I. Writing a review of The Black Swan is a nerve-wracking experience. First, because it forces me to reveal I am about ten years behind the times in my reading habits. But second, because its author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is infamous for angry Twitter rants against people who misunderstand his work. Much better men than I have read and reviewed Black Swan , messed it up, and ended up the victim of Taleb’s acerbic tongue. One might ask: what’s the worst that could happen? A famous intellectual yel...
Sep 21, 2018•39 min•Ep. 112
The collective intellect is change-blind. Knowledge gained seems so natural that we forget what it was like not to have it. Piaget says children gain long-term memory at age 4 and don’t learn abstract thought until ten; do you remember what it was like not to have abstract thought? We underestimate our intellectual progress because every every sliver of knowledge acquired gets backpropagated unboundedly into the past. For decades, people talked about “the gene for height”, “the gene for intellig...
Sep 15, 2018•14 min•Ep. 111
When you first take the Artifact, you will see a vision of ALPHANION, Demon-Sultan of the Domain of Order, who appears as a grid of spheres connected by luminous lines. Alphanion will urge you to use the Artifact to enforce cosmic order, law at its most fundamental. He will show you visions of all the most brutal and sadistic crimes of history, of all the wars caused by nations that could not live together in harmony, and he will tell you they are all preventable. He will show you dreams of perf...
Sep 13, 2018•12 min•Ep. 110
This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server – and also check out the SSC Podcast . Also: 1. Comment of the week is Stefferi on the circumstances leading to the rise of Hitler. See also idontknow : “The strongest defense against extreme right wingers is a mode...
Sep 10, 2018•3 min•Ep. 109
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by flame7926 and a_reader.] [ Content note: suicide, depression, transphobia, self-harm ] Transgender childhood transition is a hotly debated topic, with extensive media coverage devoted to it in recent years. (pro: BBC , The Lancet and The New York Times ; contra: The Cut , New Statesman and The Globe and Mail ).We see plenty of stories of transgender children (or gender dysphoric children and gender nonconforming children), both in the...
Sep 09, 2018•48 min•Ep. 108
This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Mark Davis and Mark Webb, who sent the following introduction along with their entry: Mark Davis is a naturopathic doctor. Naturopathic medicine is a century-old profession in the United States, but it’s small, with fewer than 10,000 NDs licensed to practice naturopathic medicine in the US in 2018. The profession has been historically highly skeptical of vaccination in general, and the modern profession is contentiously split on the to...
Sep 08, 2018•48 min•Ep. 107
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by John Buridan and Christian Flanery.] Matter: To what extent does liberalism and democracy obtain in Islamic countries. Whether Islam consistently poses political opposition to liberalism and democracy. Two simple narratives have split the western world’s perspective on Islam. These two narratives do not exhaust the spectrum of opinion , but they do function well enough to establish the basic controversy around Islamic countries and Li...
Sep 07, 2018•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 106
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by TracingWoodgrains and Michael Pershan (a k-12 math teacher), on advanced students in the education system] “What do America’s brightest students hear? Every year, across the nation, students who should be moved ahead at their natural pace of learning are told to stay put. Thousands of students are told to lower their expectations, and put their dreams on hold. Whatever they want to do, their teachers say, it can wait.” – A Nation Dece...
Sep 06, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 105
This week I’ll be presenting entries from the adversarial collaboration contest. Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it’s a good way to make sure you hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate between experts, except all the debate and rhetoric and disagreement have already been done by the tim...
Sep 04, 2018•3 min•Ep. 104
Commenters on yesterday’s post brought up an important point: sometimes bureaucracies aren’t just inefficient information gathering and processing mechanisms. Sometimes they’re the active ingredient in a plan. Imagine there’s a new $10,000 medication. Insurance companies are legally required to give it to people who really need it and would die without it. But they don’t want somebody who’s only a little bit sick demanding it as a “lifestyle” drug. In principle doctors are supposed to help with ...
Aug 31, 2018•5 min•Ep. 103
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work won’t let them bring in their own chair unless they have a doctor’s note saying they have back pain, and they have no doctor except me, and their insurance wants them to embark on a three month odyssey of phone calls and waiting lists for them to get one. In favor of writing the note: It would take me all of five ...
Aug 31, 2018•6 min•Ep. 102
Say a prayer for John McCain Who passes from his earthly pain His eyes are shut upon his brow He warmongers to angels now Beyond the sky, where sorrows cease He rails against the Prince of Peace. The Holy Spirit, full of love McCain denounces as “a dove” All of the weak and the cowardly policies Heaven pursues that let sin subsist still Six thousand years of detente with the darkness In hippie cliches about “choice” and “free will” All the fifth-columnists, communists, peaceniks Since ur-commie ...
Aug 29, 2018•3 min•Ep. 101
[Content note: reading this post might cause feelings of suffocation or provoke panic attacks in susceptible individuals. Epistemic status is very speculative.] Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep – all the things that will make your local family doctor say “Take two placebo and call me in the morning”. Using my ...
Aug 24, 2018•12 min•Ep. 100
Effective altruism (“EA”) is a movement dedicated to redirecting charity-related resources to the most important and successful charities. In practice this involves a lot of research into how important various problems are, and how well various charities work. Some of this research is done by well-funded official institutions. Other research, maybe exploring more unlikely scenarios or starting from weirder assumptions, is done as individual labors of love. These smaller-scale efforts might be se...
