[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] What does it take to be literally Hitler?  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] What does it take to be literally Hitler? <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall</a>

Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Actual serious review here, Amazon link to the book here. These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the

Actual serious review <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>, Amazon link to the book <a href="https://amzn.to/3XN9Ck7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>. These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the</a>

More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"

Review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without A Face" [previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi] I. Vladimir Putin’s Childhood As Metaphor For Life     Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine. At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. In 1999, a Georgian peasant woman, Vera Putina, claimed to be his real mother, who had given him up for adoption when he was ten. Journalists dutifully investigated and found that a “Vladimir Putin” had been registered at her village’s school, and that a local teacher remembered him as a bright pupil who loved Russian folk tales. What happened to him? Unclear; Artyom Borovik, the investigative journalist pursuing the story, died in a plane crash just before he could publish. Another investigative journalist, Antonio Russo, took up the story, but “his body was found on the edge of a country road . . . bruised and showed signs of torture, with techniques related to special military services.” https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin

Review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without A Face" [previously in series: <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan?s=w" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Erdogan</a>, <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography?s=w" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Modi</a>, <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Orban</a>, <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Xi</a>] I. Vladimir Putin’s Childhood As Metaphor For Life   Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine. At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. In 1999, a Georgian peasant woman, <a href="https://www.economist.com/obituary/2023/06/08/vera-putina-claimed-to-be-vladimir-putins-real-mother" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vera Putina</a>, claimed to be his real mother, who had given him up for adoption when he was ten. Journalists dutifully investigated and found that a “Vladimir Putin” had been registered at her village’s school, and that a local teacher remembered him as a bright pupil who loved Russian folk tales. What happened to him? Unclear; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artyom_Borovik#Death" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Artyom Borovik</a>, the investigative journalist pursuing the story, died in a plane crash just before he could publish. Another investigative journalist, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Russo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Antonio Russo</a>, took up the story, but “his body was found on the edge of a country road . . . bruised and showed signs of torture, with techniques related to special military services.” <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin</a>

Dictator Book Club: Putin

You can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that here. Everyone else, just wait until 8/25 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call

<a href="https://forms.gle/gBt71S3hHgNTYe928" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">You can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here</a>. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6QWH0CjcqC7PLhJUYVvNpqbHx6EwEMH-JhvJrgambU/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>. Everyone else, just wait until 8/25 and I'll give you more information on where to go then. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call</a>

Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023 - Call For Organizers

Plus more CFTC, X, and UFOs  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature

Plus more CFTC, X, and UFOs <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature</a>

Mantic Monday 7/31/23: Room Temperature Superforecaster

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review? How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you’d be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity? I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review? How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you’d be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity? I picked <a href="https://amzn.to/3Qhw96Z" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On the Marble Cliffs</a>, because it is all of that at the same time. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs</a>

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs

Suppose there’s freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is “undemocratic”? Would it be more “democratic” if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it? You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism - a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and

Suppose there’s freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is “undemocratic”? Would it be more “democratic” if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it? You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism - a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and</a>

Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism

[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability] Table Of Contents 1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social

[original post: <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-disability" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Contra The Social Model Of Disability</a>] Table Of Contents 1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social</a>

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability

Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23 Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist. First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true. Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true. Third, I’ll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs. Finally, I’ll argue this is sufficient for ideas of “intelligence explosion” to be coherent.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned

Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23 Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist. First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true. Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true. Third, I’ll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs. Finally, I’ll argue this is sufficient for ideas of “intelligence explosion” to be coherent. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned</a>

We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either:   A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or   Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.   With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die.  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading

[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either: <ul> <li> A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or </li> <li> Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. </li> </ul> With <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Trading-Traders-Decision-Making-Everyone/dp/1119574218/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CFYGH6Q0TUPK&amp;keywords=the+laws+of+trading&amp;qid=1689973717&amp;sprefix=the+laws+of+trading%2Caps%2C144&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Laws of Trading</a>, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading</a>

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.

Awesome!

As I don’t always have time to read the blog, it’s great to have an audio option.

Time

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[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?

[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?

