Aquinas famously said : beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In the best case scenario the average study will find the true result – that it’s weakly effective. But there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by...
Dec 29, 2018•21 min•Ep. 142
Ribbonfarm likes to talk about refactoring , a conceptual change in how you see the world. I’m not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means things like memetics – where you go from the usual model of people deciding what ideas they want, to a weird and inside-out (but not objectively wrong) model of ideas competing to colonize people. Here is a refactoring I think about a lot: imagine a world where people considered culture the fourth branch of government. Imagine that civics textbook ...
Dec 20, 2018•7 min•Ep. 141
A recent discussion: somebody asked why people in Silicon Valley thought that only high-tech solutions to climate change (like carbon capture or geoengineering) mattered, and why they dismissed more typical solutions like international cooperation and political activism. Another person cited statements from the relevant Silicon Valley people, who mostly say that they think political solutions and environmental activism were central to the fight against climate change, but that we should look int...
Dec 20, 2018•7 min•Ep. 140
Donald Trump has been called a setback for many things. America. The global community. The environment. Civil service. Civil society. Civility. Civilization. The list goes on. One might think he has at least been useful to his own cause. That he could at least claim to have benefited the ideas of populism, nationalism, immigration control, and protectionism. That if anything could avoid being devastated by Trump, it would be Trumpism. But here are some polls from the past few years. They’re all ...
Dec 14, 2018•15 min•Ep. 139
One interesting thing I took from Evolutionary Psychopathology was a better understanding of the diametrical theory of the social brain. There’s been a lot of discussion over whether schizophrenia is somehow the “opposite” of autism. Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have som...
Dec 12, 2018•13 min•Ep. 138
[Content note: eating disorders] Anorexia has a cultural component. I’m usually reluctant to assume anything is cultural – every mediocre social scientist’s first instinct is always to come up with a cultural explanation which is simple, seductive, flattering to all our existing prejudices, and wrong. But after seeing enough ballerinas and cheerleaders who became anorexic after pressure to lose weight for the big competition, even I have to throw up my hands and admit anorexia has a cultural com...
Dec 07, 2018•11 min•Ep. 137
I. Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe if you added them together, they might make one healthy scientific field? Enter Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach by psychology professor Marco del Giudice. It starts by presenting the theory of “life history strategies”. Then it uses the theory – along with a toolbox of evolutionary ...
Dec 05, 2018•42 min•Ep. 136
I. The Mind Illuminated is a guide to Buddhist meditation by Culadasa, aka John Yates, a Buddhist meditation teacher who is also a neuroscience PhD. At this point I would be more impressed to meet a Buddhist meditation teacher who wasn’t a neuroscience PhD. If I ever teach Buddhist meditation, this is going to be my hook. “Come learn advanced meditation techniques with Scott Alexander, whose lack of a neuroscience PhD gives him a unique perspective that combines ancient wisdom with a lack of mod...
Nov 30, 2018•39 min•Ep. 135
[This post was up a few weeks ago before getting taken down for complicated reasons. They have been sorted out and I’m trying again.] Is scientific progress slowing down? I recently got a chance to attend a conference on this topic, centered around a paper by Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb (2018) . BJRW identify areas where technological progress is easy to measure – for example, the number of transistors on a chip. They measure the rate of progress over the past century or so, and the number o...
Nov 27, 2018•23 min•Ep. 134
[Content warning: scrupulosity] I. “There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism”. I hear this from a bunch of people. Sometimes it is taken to its conclusion; no currently living person is morally acceptable. People who aren’t activists reorienting their entire lives around acknowledging and combating the evils of the world aren’t even on the scale. And people who are such activists are (in the words of one of my friends who is close to that community) “only making comfortable sacrific...
Nov 17, 2018•21 min•Ep. 133
I. A lot of people pushed back against my post on preschool , so it looks like we need to discuss this in more depth. A quick refresher: good randomized controlled trials have shown that preschools do not improve test scores in a lasting way. Sometimes test scores go up a little bit, but these effects disappear after a year or two of regular schooling. However, early RCTs of intensive “wrap-around” preschools like the Perry Preschool Program and the Abecedarians found that graduates of those pro...
Nov 15, 2018•38 min•Ep. 132
In 2016, I wrote Ketamine Research In A New Light , which discussed the emerging consensus that, contra existing theory, ketamine’s rapid-acting antidepressant effects had nothing to do with NMDA at all. I discussed some experiments which suggested they might actually be due to a related receptor, AMPA. The latest development is Attenuation of Antidepressant Effects of Ketamine by Opioid Receptor Antagonism , which finds that the opioid-blocker naltrexone prevents ketamine’s antidepressant effec...
Nov 09, 2018•6 min•Ep. 131
Four years ago I examined the claim that SSRIs are little better than placebo. Since then, some of my thinking on this question has changed. First , we got Cipriani et al’s meta-analysis of anti-depressants. It avoids some of the pitfalls of Kirsch and comes to about the same conclusion. This knocks down a few of the lines of argument in my part 4 about how the effect size might look more like 0.5 than 0.3. The effect size is probably about 0.3. Second , I’ve seen enough to realize that the anom...
Nov 09, 2018•12 min•Ep. 130
[Originally to be titled “Marijuana: I Was Wrong”, but looking back I was suitably careful about everything, and my reward is not having to say that.] Five years ago, I reviewed the potential costs and benefits of marijuana legalization and concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence for a firm conclusion. I found that using some made-up math , the effects looked slightly positive, but this was very sensitive to small changes in how made-up the math was. The only really interesting conclusion wa...