Aug 22, 2018•13 min•Ep. 99
Because I hate you, I included this question on the SSC survey: It’s a weird trick question, but I would say B is right. Imagine converting “(” to X and “)” to Y. Then the first answer is XYXY, and the second answer is YXXY. I suppose you could group the parentheses in pairs, in which case the answer would be “both”, but in practice few people wanted to say that. Of the 6,000 answers I received, most were either A or B. And one factor had a dramatic effect: age. This is a big effect. People in t...
Aug 18, 2018•5 min•Ep. 98
Traffic to this blog is declining . I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can’t help but go viral. I’m going to write about…negative results from the perception questions on last year’s survey. The last SSC survey had a lot of optical illusions and visual riddles. I had hoped to expand on some of the work in Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions and Can We Link Perception And Cognition? This post is a very brief summary of results and, b...
Aug 17, 2018•10 min•Ep. 97
Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and “behavior problems”; unofficially, anger and thrill-seeking – but most people consider these to be some sort of effect of the general attention deficit. Dr. William Dodson pushes a different conception, where one of the key features of ADHD is “rejection-sensitive dysphoria”, ie people with the condition are much less able to tolera...
Aug 16, 2018•17 min•Ep. 96
Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. We’re scheduled for meetups in 77 cities (and one ship!) in 23 countries, soundly beating last year’s list. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. Most people who are on the fence have said they’ve enjoyed going. Most people who felt intimidated about going have said they’ve enjoyed going. Most people who felt they were too different from the median SSC reader to fit in have enjoyed going. Most people who worried they weren’t smart enoug...
Aug 09, 2018•12 min•Ep. 95
STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants’ average age was 37 and which did not measure harm. You can find the study involved here . A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages – for example, a graphic murder scene from Crime and Punishment . Half the participants received the following trigger warning before the passage: TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to re...
Aug 08, 2018•12 min•Ep. 94
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades. More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative . Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors like smoking cessation and not to medical advances. Survival rates are increasing only because cancers...
Aug 07, 2018•19 min•Ep. 93
“Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?” — topic of #slatestarcodex I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. (this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.) Predictably, the move has cau...
Aug 03, 2018•52 min•Ep. 92
The Tourist Board of Xanadu Did recently impose a fee On those who travel far from home To visit Kubla’s pleasure dome Of $20, 9 – 3 So twice five miles of fertile ground With fence and wire are girdled round And signs proclaiming “ENTRY AT THE GATE” Where gather many a camera-bearing crowd And here are docents, who in solemn state Explain the Mongol histories aloud But oh! That deep romantic chasm protracting Into a hill, athwart a cedarn cover A savage region, visitors attracting By actresses,...
Jul 27, 2018•6 min•Ep. 90
[ Previously in sequence: Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental , The Whole City Is Center . This post might not make a lot of sense if you haven’t read those first.] I. Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s posts. Some of the best comments seemed to converge on an idea like this: Confusing in that people who rely on lower-level features are placed higher, but the other way would have been confusing too. We need to navigate complicated philosophical questions in order ...
Jul 27, 2018•44 min•Ep. 89
Related to yesterday’s post on people being too quick to assume value differences: some of the simplest fake value differences are where people make a big deal about routing around a certain word. And some of the most complicated real value differences are where some people follow a strategy explicitly and other people follow heuristics that approximate that strategy. There’s a popular mental health mantra that “there’s no such thing as laziness” (here are ten different articles with approximate...
Jul 21, 2018•40 min•Ep. 88
Ozy (and others ) talk about fundamental value differences as a barrier to cooperation. On their model (as I understand it) there are at least two kinds of disagreement. In the first, people share values but disagree about facts. For example, you and I may both want to help the Third World. But you believe foreign aid helps the Third World, and I believe it props up corrupt governments and discourages economic self-sufficiency. We should remain allies while investigating the true effect of forei...
Jul 21, 2018•26 min•Ep. 87
Yesterday I wrote about melatonin , mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why. Dr. Richard Wurtman, an MIT scientist who helped discover melatonin’s role in the body and pioneer its use as a sleep aid, writes : MIT was so excited about our research team’s melatonin-sleep connection discovery that they decided to patent the use of reasonable doses of melatonin—up to 1 mg—for p...
Jul 14, 2018•7 min•Ep. 86
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you. Melatonin is a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland. In a ...
Jul 12, 2018•35 min•Ep. 85
The rationalist community started with the idea of rationality as a martial art – a set of skills you could train in and get better at. Later the metaphor switched to a craft . Art or craft, parts of it did get developed: I remain very impressed with Eliezer’s work on how to change your mind and everything presaging Tetlock on prediction . But there’s a widespread feeling in the rationalist community these days that this is the area where we’ve made the least progress. AI alignment has grown int...
Jul 08, 2018•8 min•Ep. 84
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox . (You may recognize these names: Toby Ord founded the effective altruism movement; Eric Drexler kindled interest in nanotechnology; Anders Sandberg helped pioneer the academic study of x-risk, and wrote what might be my favorite Unsong fanfic ) The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense number of stars in our galaxy, for even a very tiny chance of aliens per ...
Jul 06, 2018•10 min•Ep. 83
Chris Stucchio recommended Matt Rognlie’s criticisms of Piketty ( paper , summary , Voxsplainer ). Rognlie starts by saying that Piketty didn’t correctly account for capital depreciation (ie capital losing value over time) in his calculations. This surprises me, because Piketty says he does in his book (p. 55) but apparently there are technical details I don’t understand. When you do that, the share of capital decreases, and it becomes clear that 100% of recent capital-share growth comes from on...
Jul 01, 2018•27 min•Ep. 82
