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. Tr...
Mar 09, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 52
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 Columb...
Mar 05, 2018•33 min•Ep. 51
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 a...
Feb 27, 2018•20 min•Ep. 50
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 ...
Feb 23, 2018•28 min•Ep. 49
[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 li...
Feb 22, 2018•36 min•Ep. 48
[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 ...
Feb 20, 2018•55 min•Ep. 47
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:
Feb 16, 2018•29 min•Ep. 46
[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:...
Feb 15, 2018•11 min•Ep. 45
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’. Im...
Feb 14, 2018•17 min•Ep. 44
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 ...
Feb 14, 2018•9 min•Ep. 43
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 whi...
Feb 08, 2018•15 min•Ep. 42
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 ...
Feb 06, 2018•13 min•Ep. 41
[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 al...
Feb 01, 2018•9 min•Ep. 40
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...
Jan 31, 2018•17 min•Ep. 39
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.”...
Jan 30, 2018•36 min•Ep. 38
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 somet...
Jan 26, 2018•11 min•Ep. 37
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 t...
Jan 25, 2018•21 min
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 ca...
Jan 18, 2018•17 min•Ep. 35
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.
Jan 17, 2018•8 min•Ep. 34
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.
Jan 16, 2018•13 min•Ep. 33
[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?
Jan 13, 2018•1 hr 47 min
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 prop...
Jan 12, 2018•10 min•Ep. 32
“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 ...
Jan 08, 2018•14 min•Ep. 31
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 tha...
Jan 05, 2018•45 min•Ep. 30
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....
Jan 03, 2018•20 min
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 be...
Dec 29, 2017•53 min•Ep. 27
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? ...
Dec 27, 2017•14 min•Ep. 26
[ 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 ...
Dec 26, 2017•13 min•Ep. 25
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.
Dec 22, 2017•2 min
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 SSR...
Dec 08, 2017•16 min
