Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ I. All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results. Our form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms. Our form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root! All psychotherapy books bring up th...
Nov 24, 2019•23 min•Ep. 252
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/ [Followup to: Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science ] I. In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water, and a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is taught to every schoolchild as an important chemical fact. You approach their chemists and protest: why in...
Nov 20, 2019•7 min•Ep. 251
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on? First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genet...
Nov 17, 2019•18 min•Ep. 250
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ I. LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders. Lovaza is fish oil. “Come on,” you say, “sur...
Nov 16, 2019•16 min•Ep. 249
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/ Ramelteon isn’t a bad drug. It’s just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system. All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between “idiotically dangerous” and “laughably ineffective”, and Ramelteon manages better than most. It outperforms placebo , it’s not addictive, it won’t sap your ability to sleep without it, and it doesn’t screw up your brain so badly that its unofficial...
Nov 16, 2019•10 min•Ep. 248
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/ I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about it. But this took decades of conceptual work by people like van der Kolk, crystallizing some ideas and h...
Nov 15, 2019•26 min•Ep. 247
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ Aeon: Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoron And It is Dangerous : There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous. It’s not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 Jun...
Nov 10, 2019•26 min•Ep. 246
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. “Not interested,” I said, preparing to slam the door in his face. “Please,” said the acolyte. Before I could say no he’d jammed a wad of $100 bills into my hand. “If this will buy a few moments of your time.” It did, if only because I stood too flabbergasted to move. Surely they didn’t have enough money to do this for everybody. “There is no everybody...
Nov 06, 2019•31 min•Ep. 245
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ I. About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of Dr. Zamboni posited the theory that multiple sclerosis was caused by blockages in venous return from the brain causing various complicated downstream effects which eventually led to the immune system attacking myelinated cells. The guy was a good surgeon, nothing about the theory contradicted basic laws of biology, and no one else had any better ideas...
Nov 02, 2019•14 min•Ep. 244
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ Thucydides predicted that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations. This is how I feel about New Atheism. If I were to describe the power of New Atheism over online discourse to a teenager, they would never believe m...
Nov 01, 2019•44 min•Ep. 243
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/ NYT: Economic Incentives Don’t Always Do What We Want Them To (h/t MR). For the first time in history, the title actually understates the article, which argues that incentives can be surprisingly useless: Economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they...
Nov 01, 2019•15 min•Ep. 242
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/ ( original post ) Alex M writes: I think one of the main problems with the current state of rationalism (and many other fake “sciences” such as economics or sociology) is fuzzy thinking and lack of falsifiable empirical testing. So somebody claims to be “enlightened.” Does a smart person take that at face value? Of course not. Once you just start believing random shit, you’re no better than a superstitious primitiv...
Oct 28, 2019•22 min•Ep. 241
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/23/indian-economic-reform-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ From a recent Charter Cities Institute report: From India’s independence from the British Raj in 1947 to the early 1990s, the country’s economic policy was largely socialist. In the 1980s some early steps were taken to open the Indian economy to increased trade, reduce controls over industry, and set a more realistic exchange rate. In 1991, more widespread economic reforms were introduced. These...
Oct 25, 2019•18 min•Ep. 240
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/ I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it’s worth going over in detail. The full title is Clusters Of Individual Experiences Form A Continuum Of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences In Adults by Jeffery Martin, with “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) as a scientific-sounding culturally-neutral code word for “enlightenment”. Martin is a Reiki practitioner associated with the “Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness” , so...
Oct 25, 2019•21 min•Ep. 239
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/ Last year I reviewed The Mind Illuminated , a meditation guide by Buddhist teacher Upasaka Culadasa. Last month, Culudasa’s Buddhist community accused him of cheating on his wife with prostitutes for many years. Culadasa doesn’t seem to agree with the exact details of the accusations, but he also doesn’t seem to deny that there was something in that general category of thing. What can this teach us about e...
Oct 22, 2019•7 min•Ep. 238
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science . That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or no...
Oct 19, 2019•38 min•Ep. 237
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/ Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here. Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State . SLaS argued that much of what we ...
Oct 17, 2019•23 min•Ep. 236
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry: “There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on ...
Oct 05, 2019•20 min•Ep. 235
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s : why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehere focuses on elections, and the mystery is wider than that. Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 b...
Sep 22, 2019•15 min•Ep. 244
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted. One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them, bidding ...
Sep 21, 2019•17 min•Ep. 243
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/ I. “Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”, which looks exactly like addiction, except it means you just need to give the patient more drugs. Bizarrely gullible doctors went along with this and increased prescriptions for their addicted patients. For example, from a letter in the Wall Stree...
Sep 18, 2019•40 min•Ep. 242
Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate SSC and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine! Some suggestions for organizers: 1. Bring a sign that says SSC MEETUP so people can find you 2. Bring nametags and markers 3. Bring a signup sheet where people can write ...
Sep 15, 2019•4 min•Ep. 241
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/ [ Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain , HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects ] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely. Estimates of prevalence range from about 4% of users ( Baggott ) to “nobody, the condition does not exist” ( Krebs and Johansen ). T...
Sep 15, 2019•17 min•Ep. 240
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/ Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper] The predictive coding theory argues that the brain uses Bayesian calculations to make sense of the noisy and complex world around it. It relies heavily on priors (assumptions about what the world must be like given what it already knows) to construct models of the world, sampling only enough sense...
Sep 14, 2019•21 min•Ep. 239
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/09/partial-retraction-age-and-birth-order-effects/ On Less Wrong, Bucky tries to replicate my results on birth order and age gaps. Backing up: two years ago, I looked at SSC survey data and found that firstborn children were very overrepresented . That result was replicated a few times, both in the SSC sample and in other samples of high-opennness STEM types. Last year, I expanded those results to look at how age gaps affected birth order effects. Curious...
Sep 14, 2019•5 min•Ep. 238
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it. Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chu...
Sep 07, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 237
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/04/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-ages-of-discord/ Turchin has some great stories about unity vs. polarization over time. For example in the 1940s, unity became such a “problem” that concerned citizens demanded more partisanship: Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. Four years later, th...
Sep 05, 2019•12 min•Ep. 236
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ I. I recently reviewed Secular Cycles , which presents a demographic-structural theory of the growth and decline of pre-industrial civilizations. When land is plentiful, population grows and the economy prospers. When land reaches its carrying capacity and income declines to subsistence, the area is at risk of famines, diseases, and wars – which kill enough people that land becomes plentiful again. During good times, elites...
Sep 03, 2019•47 min•Ep. 235
Last autumn we organized meetups in 85 different cities (and one ship!) around the world. Some of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent spikes in membership, which sounds like a success, so let’s do it again. For most cities: If you’re willing to host a meetup for your city, then decide on a place, date, and time, and post it in the comments here, along with an email address where people can contact you. Then please watch the comments in case I need to ask you any questions. If yo...
Aug 30, 2019•7 min•Ep. 234
Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened? I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn’t everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don’t feel the need to take their case directly to the public. The past ten years have seen AI goal alignment reach that level of maturity t...
Aug 30, 2019•17 min•Ep. 233