Meditations on Moloch [Classic]

Link:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/19/acc-when-during-fetal-development-does-abortion-become-morally-wrong/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by BlockOfNihilism and Icerun] Note: For simplicity, we have constrained our analysis of data about pregnancy and motherhood to the United States. We note that these data are largely dependent on the state of the medical and social support systems that are available in a particular region. Introduction: Review of abortion and pregnancy data in the United States We agreed that it was important to first reach an understanding about the general facts of abortion, pregnancy and motherhood in the US prior to making ethical assertions. To understand abortion rates and distributions, we reviewed data obtained by the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System (1). The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) and National Vital Statistics datasets were used to evaluate the medical hazards imposed by pregnancy (2, 3, 4). Finally, we examined a number of studies performed on the Turnaway Study cohort, maintained by UCSF, to investigate the economic effects of denying wanted abortions to women (5, 6, 7, 13).

Link: <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/19/acc-when-during-fetal-development-does-abortion-become-morally-wrong/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/19/acc-when-during-fetal-development-does-abortion-become-morally-wrong/</a> [This is an entry to the <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-collaboration-entries/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest</a> by BlockOfNihilism and Icerun] Note: For simplicity, we have constrained our analysis of data about pregnancy and motherhood to the United States. We note that these data are largely dependent on the state of the medical and social support systems that are available in a particular region. Introduction: Review of abortion and pregnancy data in the United States We agreed that it was important to first reach an understanding about the general facts of abortion, pregnancy and motherhood in the US prior to making ethical assertions. To understand abortion rates and distributions, we reviewed data obtained by the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System (1). The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) and National Vital Statistics datasets were used to evaluate the medical hazards imposed by pregnancy (2, 3, 4). Finally, we examined a number of studies performed on the Turnaway Study cohort, maintained by UCSF, to investigate the economic effects of denying wanted abortions to women (5, 6, 7, 13).

[ACC Entry] When During Fetal Development Does Abortion Become Morally Wrong?

[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 that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, one of two things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review. David Autor gives a vivid example:

[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 that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, one of two things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see <a href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp2621.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vivarelli</a> for a review. David Autor gives a vivid example:

Technological Unemployment Much More Than You Wanted to Know

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 Columbia’s psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researhers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston’s 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn’t have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.

I’ve been trying to delve deeper into <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">predictive processing theories of the brain</a>, 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 <a href="https://twitter.com/farlkriston?lang=en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">parody Twitter account</a> and Markov blanket memes. From the journal <a href="http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2010.10773634" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Neuropsychoanalysis</a> (which based on its name I predict is a center of expertise in not understanding things): At Columbia’s psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researhers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston’s 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn’t have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.

God Help Us, Let’s Try to Understand Friston on Free Energy

[Content warning: scrupulosity] I. “There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism”. I hear this from a bunch of people. Sometimes it is taken to its conclusion; no currently living person is morally acceptable. People who aren’t activists reorienting their entire lives around acknowledging and combating the evils of the world aren’t even on the scale. And people who are such activists are (in the words of one of my friends who is close to that community) “only making comfortable sacrifices that let them think of themselves as a good person within their existing comfortable moral paradigm, instead of confronting the raw terrible truth.” IE “If you think you’re one of the good ones, you’re wrong”. I have heard this sentiment raised by animal rights activists. The average meat-eater isn’t even on the scale. The average vegetarian still eats milk and cheese, and so is barely even trying. Even most vegans probably use some medical product with gelatin, or something tested on lab rats, or are just benefitting from animal suffering in some indirect way. And I have heard it raised by environmentalists. The average SUV driver isn’t even on the scale. The average conscientious liberal might think they’re better because they bike to work and recycle, but they still barely think about how they’re using electricity generated by coal plants and eating food grown with toxic pesticides. Everyone could be doing more. And I have heard raised by labor activists. Most of us use stuff made in sweatshops. Even if you avoid sweatshops, you probably use stuff made at less than a living wage. Even if you avoid that, are you doing everything you can to help and support workers who earn less than you do? Even if you aren’t an animal rights activist, environmentalist, or labor advocate, do you believe in anything? Are you a Christian, a social justice advocate, or rationalist? Do you know anyone who really satisfies you as being sinless, non-racist, and/or rational? Then perhaps you too believe nobody is good.

