) which for a fixed size applicant pool also encourages accepting as few people as possible. This has led to the death of safety schools, because they would rather reject a high performing student than admit them and have them not attend. These factors might also be a driving force behind the rise of common app, since schools are trying to get as many applicants as possible, even if it hurts the quality of their pool. kaakitwitaasota points out that consulting is an exception to the "where you go to school doesn't matter" principle:A lot of top firms these days won't even look at you if you didn't go to the "right" college. My mother did her MBA at Northeastern, and recently had lunch with an old classmate who ended up at a top consulting firm. My mother's classmate's résumé would end up in the trash unread these days–Northeastern isn't considered good enough. So while it's probably true on the macro level that smart kids will do just fine anywhere they end up, there is a subset of extremely prestigious, extremely well-paid jobs which will not even look at you if you didn't get into the right institution at the age of 18–which, in practice, means that the élite are chosen on the basis of who they were at the age of 14-17. When viewed in those terms, it's completely nuts. I'd heard this before; my impression is that a big part of consulting is having prestigious-looking people tell you what you want to hear. If what they're actually hiring for is prestige rather than competence per se, that could make it a special case

0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. The pressure of getting into a good university may even be leading to suicidesat elite high schools. Some people have dismissed the problem, saying that a misplaced focus on Harvard and Yale ignores that most colleges are easier to get into than ever. For example, from The Atlantic, Is College Really Harder To Get Into Than It Used To Be?: If schools that were once considered "safeties" now have admissions rates as low as 20 or 30 percent, it appears tougher to get into college every spring. But "beneath the headlines and urban legends," Jim Hull, senior policy analyst at the National School Board Association's Center for Public Education, says their 2010 report shows that it was no more difficult for most students to get into college in 2004 than it was in 1992. While the Center plans to update the information in the next few years to reflect the past decade of applicants, students with the same SAT and GPA in the 90's basically have an equal probability of getting into a similarly selective college today. Their link to the report doesn't work, so I can't tell if this was ever true. But it doesn't seem true today. From Pew: The first graph shows that admission rates have decreased at 53% of colleges, and increased at only 31%. The second graph shows that the decreases were mostly at very selective schools, and the increases were mostly at less selective schools. We shouldn't exaggerate the problem: three-quarters of US students go to non-selective colleges that accept most applicants, and there are more than enough of these for everyone. But if you are aiming for a competitive school – not just Harvard and Yale, but anywhere in the top few hundred institutions – the competition is getting harder. This matches my impression of "facts on the ground". In 2002, I was a senior at a California high school in a good neighborhood. Most of the kids in my class wanted to go to famous Ivy League universities, and considered University of California colleges their "safety schools". The idea of going to Cal State (California's middle- and lower- tier colleges) felt like some kind of colossal failure. But my mother just retired from teaching at a very similar school, and she says nowadays the same demographic of students would kill to get into a UC school, and many of them can't even get into Cal States. The stories I hear about this usually focus on how more people are going to college today than ever, but there's still only one Harvard, so there's increasing competition for the same number of spots.

Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You can put a checkmark next to their name to indicate you want to date them (they can't see this). If you both checkmark each other, then the site reveals you've matched. This seemed like an obvious great idea. But I started to hear a lot of stories like the following: "I checkmarked Alice's name on Reciprocity, and the system didn't notify me that there was a match, so I assumed Alice didn't like me. Later I asked her out in person, and she said yes and we had a great time." I always figured Alice was just a jerk who was ruining the system for everyone else. After all, the whole premise was to incentivize honesty. Checkmark the names of people you honestly want to date. If they don't want to date you, they never hear about it, and you would be no worse off. If they do want to date you, the system will let you know, and you can arrange a date. If your pattern of checkmarks doesn't really match who you want to date, you're just screwing yourself and everyone else over for no reason. A few months ago, someone asked me out on a date and I said yes. And I realized I hadn't checkmarked them on Reciprocity. This caused a crisis of self-loathing. What's wrong with me? Why would I go against my own incentives and ruin things for everyone else? I asked a friend, who admitted she had done the same thing. Her theory was that asking someone on a date (with all of its accompanying awkwardness and difficulty) was a stronger signal of interest than ticking a checkbox. And potentially there's a grey zone of people who you would only date if you thought they liked you more than a certain amount. And asking them in person is hard enough to be a costly signal that you like them at least that amount, but ticking a checkbox isn't.

