Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[content note: sexual harassment] I. Recent discussion of sexual harassment at work has focused on a few high-profile industries. But there has been relatively little credible research as to how rates really differ by occupation type. There are many surveys of harassment rates in specific industries, but they can't be credibly compared with one another. The percent of people who report sexual harassment varies wildly from survey to survey – thus studies finding that anywhere from 12 percent to 48 percent to 60 percent to 85 percent of women have been harassed at work. If a survey shows that 60% of female nurses get sexually harassed at work, does that mean nurses are victimized particularly often (because more than 12%) or are unusually safe (because less than 85%)? It doesn't matter, because another study says only 19% of nurses get harassed. Why do all these numbers differ so dramatically? The most important issue seems to be how you ask the question. "Have you ever been harassed?" gets numbers more like 12%; giving a long list of specific behaviors and asking "Have you ever experienced any of these?" gets numbers closer to 85%, depending on what the behaviors are. Surveys also differ on whether they ask all employees or just women, whether they include a time frame (eg "…in the past two years"), whether they specify that it had to be at work vs. work-related events, and whether they include witnessing someone else's harassment. Taking these surveys entirely seriously would lead to the conclusion that Uber has the lowest sexual harassment rate of any company or industry in the world; I choose not to take them seriously. This means we need investigations that use the same methodology across multiple fields. Whenever the media talks about this – see eg the Washington Post's The Industries With The Worst Sexual Harassment Problem – they're working off of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's records. But these are totally unsuitable for the task – they just report raw number of claims per industry. The industries that rank lowest in EEOC's data tend to be small industries with very few women – for example, taken seriously the WaPo's graph shows that mining has the least problem with sexual harassment of any industry in the world. Is this thanks to their uniquely progressive culture – or because there are practically no female miners? I'm going to say the second one. The takeaway that most real researchers take from the EEOC claims is that the lowest-paying and most mundane occupations – retail, restaurant work, hotel work, etc – have much higher sexual harassment rates than the prestigious occupations people generally talk about. Eyeballing the data, this looks basically true. But trying to get anything more fine-grained than that out of EEOC is basically hopeless. I only know of two surveys that have even attempted to compare different fields in a principled way, and neither really inspires confidence.

Medicine loves guidelines. But everywhere else, guidelines are still underappreciated. Consider a recommendation, like "Try Lexapro!" Even if Lexapro is a good medication, it might not be a good medication for your situation. And even if it's a good medication for your situation, it might fail for unpredictable reasons involving genetics and individual variability. So medicine uses guidelines – algorithms that eventually result in a recommendation. A typical guideline for treating depression might look like this (this is a very over-simplified version for an example only, NOT MEDICAL ADVICE): 1. Ask the patient if they have symptoms of bipolar disorder. If so, ignore everything else on here and move to the bipolar guideline. 2. If the depression seems more anxious, try Lexapro. Or if the depression seems more anergic, try Wellbutrin. 3. Wait one month. If it works perfectly, declare victory. If it works a little but not enough, increase the dose. If it doesn't work at all, stop it and move on to the next step. 4. Try Zoloft, Remeron, or Effexor. Repeat Step 3. 5. Cycle through steps 3 and 4 until you either find something that works, or you and your patient agree that you don't have enough time and patience to continue cycling through this tier of options and you want to try another tier with more risks in exchange for more potential benefits. 6. If the depression seems more melancholic, try Anafranil. Or if the depression seems more atypical, try Nardil. Or if your patient is on an earlier-tier medication that almost but not quite works, try augmenting with Abilify. Repeat Step 3. 7. Try electroconvulsive therapy. The end result might be the recommendation "try Lexapro!", but you know where to go if that doesn't work. A psychiatrist armed with this guideline can do much better work than one who just happens to know that Lexapro is the best antidepressant, even if Lexapro really is the best antidepressant. Whenever I'm hopelessly confused about what to do with a difficult patient, I find it really reassuring that I can go back to a guideline like this, put together by top psychiatrists working off the best evidence available. This makes it even more infuriating that there's nothing like this for other areas I care about.