[Content warning: scrupulosity] I. “There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism”. I hear this from a bunch of people. Sometimes it is taken to its conclusion; no currently living person is morally acceptable. People who aren’t activists reorienting their entire lives around acknowledging and combating the evils of the world aren’t even on the scale. And people who are such activists are (in the words of one of my friends who is close to that community) “only making comfortable sacrifices that let them think of themselves as a good person within their existing comfortable moral paradigm, instead of confronting the raw terrible truth.” IE “If you think you’re one of the good ones, you’re wrong”. I have heard this sentiment raised by animal rights activists. The average meat-eater isn’t even on the scale. The average vegetarian still eats milk and cheese, and so is barely even trying. Even most vegans probably use some medical product with gelatin, or something tested on lab rats, or are just benefitting from animal suffering in some indirect way. And I have heard it raised by environmentalists. The average SUV driver isn’t even on the scale. The average conscientious liberal might think they’re better because they bike to work and recycle, but they still barely think about how they’re using electricity generated by coal plants and eating food grown with toxic pesticides. Everyone could be doing more. And I have heard raised by labor activists. Most of us use stuff made in sweatshops. Even if you avoid sweatshops, you probably use stuff made at less than a living wage. Even if you avoid that, are you doing everything you can to help and support workers who earn less than you do? Even if you aren’t an animal rights activist, environmentalist, or labor advocate, do you believe in anything? Are you a Christian, a social justice advocate, or rationalist? Do you know anyone who really satisfies you as being sinless, non-racist, and/or rational? Then perhaps you too believe nobody is good.

The Economic Perspective on Moral Standards

Related to: Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I’m a particular fan of this one. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this: All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly. You wouldn’t even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you’ve gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again. All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory. The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can’t be directly reduced to any specific contradiction. (I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to this post where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn’t look like you “debunking” one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian crisis of faith.)

Related to: <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/08/book-review-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions</a> Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I’m a particular fan of <a href="https://66.media.tumblr.com/f7b7e89499fc87388aa7063fc84237bf/tumblr_pix85q1lJp1qh6gzao1_1280.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this one</a>. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this: All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly. You wouldn’t even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you’ve gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again. All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory. The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can’t be directly reduced to any specific contradiction. (I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this post</a> where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn’t look like you “debunking” one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg/crisis-of-faith" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">crisis of faith</a>.)

Paradigms All the Way Down

There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty. I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 responses (thank you, you are great). Here was the overall distribution of probabilities. Horizontal axis is percent chance he did it; vertical axis is number of people who responded with that percent: This looks weird because people were most likely to give numbers rounded off the the nearest ten. I separated responses into bins from 0 – 9%, 10 – 19%, and so on to 90 – 100%. Keep in mind that the last bin is slightly larger than the others, so it might make it unfairly look like more people gave extreme high answers than extreme low answers. I also switched the vertical axis to percent of responses in each bin. Smoothed out, it looks like this: This looks pretty balanced, and it is: the average probability is 52.64%. This is probably a fake balance based on all the different demographic skews involved cancelling out: 2.5x as many Democrats as Republicans answered the survey, but 9x as many men as women did.

There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty. I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 responses (thank you, you are great). Here was the overall distribution of probabilities. Horizontal axis is percent chance he did it; vertical axis is number of people who responded with that percent: This looks weird because people were most likely to give numbers rounded off the the nearest ten. I separated responses into bins from 0 – 9%, 10 – 19%, and so on to 90 – 100%. Keep in mind that the last bin is slightly larger than the others, so it might make it unfairly look like more people gave extreme high answers than extreme low answers. I also switched the vertical axis to percent of responses in each bin. Smoothed out, it looks like this: This looks pretty balanced, and it is: the average probability is 52.64%. This is probably a fake balance based on all the different demographic skews involved cancelling out: 2.5x as many Democrats as Republicans answered the survey, but 9x as many men as women did.

Kavanaugh: A Probability Poll

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 typical fascist precision. The good guys usually demonstrate a respect for human life and the bonds of friendship; the bad guys betray their citizens and their underlings with equal abandon. They gain their good guy or bad guy status by either following the universal law, or breaking it.

H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon’s <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth</a>. “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 typical fascist precision. The good guys usually demonstrate a respect for human life and the bonds of friendship; the bad guys betray their citizens and their underlings with equal abandon. They gain their good guy or bad guy status by either following the universal law, or breaking it.