Timothy Carey's Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for psychiatry, Method of Levels would score a perfect 100%. It somehow manages to do okay on the physics one despite not discussing any physics. The Method of Levels is the correct solution to every psychological problem, from mild depression to psychosis. Therapists may be tempted to use something other than the Method of Levels, but they must overcome this temptation and just use the Method of Levels on everybody. Every other therapy is about dismissing patients as "just crazy", but the Method of Levels tries to truly understand the patient. Every other therapy is about the therapist trying to change the patient, but the Method of Levels is about the patient trying to change themselves. The author occasionally just lapses into straight-up daydreams about elderly psychologists sitting on the porch, beating themselves up that they were once so stupid as to believe in psychology other than the Method of Levels. This book isn't just bad, it's dangerous. One vignette discusses a patient whose symptoms clearly indicate the start of a manic episode. The author recommends that instead of stigmatizing this person with a diagnosis of bipolar or pumping them full of toxic drugs, you should use the Method of Levels on them. This is a good way to end up with a dead patient. I like perceptual control theory. I share the author's hope that it could one day be a theory of everything for the brain. But even if it is, you can't use theories of everything to do clinical medicine. Darwin discovered a theory of everything for biology, but you can't reason from evolutionary first principles to how to treat a bacterial infection. You should treat the bacterial infection with antibiotics. This will be in accordance with evolutionary principles, and there will even be some cool evolutionary tie-ins (fungi evolved penicillin as a defense against bacteria). But you didn't discover penicillin by reasoning from evolutionary first principles. If you tried reasoning from evolutionary first principles, you might end up trying to make the bacteria mutate into a less dangerous strain during the middle of an osteomyelitis case or something. Just use actually existing clinical medicine and figure out the evolutionary justification for it later.

RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics. He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like "encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children" or "encouraging intelligent people to have more children"; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for eugenics was a belief that it would not work; people who believed the qualities involved were heritable were much more likely to support programs to select for them. For example, of people who thought criminality was completely genetic, a full 65% supported encouraging criminals to have fewer children. I was surprised to hear this, because I thought of moral opposition to eugenics was basically universal. If a prominent politician tentatively supported eugenics, it would provoke a media firestorm and they would get shouted down. This would be true even if they supported the sort of generally mild, noncoercive policies the paper seems to be talking about. How do we square that with a 40% support rate? I think back to a metaphor for norm enforcement I used in an argument against Bryan Caplan:

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. "Mutton" takes the popular vote, but "grass" wins in the Electoral College. The wolves wish they hadn't all moved into the same few trendy coastal cities. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The Timber Wolf Party and the Gray Wolf Party spend most of their energy pandering shamelessly to the tiebreaking vote. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Everyone agrees to borrow money, go to a fancy French restaurant, and leave the debt to the next generation. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The sheep votes for the Wolf Party, because he agrees with them on social issues. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. "Grass" wins the tenth election in a row, thanks to the dominance of special interests. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. FactCheck.org rates the Wolf Party's claim that mutton can be made without harming sheep as "Mostly False". Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The main issue this election is whether two more sheep should be allowed to immigrate. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. A government shutdown is narrowly averted when everyone agrees to what becomes known as the Mutton With A Side Of Grass Compromise; disappointed activists are urged to "keep their demands realistic". Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. They choose borscht. Election officials suspect foul play.

Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals. After getting 263 responses (to my 50), he reports different results: Chicken: 25 Chimpanzee: 2 Cow: 3 Elephant: 1 Lobster: 60 Pig: 5 Human: 1 On the one hand, Mechanical Turkers sometimes aren't a great sample, and some of them seem to have just put the same number for every animal so they could finish quickly and get their money. They also probably haven't thought about this that much and don't have much of a moral theory behind what they're doing. This makes them a different demographic than the people I surveyed, who were a mix of vegetarians and principled non-vegetarians who had thought a lot about animal rights. For example, 80% of my sample answered yes to a question asking if they were "familiar with work by Brian Tomasik, OneStepForAnimals, etc urging people to eat beef rather than chicken". On the other hand, this makes it pretty hard for me to claim my results are some kind of universal intuitive understanding of what animals are like. So I am partially retracting them (only partially, because of the consideration above) and adding this to my Mistakes page. The best thing to do here would be to re-run my survey with a larger sample of a similar population, but unfortunately I've lost my chance to do that now that I've told you all this, so darn. Maybe I'll include it on next year's survey anyway and hope you've forgetten by then.