Bizzolt writes: DC Public Schools HS teacher here (although I'm not returning next year, as is the case with many of my colleagues). As noted, one of the biggest factors in the graduation rates is the unexcused absences–if you look at the results of our external audit and investigation here, you see that for many schools, a significant number of our seniors "Passed Despite Excessive Absences in Regular Instruction Courses Required for Graduation"–over 40% of 2017 graduates at my high school, for example. So the attendance policy is being strictly enforced now, and you can see how from that alone, a ~30% drop in expected graduates is possible. Some more details about strictly enforcing the attendance policy though: 1: DCPS has what's called the '80 20′ rule: A student that is absent for at least 20% of their classes is considered absent for the whole day. 2: Most schools have 5 periods, so an absence in one class would be considered an absence for the whole day. 3: If you have 10 or more unexcused absences in a class, you automatically get an F for the term. 4: If you are over 15 minutes late for a class, that is considered an unexcused absence. 5: A majority of these absences are in first period. 6: A majority of students in my school and many others live in single parent households. 7: These students are typically responsible for making sure their younger siblings get to school, if they have any. 8: Elementary and middle schools in my neighborhood start at the exact same time as high school. 9: Their doors do not open until 5 to 10 minutes before the starting bell, presumably for safety reasons. 10: Refer to point 4. There's many other problems at DCPS to be sure, but this set of circumstances alone is causing the largest increase in failing grades and graduation ineligibility at my high school, and basically every other 90+% black school in the district. You could see how this accounts for quite a bit of the difference between white and black graduation rates as well. There's a reason why across the board, DCPS schools were not strictly enforcing this policy in previous years. It looks like most other school districts don't have this policy; it seems plausible that this is the main difference between DC and other poor school districts that nevertheless manage to pass most of their kids. Userfriendlyyy also focuses on the absences: Looks to me like the policy they changed was losing credit for bad attendance. This might be from a few things. Kids might need to help out with the family finances. The only part of the job market that is doing well right now is low end unskilled workers who are willing to get paid crap (no matter how much the financial press wants to pretend otherwise, I listened to an hour of local NPR and the Topic was 'call in and tell us how the booming job market is helping you out', 20 callers not one had anything good to say and my state has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country). If you know you don't have the grades for a scholarship, your family is broke and since we have effectively made going to college impossible for anyone but the offspring of the oligarchy, and you can find a minimum wage job easily; what exactly is the utility of that little piece of paper compared to the ability to put food on the table tonight?

[Some changes to the conclusions in this post; see edit at the end and entry 21 on Mistakes page] US News: DC Schools Brace For Catastrophic Drop In Graduation Rates. "Catastrophic" isn't hyperbole; the numbers are expected to drop from 73% (close to the national average of 83%) all the way down to 42%. There's no debate about why this is happening – it's because the previous graduation rate was basically fraudulent, inflated by pressure to show that recent "reforms" were working. Last year there was a big investigation, all the investigators agreed it was fraudulent, DC agreed to do a little less fraud this year, and this is the result. It's pretty damning, given how everybody was praising the reforms and holding them up as a national model and saying this proved that Tough But Fair Education Policy could make a difference: As far as scandals in the education policy world go, D.C. schools so profoundly miscalculating graduation rates at a time when the high-profile school district had been so self-laudatory about its achievements may be difficult to top […] Indeed, when Michelle Rhee took the reins of the flailing school system a decade ago, it galvanized the education reform movement, which had just begun blossoming around the country, and ushered in a host of controversial changes that included the shuttering of multiple schools, firing of hundreds of teachers and the institution of new teacher evaluation and compensation models. The changes not only dramatically altered the local political landscape in Washington but also shined a national spotlight on D.C. schools that prompted other urban school districts and education policy researchers to consider the nation's capital a bellwether for the entire education reform movement. Well, darn.

