[Original review is here . Don’t worry, people who had interesting comments on the review – I’ll try to get a comments highlights thread up eventually.] For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents. Like Malthus, he had virtually no genuine statistics at his disposal. He nevertheless had intimate knowledge of the capitalism of his time. Born into a family of Jewish financiers with ...
Jun 29, 2018•43 min•Ep. 82
[Epistemic status: I am not an economist. Many people who are economists have reviewed this book already. I review it only because if I had to slog through reading this thing I at least want to get a blog post out of it. If anything in my review contradicts that of real economists, trust them instead of me.] I. Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century isn’t just a book on inequality. It’s a book about quantitative macroeconomic history. This is much more interesting than it sounds. P...
Jun 27, 2018•42 min•Ep. 81
Sometimes I imagine quitting my job and declaring war on cost disease in medicine. I would set up a practice with a name like Cheap-O Psychiatry. The corny name would be important. It would be a statement of values. It would weed out the people who would say things like “How dare you try to put a dollar value on the health of a human being!” Those people are how we got into this mess, and they would be welcome to keep dealing with the unaffordable health system they helped create. Cheap-O Psychi...
Jun 23, 2018•8 min•Ep. 80
Last year, Bryan Caplan wrote about what he called The Unbearable Arbitrariness Of Deploring : Let’s start with the latest scandal. People all over the country – indeed, the world – have recently discovered that many celebrities are habitual sexual harassers. Each new expose leads to public outrage and professional ostracism. Why does this confuse me? Because many celebrities do many comparably bad things other than sexual harassment, and virtually no one cares. Suppose, for example, that a majo...
Jun 23, 2018•10 min•Ep. 79
[Few people realize that the 1997 cult hit GATTACA was actually just the first film in a three-movie trilogy. The final two movies, directed by the legendary Moira LeQuivalence, were flops which only stayed in theaters a few weeks and have since become almost impossible to find. In the interest of making them available to the general public, I’ve written summaries of some key scenes below. Thanks to user Begferdeth from the subreddit for the idea.] GATTACA II: EPI-GATTACA “Congratulations, Vince...
Jun 21, 2018•23 min•Ep. 78
I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again. This is a real disease – hallucinogen persisting perception disorder . Most descriptions of the condition emphasize that it’s just some the visual effects and doesn’t involve distorted reality perception. I’m not sure I believe this – my patient has some weird thoughts ...
Jun 08, 2018•16 min•Ep. 77
[Content warning: suicide. Thanks to someone on Twitter I forget for alerting me to this question] Among US states, there’s a clear relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, but not between gun ownership rates and homicide rates: You might conclude guns increase suicides but not homicides. Then you might predict that the gun-loving US would be an international outlier in suicides but not homicides. In fact, it’s the opposite: Why should this be? We’ve already discussed why US h...
Jun 03, 2018•10 min•Ep. 76
These are some of the best comments from Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia . I’m sorry I still haven’t gotten a chance to read everything that people have written about it (in particular I need to look more into Scott Sumner’s take ). Sorry to anyone with good comments I left out. Aevylmar corrects my claim that Milton Friedman supported a basic income: Technically speaking, what Milton Friedman advocated was a negative income tax, which (he thought, and I think) would be mu...
May 30, 2018•55 min•Ep. 75
Dr. Matthew Dumont treated a 44 year old woman with depression, body dysmorphia, and psychosis. She failed to respond to most of the ordinary treatments, failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy, and seemed generally untreatable until she mentioned offhandedly that she spent evenings cleaning up after her husband’s half-baked attempts to scrape lead paint off the walls. Blood tests revealed elevated lead levels, the doctor convinced her to be more careful about lead exposure, and even thou...
May 26, 2018•30 min•Ep. 74
The New York Times recently reported on various anti-PC thinkers as “the intellectual dark web” , sparking various annoying discussion. The first talking point – that the term is silly – is surely true. So is the second point – that it awkwardly combines careful and important thinkers like Eric Weinstein with awful demagogues like Ben Shapiro. So is the third – that people have been complaining about political correctness for decades, so anything that portrays this as a sudden revolt is ahistori...
May 25, 2018•45 min•Ep. 73
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee , where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan. I’ve pushed for a basic income guarantee before, and basic job guarantees sure sound similar. Some thinkers have even compared the two plans, pointing out various advantages of basic jobs: it feels “fairer” to make people wor...
May 19, 2018•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 72
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better , ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive. Graham’s hierarchy is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn’t really a hierarchy of disagreements . It’s a hierarchy of types of response, within a disagreement. Sometimes things are refutations of other people’s points, but the points should n...
May 10, 2018•43 min•Ep. 71
I. A spectre is haunting Europe. Several spectres, actually. One of them is the spectre of communism. The others are literal ghosts. They live in abandoned mansions. Sometimes they wail eerily or make floorboards creak. If you arrange things just right, you might be able to capture them on film. Or at least this must have been the position of the founders of the Fabian Society, Britain’s most influential socialist organization. In 1883, ghost hunters Frank Podmore and Edward Pease spent the nigh...
May 03, 2018•53 min•Ep. 70
Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the adversarial collaborations contest . There was a lot of good discussion in the last thread, with lots of people offering projects, but I’m not sure if people actually got in contact with each other and finalized their agreements. So, if you proposed a collaboration in the last thread, please go back, take a look, and see if someone you might want to work with responded to your proposal. I’m going to post two comments in the comment section of this...
May 01, 2018•3 min•Ep. 69
An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It’s typically done for scientific papers , but I’m excited about the possibility of people applying the conce...
Apr 29, 2018•8 min•Ep. 68
Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who have trouble affording their co-pays. This is a collection of tricks I’ve learned (mostly from them) to help deal with these situations. They are US-based and may not apply to other countries. Within the US, they are a combination of legal and probably-legal; I’ve tried to mark which is which but I am...
Apr 27, 2018•16 min•Ep. 67
That story about the blockchain-based dating site gets better: its designer is an enlightened being. I got this from Vinay Gupta’s wiki , which describes some of his thoughts and experiences. Since reading Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha , I’ve been looking at a bunch of this stuff, and it’s interesting how it does (or doesn’t) converge. For example, from the MCTB review: If you really, really examine your phenomenological experience, you realize all sorts of surprising things…one ear...
Apr 21, 2018•20 min•Ep. 66
[Content warning: harassment. This discusses the comments to SSC Survey Results: Sexual Harassment Levels By Field ] brmic writes : Thank you for posting this and the data file. FWIW, I tried to reproduce the results and couldn’t reproduce the correlations between female victimization, male victimization and male perpetration. fem vic vs. male vic is 0.65, same as yours. fem vic vs. male perp is 0.01 for me, and male vic vs. male perp is 0.21 for me. Everything else more or less checks out. As a...
Apr 20, 2018•15 min•Ep. 65
[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 4...
Apr 19, 2018•26 min•Ep. 64
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 mig...
Apr 14, 2018•11 min•Ep. 63
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, fo...
Apr 13, 2018•17 min•Ep. 62
[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 the...
Apr 12, 2018•13 min•Ep. 61
[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 abo...
Apr 06, 2018•28 min•Ep. 60
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/...
Apr 05, 2018•42 min•Ep. 59
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 ...
Apr 04, 2018•13 min•Ep. 58
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, counterfactu...
Apr 02, 2018•20 min•Ep. 57
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 i...
Mar 28, 2018•44 min•Ep. 56
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 trea...
Mar 24, 2018•53 min
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 ...
Mar 21, 2018•12 min•Ep. 54
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 ou...
Mar 12, 2018•28 min
