I. Recently spotted on Tumblr: “This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?” “Can y...
Jun 15, 2019•26 min•Ep. 202
Peter Gerdes says: As the examples of the Nicaraguan deaf children left on their own to develop their own language demonstrates (as do other examples) we do create languages very very quickly in a social environment. Creating conlangs is hard not because creating language is fundamentally hard but because we are bad at top down modelling of processes that are the result of a bunch of tiny modifications over time. The distinctive features of language require both that it be used frequently for pr...
Jun 13, 2019•37 min•Ep. 201
Why have prices for services like health care and education risen so much over the past fifty years? When I looked into this in 2017, I couldn’t find a conclusive answer. Economists Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland have written a new book on the topic, Why Are The Prices So D*mn High? (link goes to free pdf copy, or you can read Tabarrok’s summary on Marginal Revolution ). They do find a conclusive answer: the Baumol effect . T&H explain it like this: In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet N...
Jun 12, 2019•15 min•Ep. 200
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness , Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success , List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success , Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad ] When I wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell , my attempt to explain reactionary philosophy, many people complained that it missed the key insight. At the time I had an excuse: I didn’t get the key insight. Now I think I might understand it and have the vocabulary to ex...
Jun 09, 2019•15 min•Ep. 199
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness , Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success , List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success . Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it later, but it probably shouldn’t be dropped in here without justification.] I. Years ago, I wrote about sy...
Jun 09, 2019•26 min•Ep. 198
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness , Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success ] A rare example of cultural evolution in action: Throughout the Highlands of New Guinea, a group’s ability to raise large numbers of pigs is directly related to its economic and social success in competition with other regional groups. The ceremonial exchange of pigs allows groups to forge alliances, re-pay debts, obtain wives, and generate prestige through excessive displays of generosity. All this...
Jun 08, 2019•58 min•Ep. 197
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness ] I. “Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway. Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough to invent neat tools that help us survive and adapt to unfamiliar environments. Against such theories...
Jun 07, 2019•52 min•Ep. 196
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don’t like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something after it had been proven to them . And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable e...
Jun 06, 2019•11 min•Ep. 195
[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to “Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.] I. Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant hurtful lies: I just find it kind of darkly amusing and sad that the “r...
Jun 01, 2019•46 min•Ep. 194
I was surprised how many people responded to my APA photo-essay with comments like “Seems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair” or “This proves you should never trust psychiatrists”. The mood I was going for was more “let’s share a laugh at the excesses of the profession” than “everything must be burned down”. Looks like I missed it. I was disappointed to see a lot of the most hostile comments coming from people in tech. It would be easy to write an equally damning report on the tech in...
May 30, 2019•5 min•Ep. 193
The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people. Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a kno...
May 25, 2019•34 min•Ep. 192
Enquist et al on lactation fetishes is one of my favorite papers. They wonder – as we’ve all wondered at one point or another – how people develop fetishes. One plausible hypothesis is “sexual imprinting”. During childhood, you have a critical period (maybe ages 1 to 5) where you figure out what sex is. If you see some weird stuff during that time, you could end up with a fetish. For example, a child who sees latex used in a sexualized way (for example, they catch a glimpse of a sexy movie where...
May 17, 2019•6 min•Ep. 191
Psychologists are split on the existence of “birth order effects” , where oldest siblings will have different personality traits and outcomes than middle or youngest siblings. Although some studies detect effects, they tend to be weak and inconsistent. Last year, I posted Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong , finding a robust 70-30 imbalance in favor of older siblings among SSC readers. I speculated that taking a pre-selected population and counting the firstborn-to-laterborn ratio was...
May 16, 2019•12 min•Ep. 190
There’s been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth reviewing whether there’s a case for skepticism. I think it would look something like this: 1. Psychedelics have mostly been investigated in small studies run by true believers. These are the conditions that produce a field made of unreplicable results, like the effects of 5-HTTLPR . Some of the most e...