[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article.] Hey, let's review the literature on adult neurogenesis! This'll be really fun, promise. Gage's Neurogenesis In The Adult Brain, published in the Journal Of Neuroscience and cited 834 times, begins: A milestone is marked in our understanding of the brain with the recent acceptance, contrary to early dogma, that the adult nervous system can generate new neurons. One could wonder how this dogma originally came about, particularly because all organisms have some cells that continue to divide, adding to the size of the organism and repairing damage. All mammals have replicating cells in many organs and in some cases, notably the blood, skin, and gut, stem cells have been shown to exist throughout life, contributing to rapid cell replacement. Furthermore, insects, fish, and amphibia can replicate neural cells throughout life. An exception to this rule of self-repair and continued growth was thought to be the mammalian brain and spinal cord. In fact, because we knew that microglia, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes all normally divide in the adult and respond to injury by dividing, it was only neurons that were considered to be refractory to replication. Now we know that this long accepted limitation is not completely true

From sclmlw: While I don't agree with lots of Jordan Peterson, I think Scott fundamentally missed the boat in some of his criticisms because he systematically views things from a different perspective than Peterson, which was missed. From what I can tell, Peterson is intensely interested in the idea, "Everyone has the capacity to become a Nazi war criminal. What causes that phenomenon?" His answer, and the central driving idea of his philosophy, seems to be, "Anarchy/chaos is worse for society/humanity than horrific, unimaginable cruelty. So evolution pushed society to develop in a way that will always choose cruelty over chaos. Thus, if you were in Stalin's Russia, you'd run the gulags to stave off anarchy, and you'd kill hundreds of people if you had to. You may hate it, but it was required for humanity to soldier on, so it's what evolutionary forces produced." Peterson cares because he wants to understand how to steer societies away from the gulags and the killing fields.

Recently on Marginal Revolution: Are the Amish unhappy? The average levels of life satisfaction [among the Amish] was 4.4; just above the neutral point…the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995). Sounds like Amish people are quite unhappy. This came as a surprise to me, since I'd heard from Jonah Lehrer and Business Insider that the average Amish person is as happy as the average non-Amish billionaire, proving once and for all that community and old-fashioned values are more important than money: As an illustration of the striking disconnect between money and happiness, the average life satisfaction of Forbes magazine's 400 richest Americans was 5.8 on a 7-point scale. Yet the average life satisfaction of the Pennsylvania Amish is also 5.8, despite the fact that their average annual salary is several billion dollars lower.

There's a Jewish tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God during Passover, because God is closer to us and such speculations might succeed. And there's an atheist tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God on April Fools' Day, because believing in God is dumb, and at least then you can say you're only kidding. Today is both, so let's speculate. To do this properly, we need to understand five things: acausal trade, value handshakes, counterfactual mugging, simulation capture, and the Tegmarkian multiverse.

I got Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or the transgender thing, or the thing where the neo-Marxist transgender lobsters want to steal your precious bodily fluids. But, uh…I'm really embarrassed to say this. And I totally understand if you want to stop reading me after this, or revoke my book-reviewing license, or whatever. But guys, Jordan Peterson is actually good

This is in response to questions I get about how to interact (or not interact) with the inpatient mental health system and involuntary commitment. The table of contents is: 1. How can I get outpatient mental health care without much risk of being involuntarily committed to a hospital? 2: How can I get mental health care at a hospital ER without much risk of being involuntarily committed? 3. I would like to get voluntarily committed to a hospital. How can I do that? 4. I am seeking inpatient treatment. How can I make sure that everyone knows I am there voluntarily, and that I don't get shifted to involuntary status? 5. How can I decide which psychiatric hospital to go to? 6. I am in a psychiatric hospital. How can I make this experience as comfortable as possible? 7. I am in a psychiatric hospital and not happy about it and I want to get out as quickly as possible. What should I do? 8. I am in the psychiatric hospital and I think I am being mistreated. What can I do? 9. I think my friend/family member is in the psychiatric hospital, but nobody will tell me anything. 10. My friend/family member is in the psychiatric hospital and wants to get out as quickly as possible. How can I help them? 11. How will I pay for all of this? 12. I have a friend/family member who really needs psychiatric treatment, but refuses to get it. What can I do?

I sometimes advertise sci-hub.tw – the Kazakhstani pirate site that lets you get scientific papers for free. It's clearly illegal in the US. But is it unethical? I can think of two strong arguments that it might be: First, we have intellectual property rights to encourage the production of intellectual goods. If everyone downloaded Black Panther, then Marvel wouldn't get any money, the movie industry would collapse, and we would never get Black Panther 2, Black Panther Vs. Batman Vs. Superman, A Very Black Panther Christmas, Black Panther 3000: Help, We Have No Idea How To Create Original Movies Anymore, and all the other sequels and spinoffs we await with a resignation born of inevitability. This is sort of a pop-Kantian/rule-utilitarian argument: if everyone were to act as I did, our actions would be self-defeating. Or we can reframe it as a coordination problem: we're defecting against the institutions necessary to support movies existing at all, and free-loading off our moral betters.