The Invention of Moral Narrative

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 approximately that title: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). They all make the same basically good point. We shame people who don’t work very hard as “lazy”, and think they should have lower status than the rest of us. But actually, these people don’t just randomly choose not to work. Some of them have psychological issues, like anxiety and trauma that are constantly distracting them from their work, or a fear of success, or self-defeating beliefs about how nothing they do matters anyway. Others have biological issues – maybe hypothyroidism, or vitamin deficiencies, or ADHD, or other things we don’t understand that lower their energy and motivation. Still others just don’t want to do the specific thing we are asking them to do right now and can’t force themselves to work uphill against that gradient. When we call people “lazy”, we’re ignorantly dismissing all these possibilities in favor of a moralistic judgment. A dialogue: Sophisticus: I don’t believe in laziness. Simplicio: What about my cousin Larry? He keeps promising to do important errands for his friends and family, and then he never does them. Instead he just plays video games all the time. This has happened consistently over the past few years, every time he’s promised to do something. One time my aunt asked him to go to the DMV to get some paperwork filled out, he promised he would do it, and then he kept putting it off for a month until it was past the deadline and she almost lost her car. He didn’t forget about it or anything, he just couldn’t bring himself to go out and do it. And he’s been fired from his last three jobs for not showing up, and… Sophisticus: Yes, yes, I’m sure there are people like this. But he probably has some self-defeating beliefs, or vitamin deficiencies, or mental health issues. Simplicio: Okay. Well, my mother is going to be away for the next week, and she needs someone to dog-sit for her. Her dog is old and sick and requires a lot of care each day. She’s terrified that if he doesn’t get his food and medication and daily walk on time, something terrible will happen to him. She’s willing to pay a lot of money. Do you think I should recommend she ask my cousin Larry? Sophisticus: No, of course not. Simplicio: Why not? Sophisticus: He probably won’t do it. He’ll just play video games instead. Simplicio: Why do you think so? Sophisticus: Because he has a long history of playing video games instead of doing important tasks. Simplicio: If only there were a word for the sort of person who does that! Sophisticus: Oh, I see. Now you’re making fun of me. But I’m not saying everyone is equally reliable. I’m saying that instead of denouncing someone as “lazy”, we should look for the cause and try to help them. Simplicio: Hey, we did try to help him. Larry’s family has taken him to the doctor loads of times. They didn’t anything on the lab tests, but the psychiatrist thought he might be ADHD and gave him some Adderall. I would say now he pulls through on like 20% of the things we ask him to do instead of zero percent. We also tried to get him to go to therapy, but the therapist deferred because ADHD has a very low therapy response rate. His parents tried to change the way they asked him to do things to make it easier for him, or to let him choose a different set of tasks that were more to his liking, but that only worked a little, if at all. Probably there’s some cause we don’t understand, but it’s beyond the reach of medical science, incentive design, or the understanding that exists between loving family members to identify. Sophisticus: See! The Adderall helped! And letting him choose his own tasks helped a little too! Simplicio: I agree it helped a little. So should I recommend him to my mother as a dog-sitter? Sophisticus: No, of course not. Simplicio: Then I still don’t see what the difference between us is. I agree it was worth having him go to the doctor and the therapist to rule out any obvious biological or psychological issues, and to test different ways of interacting with him in case our interaction style was making things worse. You agree that since this still hasn’t made him reliably fulfill his responsibilities and we don’t have any better ideas, he’s a bad choice for a dog-sitter. Why can’t I communicate the state of affairs we both agree on to my mother using the word “lazy”?