[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.] Yesterday's post reviewed research showing that animals' intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder. Here are the numbers from this list. I can't find chickens, so I've used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can't find cows, so I've eyeballed a number from other cow-sized ruminants (see here for some debate on this). Some animal rights activists discuss the relative value of different species of animal. You have to eat a lot of steak to kill one cow, but you only have to eat a few chicken wings to kill one chicken. This suggests nonvegetarians trying to minimize the moral impact of their diet should eat beef, not chicken. But any calculation like this depends on assumptions about whether one cow and one chicken have similar moral values. Most people would say that they don't – the cow seems intuitively more "human" and capable of suffering – but most people would also say the cow isn't infinitely more valuable. Different animals rights people have come up with different ideas for exactly how we should calculate this. I wondered how people's intuitive ideas about the moral value of animals would correspond to their cortical neuron count. I asked Tumblr users who believed that animals had moral value to fill out a survey (questions, results) estimating the relative value of each animal, in terms of how many animals = 1 human. Fifty people answered, including 21 vegetarians and 29 nonvegetarians. Their numbers ranged from 1 to putting their hand on the 9 key and leaving it there a while, but when I took the median, here's what I got:

Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren't they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as "it takes a big brain to control a body that size". But it really doesn't. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts and did fine. Also, the animal with the highest brain-relative-to-body size is a shrew. The classic answer to that has been to look at a statistic called "encephalization quotient", which compares an animal's brain size to its predicted brain size given an equation that fits most animals. Sometimes people use brain weight = constant x (body weight)^0.66, where the constant varies depending on what kind of animal you're talking about. The encephalization quotient mostly works, but it's kind of a hack. Also, capuchin monkeys have higher EQ than chimps, but are not as smart. Also, some birds have lower encephalization quotients than small mammals, but are much smarter. So although EQ usually does a good job predicting intelligence, it's definitely not perfect, and it doesn't tell us what intelligence is. A new AI Impacts report on animal intelligence, partly based on research by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, starts off here. If we knew what made some animals smarter than others, it might help us figure out what intelligence is in a physiological sense, and that might help us predict the growth of intelligence in future AIs. AII focuses on birds. Some birds are very intelligent: crows can use tools, songbirds seem to have a primitive language, parrots can learn human speech. But birds have tiny brains, whether by absolute standards or EQ. They also have very different brains than mammals: while mammals have a neocortex arranged in a characteristic pattern of layers, birds have a different unlayered structure called the pallium with neurons "organized into nuclei". So bird intelligence is surprising both because of their small brains, and because it suggests high intelligence can arise in brain structures very different from our own.

Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I've puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston's free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy. Put this way, it's clearly just perceptual control theory. Powers describes the same insight like this: [Action] is the difference between some condition of the situation as the subject sees it, and what we might call a reference condition, as he understands it. I'd previously noticed that these theories had some weird similarities. But I want to go further and say they're fundamentally the same paradigm. I don't want to deny that the two theories have developed differently, and I especially don't want to deny that free energy/predictive coding has done great work building in a lot of Bayesian math that perceptual control theory can't match. But the foundations are the same. Why is this of more than historical interest? Because some people (often including me) find free energy/predictive coding very difficult to understand, but find perceptual control theory intuitive. If these are basically the same, then someone who wants to understand free energy can learn perceptual control theory and then a glossary of which concepts match to each other, and save themselves the grief of trying to learn free energy/predictive coding just by reading Friston directly.