A few months ago, I wrote Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression, which used the predictive coding model of brain function to speculate about mood disorders and emotions. Emotions might be a tendency toward unusually high (or low) precision of predictions: Imagine the world's most successful entrepreneur. Every company they found becomes a multibillion-dollar success. Every stock they pick shoots up and never stops. Heck, even their personal life is like this. Every vacation they take ends out picture-perfect and creates memories that last a lifetime; every date they go on leads to passionate soul-burning love that never ends badly.

I'm traveling and not in a position to record "SSC Journal Club: Friston on Computational Mood" so I thought I'd release this SSC classic to tide people over: [Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for "The Secret of Father Brown". This isn't especially original to me and I don't claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I'm not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.] I. In Chesterton's The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.

I've been trying to delve deeper into predictive processing theories of the brain, and I keep coming across Karl Friston's work on "free energy". At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I realized I wasn't alone. There's an entire not-understanding-Karl-Friston internet fandom, complete with its own parody Twitter account and Markov blanket memes. From the journal Neuropsychoanalysis (which based on its name I predict is a center of expertise in not understanding things): At Columbia's psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researhers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston's 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn't have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.

I. The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al's Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. It purports to be the last word in the "do antidepressants work?" question, and a first (or at least early) word in the under-asked "which antidepressants are best?" question. This study is very big, very sophisticated, and must have taken a very impressive amount of work. It meta-analyzes virtually every RCT of antidepressants ever done – 522 in all – then throws every statistical trick in the book at them to try to glob together into a coherent account of how antidepressants work. It includes Andrea Cipriani, one of the most famous research psychiatrists in the world – and John Ioannidis, one of the most famous statisticians. It's been covered in news sources around the world: my favorite headline is Newsweek's unsubtle Antidepressants Do Work And Many More People Should Take Them, but honorable mention to Reuters' Study Seeks To End Antidepressant Debate: The Drugs Do Work.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the post about technological unemployment. From Onyomi: Not saying I necessarily think this is what is going on, but one simple possible explanation for why technological unemployment could happen now when it never happened much in the past could be quite simply the greatly accelerated pace of change. For most of history, technological change was very, very slow. The past few hundred years we've moved increasingly to a place where each new generation has to learn to function in a world different from the one their parents grew up in. We could now be moving to a world where each generation has to learn to function in multiple worlds over the course of a lifetimes, which may stretch the limits of human adaptability.

[Taken from here.] I. Deep in the forest, thousands of miles from civilization, there is an isolated village. It has not seen contact with any other humans for a long time. It is, however, a pleasant and flourishing community, which strongly values freedom and entrepreneurship. There is, however, one tiny quirk. In this village, there is a ritual. Every year, a boy who reaches 18 is cannibalized. It brings the rains, or something. But despite its taste for cannibalism, this village wishes to live in accordance with libertarian principles. Thus, they will only cannibalize the boy if he consents. In order to encourage this to happen, they will put tremendous social pressure on the boy. All through his youth, they will tell him they believe the future of the village depends on his consenting. His parents tell him that he would bring great shame on the household if he refused, which is true. The choice nevertheless rests with the boy, and whatever he chooses will be respected. The parents and villagers attempt to persuade him, but never lie to him, and make clear that they would never force his choice. However: if the boy refuses to be cannibalized, the village has a backup plan. The boy will be blacklisted. No shopkeeper will sell him food, no hotel will give him a room, no hospital will treat him, no employer will hire him. After all, under libertarian principles, nobody can be told how to use their property. The boy's parents, ashamed of him, will turn him out of the house with no money. He may leave the village, but it is certain death, for thousands of miles of desolate wolf-infested wilderness stand between him and other humans and he has no food. (The wilderness is also privately-owned, and he cannot pay the admission fee.) He is shunned and despised, left to wander the streets in a futile search for shelter and sustenance. However, no force is exercised against him. He is never touched or arrested. He is treated as nonexistent, as the villagers await his demise. So the boy starves to death. The villagers then cannibalize his emaciated corpse, reasoning that they cannot be compelled to give him a dignified burial (plus he died on private property, collapsing in a flowerbed).