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 approximately that title: <a href="http://rebecca-stafford.org/1-minute-psychology-theres-no-such-thing-as-laziness/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@aimanhassani/theres-no-such-thing-as-laziness-535fd56acec9" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@dr_eprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">3</a>, <a href="http://www.willwintermd.com/view_article.php?artid=20" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">4</a>, <a href="https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/there-is-no-such-thing-as-laziness-wcz/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">5</a>, <a href="https://www.moveandbefree.com/blog/laziness-doesnt-exist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">6</a>, <a href="https://fox13now.com/2018/05/23/no-such-thing-as-laziness/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">7</a>, <a href="http://www.parkslopetherapist.com/theres-no-thing-lazy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">8</a>, <a href="https://boomprogress.com/2018/06/03/there-is-no-such-thing-as-laziness/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">9</a>, <a href="http://libertyhangout.org/2016/01/there-is-no-such-thing-as-laziness/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">10</a>). They all make the same basically good point. We shame people who don’t work very hard as “lazy”, and think they should have lower status than the rest of us. But actually, these people don’t just randomly choose not to work. Some of them have psychological issues, like anxiety and trauma that are constantly distracting them from their work, or a fear of success, or self-defeating beliefs about how nothing they do matters anyway. Others have biological issues – maybe hypothyroidism, or vitamin deficiencies, or ADHD, or other things we don’t understand that lower their energy and motivation. Still others just don’t want to do the specific thing we are asking them to do right now and can’t force themselves to work uphill against that gradient. When we call people “lazy”, we’re ignorantly dismissing all these possibilities in favor of a moralistic judgment. A dialogue: Sophisticus: I don’t believe in laziness. Simplicio: What about my cousin Larry? He keeps promising to do important errands for his friends and family, and then he never does them. Instead he just plays video games all the time. This has happened consistently over the past few years, every time he’s promised to do something. One time my aunt asked him to go to the DMV to get some paperwork filled out, he promised he would do it, and then he kept putting it off for a month until it was past the deadline and she almost lost her car. He didn’t forget about it or anything, he just couldn’t bring himself to go out and do it. And he’s been fired from his last three jobs for not showing up, and… Sophisticus: Yes, yes, I’m sure there are people like this. But he probably has some self-defeating beliefs, or vitamin deficiencies, or mental health issues. Simplicio: Okay. Well, my mother is going to be away for the next week, and she needs someone to dog-sit for her. Her dog is old and sick and requires a lot of care each day. She’s terrified that if he doesn’t get his food and medication and daily walk on time, something terrible will happen to him. She’s willing to pay a lot of money. Do you think I should recommend she ask my cousin Larry? Sophisticus: No, of course not. Simplicio: Why not? Sophisticus: He probably won’t do it. He’ll just play video games instead. Simplicio: Why do you think so? Sophisticus: Because he has a long history of playing video games instead of doing important tasks. Simplicio: If only there were a word for the sort of person who does that! Sophisticus: Oh, I see. Now you’re making fun of me. But I’m not saying everyone is equally reliable. I’m saying that instead of denouncing someone as “lazy”, we should look for the cause and try to help them. Simplicio: Hey, we did try to help him. Larry’s family has taken him to the doctor loads of times. They didn’t anything on the lab tests, but the psychiatrist thought he might be ADHD and gave him some Adderall. I would say now he pulls through on like 20% of the things we ask him to do instead of zero percent. We also tried to get him to go to therapy, but the therapist deferred because ADHD has a very low therapy response rate. His parents tried to change the way they asked him to do things to make it easier for him, or to let him choose a different set of tasks that were more to his liking, but that only worked a little, if at all. Probably there’s some cause we don’t understand, but it’s beyond the reach of medical science, incentive design, or the understanding that exists between loving family members to identify. Sophisticus: See! The Adderall helped! And letting him choose his own tasks helped a little too! Simplicio: I agree it helped a little. So should I recommend him to my mother as a dog-sitter? Sophisticus: No, of course not. Simplicio: Then I still don’t see what the difference between us is. I agree it was worth having him go to the doctor and the therapist to rule out any obvious biological or psychological issues, and to test different ways of interacting with him in case our interaction style was making things worse. You agree that since this still hasn’t made him reliably fulfill his responsibilities and we don’t have any better ideas, he’s a bad choice for a dog-sitter. Why can’t I communicate the state of affairs we both agree on to my mother using the word “lazy”?

The Whole City is Center

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It’s a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It’s an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It’s a self-conscious defense of the author’s own arrogance. But most of all, it’s a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so much that is evil? The market economy is very good at what it does, which is something like “exploit money-making opportunities” or “pick low-hanging fruit in the domain of money-making”. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk, today is your lucky day. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in Grand Central Station, and you remember having seen the same bill a week ago, something is wrong. Thousands of people cross Grand Central every week – there’s no way a thousand people would all pass up a free $20. Maybe it’s some kind of weird trick. Maybe you’re dreaming. But there’s no way that such a low-hanging piece of money-making fruit would go unpicked for that long.