They say "don't judge a book by its cover". So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in fact, communist. Inventing The Future isn't technically Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' manifesto – that would be the equally-striking-looking Accelerate Manifesto. But it's a manifesto-ish description of their plan for achieving a postcapitalist world. S&W start with a critique of what they call "folk politics", eg every stereotype you have of lazy left-wing activists. Protesters who march out and wave signs and then go home with no follow-up plan. Groups that avoid having any internal organization, because organization implies hierarchy and hierarchy is bad. The People's Front of Judaea wasting all their energy warring with the Judaean People's Front. An emphasis on spectacle and performance over results. We've probably all heard stories like this, but some of S&W's are especially good, like one from an activist at a trade summit: On April 20, the first day of the demonstrations, we marched in our thousands toward the fence, behind which 34 heads of state had gathered to hammer out a hemispheric trade deal. Under a hail of catapult-launched teddy bears, activists dressed in black quickly removed the fence's support with bolt cutters and pulled it down with grapples as onlookers cheered them on. For a brief moment, nothing stood between us and the convention centre. We scrambled atop the toppled fence, but for the most part we went no further, as if our intention all along had been simply to replace the state's chain-link and concrete barrier with a human one of our own making. S&W comment: We see here the symbolic and ritualistic nature of the actions, combined with the thrill of having done something – but with a deep uncertainty that appears at the first break with the expected narrative. The role of dutiful protester had given these activists no indication of what to do when the barriers fell. Spectacular political confrontations like the Stop the War marches, the now familiar melees against G20 or World Trade Organization and the rousing scenes of democracy in Occupy Wall Street all give the appearance of being highly significant, as if something were genuinely at stake. Yet nothing has changed, and long-term victories were traded for a simple registration of discontent. To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements want, beyond expressing a generalized discontent with the world…in more recent struggles, the very idea of making demands has been questioned. The Occupy movement infamously struggled to articulate meaningful goals, worried that anything too substantial would be divisive. And a broad range of student occupations across the Western world has taken up the mantra of "no demands" under the misguided belief that demanding nothing is a radical act.

Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on the Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, a 117 MB collection of pre-1923 English poetry, to create a specialized poetry AI. I previously tested the out-of-the-box version of GPT-2 and couldn't make it understand rhyme and meter. I wrongly assumed this was a fundamental limitation: "obviously something that has never heard sound can't derive these complex rhythms just from meaningless strings of letters." I was wrong; it just didn't have enough training data. Gwern's retrained version gets both of these right, and more too. For example: Thou know'st how Menoetiades the swift Was dragged, of Hector and the fierce compeers And Phrygian warriors. So, we will dispatch Your bodies, then, yourselves to burn the ships In sacrifice; with torches and with bells To burn them, and with oxen to replace Your gallant friends for ever. But I wish That no man living has so long endured The onset of his foes, as I have power To burn or storm; for mighty Hector erst Was slain, and now returns his safe return This is all perfect iambic pentameter. I know AP English students who can't write iambic pentameter as competently as this. (by the way, both "compeers" and "erst" are perfectly cromulent words from the period when people wrote poems like this; both show up in Shelley) It has more trouble with rhymes – my guess is a lot of the poetry it was trained on was blank verse. But when it decides it should be rhyming, it can keep it up for a little while. From its Elegy Written in a Country Churchyardfanfic:

Here's a graph of US air pollution over time: During the discussion of 90s environmentalism, some people pointed out that this showed the Clean Air Act didn't matter. The trend is the same before the Act as after it. This kind of argument is common. For example, here's the libertarian Mercatus Institute arguing that OSHA didn't help workplace safety: I've always taken these arguments pretty seriously. But recently I've gotten more cautious. Here's a graph of Moore's Law, the "rule" that transistor counts will always increase by a certain amount per year: The Moore's Law Wikipedia article lists factors that have helped transistors keep shrinking during that time, for example "the invention of deep UV excimer laser photolithography" in 1980. But if we wanted to be really harsh, we could make a graph like this: But the same argument that disproves the importance of photolithography disproves the importance of anything else. We'd have to retreat to a thousand-coin-flips model where each factor is so small that it happening or not happening at any given time doesn't change the graph in a visible way. The only satisfying counterargument I've heard to this is that Moore's Law comes from a combination of physical law and human commitment. Physical law is consistent with transistors shrinking this quickly. But having noticed this, humans (like the leadership of Intel) commit to achieve it. That commitment functions kind of as a control system. If there's a big advance in one area, they can relax a little bit in other areas. If there's a problem in one area, they'll pour more resources into it until there stops being a problem. One can imagine an event big enough to break the control system – a single unexpected discovery that cuts sizes by a factor of 1000 all on its own, or a quirk of physical law that makes it impossible to fit more transistors on a chip without inventing an entirely new scientific paradigm. But in fact there was no event big enough to break the control system during this period, so the system kept working. But then we have to wonder whether other things like clean air are control systems too. That is, suppose that as the economy improves and stuff, the American people demand cleaner air. They will only be happy if the air is at least 2% cleaner each year than the year before. If one year the air is 10% cleaner than the year before, environmentalist groups get bored and wander off, and there's no more progress for the next five years. But if one year the air is only 1% cleaner, newly-energized environmentalist voters threaten to vote out all the incumbents who contributed to the problem, and politicians pass some emergency measure to make it go down another 1%. So absent some event strong enough to overwhelm the system, air pollution will always go down 2% per year. But that doesn't mean the Clean Air Act didn't change things! The Clean Air Act was part of the toolkit that the control system used to keep the decline at 2%. If the Clean Air Act had never happened, the control system would have figured out some other way to keep air pollution low, but that doesn't mean the Clean Air Act didn't matter. Just that it mattered exactly as much as whatever it would have been replaced with.