May 12, 2019•9 min•Ep. 189
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46). Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see here for list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing ne...
May 10, 2019•24 min•Ep. 188
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal. A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal. A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you ...
May 04, 2019•3 min•Ep. 187
A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people’s moral valuation of different kinds of animals scaled pretty nicely with the animals’ number of cortical neurons (see here for more on why we might expect that to be true). A commenter, Tibbar, did a larger survey on Mechanical Turk and got very different results, so I retracted the claim. I wasn’t sure why we got such different results, but I chalked it down to chance, or perhaps to my having surveyed an animal-...
May 04, 2019•7 min•Ep. 186
( Epistemic status : Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.) I. There is a national shortage of buspirone. Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years. Now there’s a ...
May 03, 2019•20 min•Ep. 185
[ Epistemic status: Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most of the good ideas are his, any errors are mine.] I. In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026. This sounds like the plot of a sci-fi book. But it’...
Apr 24, 2019•28 min•Ep. 384
HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it): One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance, which directly includes low...
Apr 19, 2019•35 min•Ep. 183
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. The pressure of getting into a good university may even be leading to suicides at elite high schools. Some people have dismissed the problem, saying that a misplaced focus on Harvard and Yale ignores that most colleges are easier to get into than ever. For example, from The Atlantic , Is College Really H...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 182
Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You can put a checkmark next to their name to indicate you want to date them (they can’t see this). If you both checkmark each other, then the site reveals you’ve matched. This seemed like an obvious great idea. But I started to hear a lot of stories like the following: “I checkmarked Alice’s name on Reciprocity, and the system didn’t notify me that th...
Apr 12, 2019•4 min•Ep. 181
Timothy Carey’s Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for psychiatry, Method of Levels would score a perfect 100%. It somehow manages to do okay on the physics one despite not discussing any physics. The Method of Levels is the correct solution to every psychological problem, from mild depression to psychosis. Therapists may be tempted to use something other than the Method ...
Apr 11, 2019•19 min•Ep. 180
RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics . He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like “encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children” or “encouraging intelligent people to have more children”; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for eugenics was a belief that it would not work; people who believed the qualities involved were heritable w...
Apr 04, 2019•9 min•Ep. 179
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. “Mutton” takes the popular vote, but “grass” wins in the Electoral College. The wolves wish they hadn’t all moved into the same few trendy coastal cities. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The Timber Wolf Party and the Gray Wolf Party spend most of their energy pandering shamelessly to the tiebreaking vote. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Everyone agrees...
Mar 31, 2019•4 min•Ep. 178
Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals. After getting 263 responses (to my 50), he reports different results : Chicken: 25 Chimpanzee: 2 Cow: 3 Elephant: 1 Lobster: 60 Pig: 5 Human: 1 On the one hand, Mechanical Turkers sometimes aren’t a great sample, and some of them seem to have just put the same number for every animal so they could finish quickly and get their money. They also probably haven’t thought about this ...
Mar 31, 2019•3 min•Ep. 177
[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.] Yesterday’s post reviewed research showing that animals’ intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder. Here are the numbers from this list . I can’t find chickens, so I’ve used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can’t find cows, so I’ve eyeball...
Mar 28, 2019•8 min•Ep. 176
Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes a big brain to control a body that size”. But it really doesn’t. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts and did fine. Also, the animal with the highest brain-relativ...
Mar 27, 2019•10 min•Ep. 175
Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I’ve puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston’s free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy. Put this way, it’s clearly just perceptual control theory. Powers describes the same insight like this : [Action] is the difference between ...
Mar 22, 2019•11 min•Ep. 174
They say “don’t judge a book by its cover”. So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in fact, communist. Inventing The Future isn’t technically Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ manifesto – that would be the equally-striking-looking Accelerate Manifesto . But it’s a manifesto-ish description of their plan for achieving a postcapitalist world. S&W start with a critique of what they call “folk politics”, eg every stereotype you have o...
Mar 21, 2019•52 min•Ep. 173