[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I'm writing it down to speed your going through the same process. If you have more direct access to economists and experts, feel free to ignore this] Technological unemployment is a hard topic because there are such good arguments on both sides. The argument against: we've had increasing technology for centuries now, people have been predicting that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it's never come true. Instead, one of two things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review. David Autor gives a vivid example:

Those yearly "predictions for next year" posts are starting to reach the limit of their usefulness. Not much changes from year to year, and most of what does change is hard to capture in objective probabilistic predictions. So in honor of this blog's five year anniversary, here are some predictions for the next five years. All predictions to be graded on 2/15/2023:

[Previously in series: Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog and More Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog. Content warning: profanity, rape, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet] Sometimes I look at what search terms lead people to SSC. Sometimes it's the things you would think – "slate star codex", "rationality", the names of medications I've written about. Other times it's a little weirder:

Last post I thanked some of the people who have contributed to this blog. But once again, it's time to honor some of the most important contributors: the many people who give valuable feedback on everything I write. Here's a short sample of some of…most interesting. I'm avoiding names and links to avoid pile-ons. Some slightly edited for readability. "A cowardly autistic cuckolded deviant Jew who uses his IQ to rationalize away wisdom" "He's part of the self-declared 'Rationalish Community'. Imagine the ridiculous level of self-regard implied by that. Picture cb2 with a graduate degree. Scott Alexander, if brevity is the soul of wit, you're a witless soulsucking...

Today is the fifth anniversary of Slate Star Codex. Overall I'm very happy with how this project is going so far, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's made things work behind the scenes. Trike Apps generously volunteered to host me free of charge. I give them the highest praise it is possible to give a hosting company – namely, that I completely forgot about their existence until right now because I've never had to worry about anything. Special thanks to Matt Fallshaw and Cat Truscott for their kindness and patience. Bakkot has done various things behind the scenes to make the blog more useable – fixing WordPress bugs, helping with moderation tasks, and adding cool new features like the green highlights around new comments. A big part of the success of the comments section is thanks to his innovations; the remaining horribleness is mostly my fault. Rory O and Alice M have also helped with this.

Rereading The Hungry Brain, I notice my review missed one of my favorite parts: the description of the motivational system. It starts with studies of lampreys, horrible little primitive parasitic fish: How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives "bids" from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey's brain is whispering "mate" to the striatum, while another piece is shouting "flee the predator" and so on.

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2018. Some changes this year: I've eliminated a bunch of predictions about things that are very unlikely where I just plug in the same number each year, like "99% chance of no coup in the US". I've tried to have almost everything this year be new and genuinely uncertain. I've also included some very personal predictions about friends and gossip that I'm keeping secret for now – I have them written down somewhere else and they're for my own interest only.

[All things that have been discussed here before, but some people wanted it all in a convenient place] The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche's Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they're wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they're super-important for the past fifty years.

H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon's The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth. "Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?" The article claims almost every modern epic – superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – shares a similar plot. There are some good guys. There are some bad guys. They fight. The good guys win. The end. The good guys are usually scrappy amateurs; the bad guys usually well-organized professionals with typical fascist precision. The good guys usually demonstrate a respect for human life and the bonds of friendship; the bad guys betray their citizens and their underlings with equal abandon. They gain their good guy or bad guy status by either following the universal law, or breaking it.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the posts about conflict and mistake theory. aciddc writes: I'm a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I'm a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I've thought about this "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" dichotomy a lot, though I've been thinking of it as what distinguishes "leftists" from "liberals."

There were a lot of good comments on yesterday's conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn't public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn't Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation for why capitalists have to do what they do and how the incentive landscape needs to change? I want to explore these questions further – but first, some data from the SSC survey showing that the distinction does capture something real and important. No questions really matched the conflict/mistake theory distinction, but one of the closest was POLITICAL DISAGREEMENT I: "Which of these plays a bigger role in explaining why some people are wrong about politics – intellectual failure, or moral failure?" This isn't quite the way I would frame it now – but it'll do for our purposes.

Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as "You'll never hear the terms 'principal-agent problem,' 'rent-seeking,' or 'aligning incentives' from socialists. That's because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance." There have been some really weird and poorly-informed socialist critiques of public choice theory lately, and this article generalizes from those to a claim that Marxists just don't like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government. This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.

They say money can't buy love. But that was the bad old days of fiat money. Now there are dozens of love-based cryptocurrencies – LoveCoin, CupidCoin, Erosium, Nubilo – with market caps in the mid nine-figures. The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee. You think I'm joking, but can you be sure? How weird is "too weird to be true" these days, and how confident are you in your answer? Case in point: Luna, which bills itself as blockchain-optimized dating. They caught my attention by hiring Aella, previously featured on this blog for her adventures taking LSD megadoses weekly for a year. They kept it with their cutesy story about how the name "Luna" comes from founder Andre Ornish's first word – adorable, until you consider that any baby whose first word is in Latin is definitely possessed.

On December's survey, I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to 5 (very happy): The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids! This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.

By Ted Chiang, on Buzzfeed: The Real Danger To Civilization Isn't AI: It's Runaway Capitalism. Chiang's science fiction is great and I highly recommend it. This article, not so much. The gist seems to be: hypothetical superintelligent AIs sound a lot like modern capitalism. Both optimize relentlessly for their chosen goal (paperclips, money), while ignoring the whole complexity of human value.

[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!] I. Allan Ginsberg's famous poem, Moloch: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Alex Tabarrok beat me to the essay on Oregon's self-service gas laws that I wanted to write. Oregon is one of two US states that bans self-service gas stations. Recently, they passed a law relaxing this restriction – self-service is permissable in some rural counties during odd hours of the night. Outraged Oregonians took to social media to protest that self-service was unsafe, that it would destroy jobs, that breathing in gas fumes would kill people, that gas pumping had to be performed by properly credentialed experts – seemingly unaware that most of the rest of the country and the world does it without a second thought.

"Birth order" refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc. Then people got around to actually studying it and couldn't find any of that. Wikipedia's birth order article says: Claims that birth order affects human psychology are prevalent in family literature, but studies find such effects to be vanishingly small….the largest multi-study research suggests zero or near-zero effects. Birth-order theory has the characteristics of a zombie theory, as despite disconfirmation, it continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture.

I started reading Foucault's Madness And Civilization with the expectation that it would be tedious and incomprehensible. You know, the stereotype that postmodernism / post-structuralism / Continentalism / etc. involves a lot of negation of the negation of the inversion of the Other within the Absolute within [and so on for 200 pages]. There was a little of that. But there was also a fascinating look at the history of mental illness, an entertainingly bombastic writing style, and a few ideas that I might have actually half-understood.

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, and 2016. And here are the predictions I made for 2017. Strikethrough'd are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can't decide if they're true or not.

I didn't realize how much of a psychiatrist's time was spent gatekeeping Adderall. The human brain wasn't built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can't sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?

The Silmarillion describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maedhros stole another, but regretted his deed and jumped into a fiery chasm. And Maglor took the last one, but threw it into the sea in despair. Well, Venus is still around. But what happened to the latter two? Surely over all the intervening millennia, with so many people wanting a Silmaril, they haven't just hung around in the earth and ocean? After some research, I've developed a couple of promising leads for the location of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age.

[This post is about the 2018 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please take the survey if you haven't already. Please don't read on until you've taken it, since this could bias your results.] I'm preregistering my hypotheses for the survey this year. So far I've glanced at Google's bar graphs for each individual question but haven't started exploring relationships yet, so I'm not cheating too badly. I'll still look for things I haven't preregistered, but I'll admit they're preliminary results only. This is the stuff I've been thinking about beforehand and will be taking more seriously:

If you're reading this and have previously read at least one Slate Star Codex post, please take the 2018 SSC Survey. This year's survey is in three sections. If you're strapped for time, just take Section 1. If you have a little more time, take both Sections 1 and 2. If you have a lot of time, take all three sections. Each section will take about ten minutes. There's some more information on the survey itself.