[Related to: Book Review: Albion's Seed] [Epistemic status: Not too serious] I realize I've been confusing everyone with my use of the word "Puritan". When I say "That guy is so Puritan!" people object "But he's not religious!" or "He doesn't hate fun!" I don't know what the real word for the category I'm calling "Puritan" is. Words like "Yankee", "Boston Brahmin", or "Transcendentalist" are close, but none of them really work. "Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian early American who takes morality very seriously" is good, but too long. Instead of explaining further, here's a (more than half-joking) Puritan checklist. Maximum one item per red box. The obvious next step is to rank historical figures by Puritanism Points. Here are the top five famous Americans I can find, as per Wikipedia: #5: SAMUEL MORSE Samuel Morse was born to Pastor (+3) Jedediah (+1) Morse and his wife Elizabeth (+1) in Charlestown, Massachusetts (+3), the eldest of six children (+3). After attending Yale (+1), he pursued a career as an internationally famous painter. But when his wife Lucretia (+1) fell sick, he was unable to receive the news in time to go home to her before she died, inspiring him to change careers during mid-life (+3) and become an inventor. He spent his life perfecting the telegraph (+1), but also invented an automatic sculpture-making machine (+3). In later life, he switched careers again, becoming an anti-Catholic activist (+1); he ran for Mayor of New York on an anti-Catholic platform, and wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets like A Foreign Conspiracy Against The Liberties Of The United States (+1). He was also a well-known philanthropist (+3). His hairstyle looked like this (+3). Total Puritanism = 28

I. Albion's Seed by David Fischer is a history professor's nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It's not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does. In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as "Englishmen", a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer's thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US. I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion's Seed argues that this is basically the process that formed several early US states. Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the 1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s. II. A: The Puritans I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn't get away quick and build something better. They really liked "city on a hill" metaphors. I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse. But I didn't know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist's wet dream. Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan "homeland" of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it "accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England." Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that "it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation" and that "those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England". Puritan "headhunters" went back to England to recruit "godly men" and "honest men" who "must not be of the poorer sort".

Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let's review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend tens of millions of dollars proving safety and efficacy to the FDA. The FDA rewards them with a 10ish year monopoly on the drug, during which they can charge whatever ridiculous price they want. This isn't a great system, but at least we get new medicines sometimes. Occasionally people discover that an existing chemical treats an illness, without the chemical having been discovered and patented by a pharmaceutical company. In this case, whoever spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA may not get a monopoly on the drug and the right to sell it for ridiculous prices. So nobody spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA, and so it risks never getting approved. The usual solution is for some pharma company to make some tiny irrelevant change to the existing chemical, and patent this new chemical as an "exciting discovery" they just made. Everyone goes along with the ruse, the company spends tens of millions of dollars pushing it through FDA trials, it gets approved, and they charge ridiculous prices for ten years. I wouldn't quite call this "the system works", but again, at least we get new medicines. Twenty years ago, people noticed that ketamine treated depression. Alas, ketamine already existed – it's an anaesthetic and a popular recreational drug – so pharma companies couldn't patent it and fund FDA trials, so it couldn't get approved by the FDA for depression. A few renegade doctors started setting up ketamine clinics, where they used the existing approval of ketamine for anaesthesia as an excuse to give it to depressed people. But because this indication was not FDA-approved, insurance companies didn't have to cover it. This created a really embarrassing situation for the medical system: everyone secretly knows ketamine is one of the most effective antidepressants, but officially it's not an antidepressant at all, and mainstream providers won't give it to you. The pharmaceutical industry has lobbyists in Heaven. Does this surprise you? Of course they do. A Power bribed here, a Principality flattered there, and eventually their petitions reach the ears of God Himself. This is the only possible explanation for stereochemistry, a quirk of nature where many organic chemicals come in "left-handed" and "right-handed" versions. The details don't matter, beyond that if you have a chemical that you can't patent, you can take the left-handed (or right-handed) version, and legally pretend that now it is a different chemical which you can patent. And so we got "esketamine".