Nov 08, 2018•8 min•Ep. 129
Kelsey Piper has written an article for Vox: Early Childhood Education Yields Big Benefits – Just Not The Ones You Think . I had previously followed various studies that showed that preschool does not increase academic skill, academic achievement, or IQ, and concluded that it was useless. In fact, this had become a rallying point of movement for evidence-based social interventions; the continuing popular support for preschool proved that people were morons who didn’t care about science. I don’t ...
Nov 07, 2018•9 min•Ep. 128
These are my preliminary choices for California elected positions and ballot initiatives. Some of them are based on Ozy’s recommendations and the Berkeley EA and rationalist community’s recommendations . I agree with the latter’s note that because California ballot propositions are weird superlaws that permanently overrule the legislature unless repealed by voters, in general we should be very cautious about them (though some of them were recommended by the legislature itself, since for complica...
Nov 05, 2018•26 min•Ep. 127
[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.] Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – see for example his Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics or Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious . I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Existing sites on how to use Google Trends for research don’t capture some of the things I learned, so I ...
Nov 02, 2018•14 min•Ep. 126
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a small online ad startup. You know the ads on Facebook and Twitter? We tell companies how to get them the most clicks. This startup – I won’t tell you the name – was going to add deep learning, because investors will throw money at anything that uses the words “deep learning”. We train a network to predic...
Nov 01, 2018•29 min•Ep. 125
I’ve gotten a chance to discuss The Whole City Is Center with a few people now. They remain skeptical of the idea that anyone could “deserve” to have bad things happen to them, based on their personality traits or misdeeds. These people tend to imagine the pro-desert faction as going around, actively hoping that lazy people (or criminals, or whoever) suffer. I don’t know if this passes an Intellectual Turing Test. When I think of people deserving bad things, I think of them having nominated them...
Oct 26, 2018•11 min•Ep. 124
[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.] There’s been recent interest in “smart drugs” said to enhance learning and memory. For example, from the Washington Post : When aficionados talk about nootropics, they usually refer to substances that have supposedly few side effects and low toxicity. Most often they mean piracetam, which Giurgea first synthesized in 1964 and which is approved for therapeutic use in dozen...
Oct 24, 2018•18 min•Ep. 123
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up eventually; please accept this post instead for now.] In Jewish legend, the Chamber of Guf is a pit where all the proto-souls hang out whispering and murmuring. Whenever a child is born, an angel reaches into the chamber, scoops up a soul, and brings it into the world. In the syncretist mindset where every leg...
Oct 16, 2018•11 min•Ep. 122
The best thing about personalized medicine is that it’s obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But outside a few special cases like cancer, we don’t know how to predict which treatment will work for which person. Some psychiatric researchers claim they can do this at a high level; I think they’re wrong . For most treatments and most conditions, there’s no way to figure out whether a given sometimes-e...
Oct 13, 2018•7 min•Ep. 121
There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty. I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 res...
Oct 09, 2018•11 min•Ep. 120
Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this , and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration. 126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open: People generally reported slight but positive changes: When asked to rate the magnitude of improvement to well-being on ...
Oct 06, 2018•6 min•Ep. 119
[Content note: attempt to consider real people’s real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas] I. Imagine the state of nature, except for some reason there are cities. Some people in these cities play the drums all night and keep everyone else awake. The sleep-deprived people get together and agree this is unacceptable. They embark on a long journey to the wilderness where they found their own community of Nodrumia. They form a company, the Nodrumia Corporation, which own...
Oct 05, 2018•19 min•Ep. 118
Quixote writes: It’s odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias. But just a few comments down, Lasagna says: I despise (I’m choosing that word carefully) [New York City]. I still commute there every day, and I can’t stand it – the broken infrastructure, the horrible smells, the $14 for a yogurt and coffee in the morning, the massive crowds of unpleasant people (how could we NOT be? We’re walking through an open sewer). There’s a litan...
Oct 04, 2018•23 min•Ep. 117
[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I’m not sure I honestly support. This focuses on San Francisco to make it easier, but other cities exist too. Thanks to Nintil for some of the bright-line argument in part four. Conflict of interest notice: I live in a lower-density part of Oakland] Everyone I know is a YIMBY – ie “Yes In My Back Yard” – ie somebody who wants citie...
Oct 03, 2018•35 min•Ep. 116
Grand Prize ($1000): Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? Editor’s Choice ($500): Should Transgender Children Transition? Honorable Mentions ($250): Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory? , Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible? I’m sorry for jerking the number and value of the prizes around so many times, but I wanted to balance my preferences, the contestants’ preferences, and readers’ preferences – and this was the best way I could think of to do it. Nobody h...
Sep 29, 2018•47 min•Ep. 115
A neglected gem from Less Wrong: Why The Tails Come Apart , by commenter Thrasymachus. It explains why even when two variables are strongly correlated, the most extreme value of one will rarely be the most extreme value of the other. Take these graphs of grip strength vs. arm strength and reading score vs. writing score: In a pinch, the second graph can also serve as a rough map of Afghanistan Grip strength is strongly correlated with arm strength. But the person with the strongest arm doesn’t h...
Sep 29, 2018•19 min•Ep. 114
A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a person is just starting to develop schizophrenia and is acting a little bit strange while still having some insight into their condition. There’s a big push to treat schizophrenia prodrome as a critical period for intervention. Multiple studies have suggested that even though schizophrenia itself is a...
Sep 23, 2018•20 min•Ep. 113