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It’s a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It’s an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It’s a self-conscious defense of the author’s own arrogance. But most of all, it’s a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so much that is evil? The market economy is very good at what it does, which is something like “exploit money-making opportunities” or “pick low-hanging fruit in the domain of money-making”. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk, today is your lucky day. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in Grand Central Station, and you remember having seen the same bill a week ago, something is wrong. Thousands of people cross Grand Central every week – there’s no way a thousand people would all pass up a free $20. Maybe it’s some kind of weird trick. Maybe you’re dreaming. But there’s no way that such a low-hanging piece of money-making fruit would go unpicked for that long.

Book Review: Inadequate Equilibria

I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that. Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and education – plus a couple more. First let’s look at primary education:     There was some argument about the style of this graph, but as per Politifact the basic claim is true. Per student spending has increased about 2.5x in the past forty years even after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, test scores have stayed relatively stagnant. You can see the full numbers here, but in short, high school students’ reading scores went from 285 in 1971 to 287 today – a difference of 0.7%. There is some heterogenity across races – white students’ test scores increased 1.4% and minority students’ scores by about 20%. But it is hard to credit school spending for the minority students’ improvement, which occurred almost entirely during the period from 1975-1985. School spending has been on exactly the same trajectory before and after that time, and in white and minority areas, suggesting that there was something specific about that decade which improved minority (but not white) scores. Most likely this was the general improvement in minorities’ conditions around that time, giving them better nutrition and a more stable family life. It’s hard to construct a narrative where it was school spending that did it – and even if it did, note that the majority of the increase in school spending happened from 1985 on, and demonstrably helped neither whites norminorities. I discuss this phenomenon more here and here, but the summary is: no, it’s not just because of special ed; no, it’s not just a factor of how you measure test scores; no, there’s not a “ceiling effect”. Costs really did more-or-less double without any concomitant increase in measurable quality. So, imagine you’re a poor person. White, minority, whatever. Which would you prefer? Sending your child to a 2016 school? Or sending your child to a 1975 school, and getting a check for $5,000 every year? I’m proposing that choice because as far as I can tell that is the stakes here. 2016 schools have whatever tiny test score advantage they have over 1975 schools, and cost $5000/year more, inflation adjusted. That $5000 comes out of the pocket of somebody – either taxpayers, or other people who could be helped by government programs. Second, college is even worse:     Note this is not adjusted for inflation; see link below for adjusted figures   Inflation-adjusted cost of a university education was something like $2000/year in 1980. Now it’s closer to $20,000/year. No, it’s not because of decreased government funding, and there are similar trajectories for public and private schools. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of “test scores” measuring how well colleges perform, so just use your best judgment. Do you think that modern colleges provide $18,000/year greater value than colleges did in your parents’ day? Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000? (or, more realistically, have $72,000 less in student loans to pay off) Was your parents’ college even noticeably worse than yours? My parents sometimes talk about their college experience, and it seems to have had all the relevant features of a college experience. Clubs. Classes. Professors. Roommates. I might have gotten something extra for my $72,000, but it’s hard to see what it was. Third, health care. The graph is starting to look disappointingly familiar:

I. Tyler Cowen <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-18/this-economic-phenomenon-is-making-government-sick" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">writes about cost disease</a>. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that. Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and education – plus a couple more. First let’s look at primary education: There was some argument about the style of this graph, but <a href="http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/brat-us-school-spending-375-percent-over-30-years-/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">as per Politifact</a> the basic claim is true. Per student spending has increased about 2.5x in the past forty years even after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, test scores have stayed relatively stagnant. You can see <a href="http://nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the full numbers here</a>, but in short, high school students’ reading scores went from 285 in 1971 to 287 today – a difference of 0.7%. There is some heterogenity across races – white students’ test scores increased 1.4% and minority students’ scores by about 20%. But it is hard to credit school spending for the minority students’ improvement, which occurred almost entirely during the period from 1975-1985. School spending has been on exactly the same trajectory before and after that time, and in white and minority areas, suggesting that there was something specific about that decade which improved minority (but not white) scores. Most likely this was the general improvement in minorities’ conditions around that time, giving them better nutrition and a more stable family life. It’s hard to construct a narrative where it was school spending that did it – and even if it did, note that the majority of the increase in school spending happened from 1985 on, and demonstrably helped neither whites norminorities. I discuss this phenomenon more <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/02/contra-robinson-on-schooling/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-comment-thread-on-school-choice/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>, but the summary is: no, it’s not just because of special ed; no, it’s not just a factor of how you measure test scores; no, there’s not a “ceiling effect”. Costs really did more-or-less double without any concomitant increase in measurable quality. So, imagine you’re a poor person. White, minority, whatever. Which would you prefer? Sending your child to a 2016 school? Or sending your child to a 1975 school, and getting a check for $5,000 every year? I’m proposing that choice because as far as I can tell that is the stakes here. 2016 schools have whatever tiny test score advantage they have over 1975 schools, and cost $5000/year more, inflation adjusted. That $5000 comes out of the pocket of somebody – either taxpayers, or other people who could be helped by government programs. Second, college is even worse: Note this is not adjusted for inflation; see link below for adjusted figures Inflation-adjusted cost of a university education was <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">something like $2000/year in 1980</a>. Now it’s closer to $20,000/year. No, it’s not because of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">decreased government funding</a>, and there are similar trajectories for public and private schools. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of “test scores” measuring how well colleges perform, so just use your best judgment. Do you think that modern colleges provide $18,000/year greater value than colleges did in your parents’ day? Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000? (or, more realistically, have $72,000 less in student loans to pay off) Was your parents’ college even noticeably worse than yours? My parents sometimes talk about their college experience, and it seems to have had all the relevant features of a college experience. Clubs. Classes. Professors. Roommates. I might have gotten something extra for my $72,000, but it’s hard to see what it was. Third, health care. The graph is starting to look disappointingly familiar:

Considerations on Cost Disease [Classic]

Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this, and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration. 126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open:  People generally reported slight but positive changes:  When asked to rate the magnitude of improvement to well-being on a 0 to 5 scale, they averaged 1.4:  I mentioned in the post that succulents could help in theory, but you needed to get the right kind of succulents and you needed at least ten of them. I was skeptical that anyone really got ten succulents in their room, so I wondered whether that might work as a crypto-placebo group. If so, the intervention failed to separate from placebo. Succulent users had an average improvement of 1.29, compared to about 1.50 for people who did other things. The difference wasn’t significant, although admittedly the sample size was low. Looking at the various groups, the most striking difference was actually people who left a window open (1.57) vs. people who did one of the other named options (1.31). A few people who left windows open mentioned this made their room cooler, which seemed to help with sleep. But this is very post hoc, and this difference wasn’t significant either.

Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open-door-policy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">my post on this</a>, and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration. 126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open:  People generally reported slight but positive changes:  When asked to rate the magnitude of improvement to well-being on a 0 to 5 scale, they averaged 1.4:  I mentioned in the post that succulents could help in theory, but you needed to get the right kind of succulents and you needed at least ten of them. I was skeptical that anyone really got ten succulents in their room, so I wondered whether that might work as a crypto-placebo group. If so, the intervention failed to separate from placebo. Succulent users had an average improvement of 1.29, compared to about 1.50 for people who did other things. The difference wasn’t significant, although admittedly the sample size was low. Looking at the various groups, the most striking difference was actually people who left a window open (1.57) vs. people who did one of the other named options (1.31). A few people who left windows open mentioned this made their room cooler, which seemed to help with sleep. But this is very post hoc, and this difference wasn’t significant either.

Nighttime Ventilation Survey Results

 https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/   I. John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess: When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group — or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy — retained these benefits. A while ago, Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples. Gottman decided the field needed statistical rigor, and that he – a former MIT math major – was exactly the guy to enforce it. He set up a model apartment in his University of Washington research center – affectionately called “the Love Lab”, and invited hundreds of couples to spend a few days there – observed, videotaped, and attached to electrodes collecting information on every detail of their physiology. While at the lab, the couples went through their ordinary lives. They experienced love, hatred, romantic dinners, screaming matches, and occasionally self-transformation. Then Gottman monitored them for years, seeing who made things work and who got divorced. Did you know that if a husband fails to acknowledge his wife’s feelings during an argument, there is an 81% chance it will damage the marriage? Or that 69% of marital conflicts are about long-term problems rather than specific situations? John Gottman knows all of this and much, much more.