[Title from this unrelated story or this unrelated essay] Last week I wrote about how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than debunkings of those same theories. A few commenters chimed in to say that of course this was true, the conspiracy theories had evolved into an almost-perfect form for exploiting cognitive biases and the pressures of social media. Debunkings and true beliefs couldn't copy that process, so they were losing out. This sounded like a challenge, so here you go:

[With apologies to Putnam, Pope, and all of you] Two children are reading a text written by an AI: The hobbits splashed water in each other's faces until they were both sopping wet One child says to the other "Wow! After reading some text, the AI understands what water is!" The second child says "It doesn't really understand." The first child says "Sure it does! It understands that water is the sort of substance that splashes. It understands that people who are splashed with water get wet. What else is left to understand?" The second child says "All it understands is relationships between words. None of the words connect to reality. It doesn't have any internal concept of what water looks like or how it feels to be wet. Only that the letters W-A-T-E-R, when appearing near the letters S-P-L-A-S-H bear a certain statistical relationship to the letters W-E-T." The first child starts to cry. Two chemists are watching the children argue with each other. The first chemist says "Wow! After seeing an AI, these kids can debate the nature of water!" The second chemist says "Ironic, isn't it? After all, the children themselves don't understand what water is! Water is two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen atom, and neither of them know!" The first chemist answers "Come on. The child knows enough about water to say she understands it. She knows what it looks like. She knows what it tastes like. That's pretty much the basics of water." The second chemist answers "Those are just relationships between pieces of sense-data. The child knows that (visual perception of clear shiny thing) = (tactile perception of cold wetness) = (gustatory perception of refreshingness). And she can predict statistical relationships, like that if she sees someone throw a bucket of (visual perception of clear shiny thing) at her, she will soon feel (tactile perception of cold miserable sopping wetness). She uses the word "water" as a concept-hook that links all of these relationships together and makes predicting the world much easier. But no matter how well she masters these facts, she can never connect them to H2O or any other real chemical facts about the world beyond mere sense-data."

The Verge writes a story (an exposé?) on the Facebook-moderation industry. It goes through the standard ways it maltreats its employees: low pay, limited bathroom breaks, awful managers – and then into some not-so-standard ones. Mods have to read (or watch) all of the worst things people post on Facebook, from conspiracy theories to snuff videos. The story talks about the psychological trauma this inflicts: It's an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions…where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers… It's a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: "I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack. One of the commenters on Reddit asked "Has this guy ever worked in a restaurant?" and, uh, fair. I don't want to speculate on how much weed-smoking or sex-in-stairwell-having is due to a psychological reaction to the trauma of awful Facebook material vs. ordinary shenanigans. But it sure does seem traumatic. Other than that, the article caught my attention for a few reasons. First, because I recently wrote a post that was a little dismissive of moderators, and made it sound like an easy problem. I think the version I described – moderation of a single website's text-only comment section – is an easi-er problem than moderating all of Facebook and whatever horrible snuff videos people post there. But if any Facebook moderators, or anyone else in a similar situation, read that post and thought I was selling them short, I'm sorry.

Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it's easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progress on demand, and all you have to do is test some stuff to see if it's true? I don't want to devalue experimentalists. They do great work. But it's appropriate that Einstein is more famous than Eddington. If you took away Eddington, someone else would have tested relativity; the bottleneck is in Einsteins. Einstein-in-a-box at the cost of requiring two Eddingtons per insight is a heck of a deal. What if the box had only a 10% success rate? A 1% success rate? My guess is: still most valuable object in the world. Even an 0.1% success rate seems pretty good, considering (what if we ask the box for cancer cures, then test them all on lab rats and volunteers?) You have to go pretty low before the box stops being great. I thought about this after reading this list of geniuses with terrible ideas. Linus Pauling thought Vitamin C cured everything. Isaac Newton spent half his time working on weird Bible codes. Nikola Tesla pursued mad energy beams that couldn't work. Lynn Margulis revolutionized cell biology by discovering mitochondrial endosymbiosis, but was also a 9-11 truther and doubted HIV caused AIDS. Et cetera. Obviously this should happen. Genius often involves coming up with an outrageous idea contrary to conventional wisdom and pursuing it obsessively despite naysayers. But nobody can have a 100% success rate. People who do this successfully sometimes should also fail at it sometimes, just because they're the kind of person who attempts it at all. Not everyone fails. Einstein seems to have batted a perfect 1000 (unless you count his support for socialism). But failure shouldn't surprise us.