I wanted NSI-189 to be real so badly. Pharma companies used to love antidepressants. Millions of people are depressed. Millions of people who aren't depressed think they are. Sell them all a pill per day for their entire lifetime, and you're looking at a lot of money. So they poured money into antidepressant research, culminating in 80s and 90s with the discovery of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac. Since then, research has moved into exciting new areas, like "more SSRIs", "even more SSRIs", "drugs that claim to be SNRIs but on closer inspection are mostly just SSRIs", and "drugs that claim to be complicated serotonin modulators but realistically just work as SSRIs". Some companies still go through the pantomime of inventing new supposedly-not-SSRI drugs, and some psychiatrists still go through the pantomime of pretending to be excited about them, but nobody's heart is really in it anymore.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last two posts, especially the many people who disagreed with me. Two things I will admit I got mostly wrong: 1. I was wrong to say there was "no case" for the tax bill. Aside from all of the minor provisions which can be good or bad, the case for slashing corporate rates is that they're more distortionary and less efficient than other forms of taxation. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me. 2. Several people brought up problems with the article saying CEOs say they will just give the money back to shareholders, most notably that giving money back to shareholders may stimulate the economy in other ways.

There was some good pushback on yesterday's article on taxes. But sorry, I'm still right. Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let's say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is still not the right way to do tax cuts. Budget director Mick Mulvaney claims that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income tax; the Wall Street Journal's numbers are a little lower, at 84%. Total income taxes are $1.8 trillion, so the poorest 80%'s share comes out to somewhere between 90 and 280 billion. This is around the same order of magnitude as the $100 billion in tax cuts in the current GOP bill. So it looks like one alternative to this bill, no more or less costly, would be to halve income taxes for the bottom 80% of the population, maybe anyone making less than $100,000.

Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it's not quite enough money to solve world hunger, it's enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs. I'm writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders' college plan was bad. And compared to any reasonable use of the money, I still think that's true.

About 30% of the victims of sexual harassment are men. About 20% of the perpetrators of sexual harassment are women. Don't believe me? In a Quinnipiac poll, 60% of women and 20% of men said they'd been sexually harassed. Opinium, which sounds like a weird drug, reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men. YouGov poll in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely depending on how the pollsters frame the question, but the ratio is pretty consistent.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It's a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It's an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It's a self-conscious defense of the author's own arrogance. But most of all, it's a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so much that is evil? The market economy is very good at what it does, which is something like "exploit money-making opportunities" or "pick low-hanging fruit in the domain of money-making". If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk, today is your lucky day. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in Grand Central Station, and you remember having seen the same bill a week ago, something is wrong. Thousands of people cross Grand Central every week – there's no way a thousand people would all pass up a free $20. Maybe it's some kind of weird trick. Maybe you're dreaming. But there's no way that such a low-hanging piece of money-making fruit would go unpicked for that long.

Earlier this year, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote an article against school vouchers. He argued that private schools would be so focused on profit that they would sacrifice quality, and that competition wouldn't be enough to keep them in line. I counterargued that yes it would, and cited among other things the success of food stamps (ie "food vouchers"). These give poor people access to the same dazzling variety of food choices as everyone else, usually at reasonable prices and low profit margins. If school vouchers worked as well as food vouchers, they would succeed in their mission of improving choice without sacrificing quality. Now Robinson doubles down, sticking to his anti-voucher position and also proposing A Public Option For Food.

Question I'd never thought to ask before: are we sure it's a good idea to let people know what the laws are? The Chinese legal system originated somewhat over 2000 years ago in the conflict between two views of law, legalist and Confucianist. The legalists, who believed in using the rational self-interest of those subject to law to make them behave in the way desired by those making the law, advocated harsh penalties to drive the equilibrium crime rate to near zero. They supported the ideas of a strong central government, equal treatment under law, and written law available to all. Confucianists saw the issues in terms of morality rather than law and the objective not to modify by behavior by punishing and rewarding but by teaching virtue. They feared that a written law code generally available would lead to rules lawyering and supported unequal treatement based on the unequal status of those to whom the law applied…Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available.

Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers. "Anarcho-capitalism" evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe we've always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn't a fact of nature, but a historical oddity as contingent as collectivized farming or nationalized railroads. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, by anarcho-capitalist/legal scholar/medieval history buff David Friedman, successfully combines the author's three special interests into a whirlwind tour of exotic law.