[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can't guarantee I've understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Some light editing to bring in important points people raised in the comments.] You all know this graph: Median wages tracked productivity until 1973, then stopped. Productivity kept growing, but wages remained stagnant. This is called "wage decoupling". Sometimes people talk about wages decoupling from GDP, or from GDP per capita, but it all works out pretty much the same way. Increasing growth no longer produces increasing wages for ordinary workers. Is this true? If so, why? 1. What Does The Story Look Like Across Other Countries And Time Periods? Here's a broader look, from 1800 on: It no longer seems like a law of nature that productivity and wages are coupled before 1973. They seem to uncouple and recouple several times, with all the previous graphs' starting point in 1950 being a period of unusual coupledness. Still, the modern uncoupling seems much bigger than anything that's happened before. What about other countries? This graph is for the UK (you can tell because it spells "labor" as "labour") It looks similar, except that the decoupling starts around 1990 instead of around 1973. And here's Europe: This is only from 1999 on, so it's not that helpful. But it does show that even in this short period, France remains coupled, Germany is decoupled, Spain is…doing whatever Spain is doing, and Italy is so pathetic that the problem never even comes up. Overall not sure what to think about these. 2. Could Apparent Wage Decoupling Be Because Of Health Insurance? Along with wages, workers are compensated in benefits like health insurance. Since health insurance has skyrocketed in price, this means total worker compensation has gone up much more than wages have. This could mean workers are really getting compensated much more, even though they're being paid the same amount of money. This view has sometimes been associated with economist Glenn Hubbard. There are a few lines of argument that suggest it's not true. First, wage growth has been worst for the lowest-paid workers. But the lowest-paid workers don't usually get insurance at all.

[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can't comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several years ago, an SSC reader made an r/slatestarcodex subreddit for discussion of blog posts here and related topics. As per the usual process, the topics that generated the strongest emotions – Trump, gender, race, the communist menace, the fascist menace, etc – started taking over. The moderators (and I had been added as an honorary mod at the time) decreed that all discussion of these topics should be corralled into one thread so that nobody had to read them unless they really wanted to. This achieved its desired goal: most of the subreddit went back to being about cognitive science and medicine and other less-polarizing stuff. Unexpectedly, the restriction to one thread kick-started the culture war discussions rather than toning them down. The thread started getting thousands of comments per week, some from people who had never even heard of this blog and had just wandered in from elsewhere on Reddit. It became its own community, with different norms and different members from the rest of the board. I expected this to go badly. It kind of did; no politics discussion area ever goes really well. There were some of the usual flame wars, point-scoring, and fanatics. I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself. But in between all of that, there was some really impressive analysis, some good discussion, and even a few changed minds. Some testimonials from participants: For all its awfulness there really is something special about the CW thread. There are conversations that have happened there that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Someone mentioned its accidental brilliance and I think that's right—it catches a wonderful conversational quality I've never seen on the Internet, and I've been on the Internet since the 90s – werttrew I feel that, while practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true, it is still the best and most civil culture war-related forum for conversation I have seen. And I find the best-of roundup an absolute must-read every week – yrrosimyarin

I was going back over yesterday's post, and something sounded familiar about this paragraph: A very careless plagiarist takes someone else's work and copies it verbatim: "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: "The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell". A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: "In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos". The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism. After rereading it a few times, it hit me. A few days ago, I'd come across this quote from Miss Manners: There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. I laughed at it, I thought it was great, and I stored it in my head as the sort of thing I should quote at some point in order to sound witty. And although I wasn't consciously thinking about it at the time, I'm sure the last sentence of my paragraph comes from the last sentence of Miss Manners'. It would be easy to dismiss it as a coincidence, it probably seems like a coincidence to you, I can't explain how I know that the one comes from the other, but when I replay in my mind the process that made me write that, it's obvious that it did.

A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday's post, saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. I resisted the urge to answer "Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked." But I think it would have been true. A very careless plagiarist takes someone else's work and copies it verbatim: "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell". A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: "The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell". A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: "In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos". The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism. GPT-2 writes fantasy battle scenes by reading a million human-written fantasy battle scenes, distilling them down to the concept of a fantasy battle scene, and then building it back up from there. I think this is how your mom (and everyone else) does it too. GPT-2 is worse at this, because it's not as powerful as your mom's brain. But I don't think it's doing a different thing. We're all blending experience into a slurry; the difference is how finely we blend it.

Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response): Prompt: For today's homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War. It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, because so many people and so many books and so much television and films tell us that it was the cause, that it has something to do with race or economics or religion. There is much agreement that it was essentially a war of slavery on behalf of capitalism, about a century of slavery. But that's not what most people think of when they think of the Civil War. Many people think of the war as about states rights. You're not wrong about that, but it's kind of misleading to say that the Civil War was a conflict between states' rights and federalism. So let's try again. What's the idea that has inspired so many people to go onto the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Gettysberg and Petersburg and Fredericksburg? The American idea of the republic–a notion of limited government–is a great part of the history. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." The "founding fathers" were basically religious men who were not very concerned with states' rights. The Civil War occurred in reaction to the idea that the federal government was taking far too much power away from the states, that they weren't sovereign. Jefferson himself, as you well know, is an author of the Declaration of Independence who had some really crazy ideas about, well, you know, secession for a variety of reasons. The War Between the States (later the Great Rebellion) was a radical re-imagining of the American idea and not surprisingly, Jefferson's grandson, who took after both his father and his grandfather and wrote about it, was named Thomas, after the president. "The federal and state governments are both contrived for the benefit of the rich and large property," This view of the Founding Fathers has been promoted by some of today's most prominent politicians, including some who hold prominent national offices and have a direct stake in a Republican Party that has been hijacked by the "federalist" wing of the party. So why is it that so many people have an easy-to-spot way of understanding the Civil War that has everything to do with the South and nothing to do with the South? The Confederate flag has been a symbol of racism for a long time, but when the Civil War started and the Civil War ended, many people suddenly began to see it differently. There was a change of heart, which I think is what led people to take the question of why the Civil War happened quite seriously… Although OpenAI calls this a "language model", modeling language necessarily involves modeling the world. Even if the AI was only supposed to learn things like "texts that talk about the Civil War use the word 'Confederate' a lot", that has flowered into a rudimentary understanding of how the Civil War worked. Its training corpus (8 million web pages) was large enough that in the course of learning language it learned the specific idiom and structure of all sorts of different genres and subtopics. For example:

I. Chefs. Hundreds of them. Tall chefs, short chefs, black chefs, white chefs. I pushed forward through them, like an explorer hacking away at undergrowth. They muttered curses at me, but I was stronger than they were. I came to a door. I opened it. Sweet empty space. I shut the door behind me, sat down in the chair. "Hello," I said. "Detective Paul Eastman, pleased to make your acquaintance." "Doctor Zachary LaShay," said the man behind the desk. His little remaining hair was greying; his eyes showed hints of the intellect that had been buried beneath the dullness of an administrative career. "I hope you didn't have any trouble getting here. Did my secretary warn you about the chefs?" "She did not," I said. "Well, forewarned is forearmed," he answered, inanely and incongruously. "But I trust you got my message about the federal investigators?" "Once a federal investigation has started, we'll retreat and let them take over. But two women died here. We can't just not investigate because you tell us you're trying to get the Feds involved." "Yes, ah, of course. It's just that we're a sort of, ah, defense contractor. None of our projects are officially classified, yet, but we were hoping to get someone with a security clearance, in case this touched on sensitive areas." "I won't pry further than I have to, but until someone from the government says something official, this is a matter for city police. Maybe you could start by telling me more about exactly what you do here." "We're the United States' only proverb laboratory. Our mission is to stress-test the nation's proverbs. To provide rigorous backing for the good ones, and weed out the bad ones." "I'd never even heard of your organization before today, I have to admit. And now that I'm here…it's huge! Who pays for all of this?" "Everybody who uses proverbs," said the Doctor, "which is to say, everybody. Consider: he who hesitates is lost. But also: look before you leap. Suppose you're a business executive who spots a time-limited opportunity. What do you do? Hesitate? Or leap without looking? Eggheads devise all sorts of fancy rules about timing the market and relying on studies, but when push comes to shove most people are going to rely on the simple sayings they learned as a child. If you can keep your stock of proverbs more up-to-date than your competitor's, that gives you a big business advantage." A smartly-dressed woman came in, handed Dr. LaShay a cup of boiling liquid. He put it to his lips, then spat. "This is terrible!" he said. "Try it!" I had been expecting it to be tea, but it wasn't. I didn't know what it was. But it was terrible. Somehow too plain, too salty, and too bitter all at once. I gagged. "That settles it!" said the Doctor. "Too many cooks really do spoil the broth. Tricia, tell the chefs they can all go home now." "So that's what you were doing!" I said.