<a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/</a> I. John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess: When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group — or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy — retained these benefits. A while ago, Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples. Gottman decided the field needed statistical rigor, and that he – a former MIT math major – was exactly the guy to enforce it. He set up a model apartment in his University of Washington research center – affectionately called “the Love Lab”, and invited hundreds of couples to spend a few days there – observed, videotaped, and attached to electrodes collecting information on every detail of their physiology. While at the lab, the couples went through their ordinary lives. They experienced love, hatred, romantic dinners, screaming matches, and occasionally self-transformation. Then Gottman monitored them for years, seeing who made things work and who got divorced. Did you know that if a husband fails to acknowledge his wife’s feelings during an argument, there is an 81% chance it will damage the marriage? Or that 69% of marital conflicts are about long-term problems rather than specific situations? John Gottman knows all of this and much, much more.

Book Review: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

“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 caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”, and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery. Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography. People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybodyhas heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?” While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of publicity. PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”

“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 <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/07/25/335156430/last-word" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">offering to pay the water bills</a> 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 caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/peta-drowning-backlash-detroit-water-crisis-veganism-push-1639454" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“drowning in backlash”</a>. Groundswell thinks it’s a <a href="http://www.groundswell.org/petas-big-blunder-what-would-a-solution-look-like/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“big blunder”</a>. Daily Banter says it’s <a href="http://thedailybanter.com/2014/07/petas-repugnant-offer-desperate-detroit-shows-everybody-hates/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“exactly why everyone hates PETA”</a>. Jezebel calls them <a href="http://unvis.it/jezebel.com/peta-assholes-to-detroit-well-pay-your-water-bills-if-1610490630" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“assholes”</a>, and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery. Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography. People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. <a href="http://veganoutreach.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vegan Outreach</a> is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybodyhas heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?” While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of publicity. PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”

The Toxoplasma of Rage [Classic]

I. Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe if you added them together, they might make one healthy scientific field? Enter Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach by psychology professor Marco del Giudice. It starts by presenting the theory of “life history strategies”. Then it uses the theory – along with a toolbox of evolutionary and genetic ideas – to shed new light on psychiatric conditions. Some organisms have lots of low-effort offspring. Others have a few high-effort offspring. This was the basis of the old r/k selection theory. Although the details of that theory have come under challenge, the basic insight remains. A fish will lay 10,000 eggs, then go off and do something else. 9,990 will get eaten by sharks, but that still leaves enough for there to be plenty of fish in the sea. But an elephant will spend two years pregnant, three years nursing, and ten years doing at least some level of parenting, all to produce a single big, well-socialized, and high-prospect-of-life-success calf. These are two different ways of doing reproduction. In keeping with the usual evolutionary practice, del Giudice calls the fish strategy “fast” and the elephant strategy “slow”. To oversimplify: fast strategies (think “live fast, die young”) are well-adapted for unpredictable dangerous environments. Each organism has a pretty good chance of randomly dying in some unavoidable way before adulthood; the species survives by sheer numbers. Fast organisms should grow up as quickly as possible in order to maximize the chance of reaching reproductive age before they unpredictably die. They should mate with anybody around, to maximize the chance of mating before they unpredictably die. They should ignore their offspring, since they expect most offspring to unpredictably die, and since they have too many to take care of anyway. They should be willing to take risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) is already their default expectation, and the upside (becoming one of the few individuals to give birth to the 10,000 offspring of the next generation) is high. Slow strategies are well-adapted for safer environments, or predictable complex environments whose intricacies can be mastered with enough time and effort. Slow strategy animals may take a long time to grow up, since they need to achieve mastery before leaving their parents. They might be very picky maters, since they have all the time in the world to choose, will only have a few children each, and need to make sure each of those children has the best genes possible. They should work hard to raise their offspring, since each individual child represents a substantial part of the prospects of their genetic line. They should avoid risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) would be catastrophically worse than default, and the upside (giving birth to a few offspring of the next generation) is what they should expect anyway.

I. Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe if you added them together, they might make one healthy scientific field? Enter <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychopathology-Marco-Del-Giudice/dp/0190246847/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1542484747&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=evolutionary+psychopathology&amp;linkCode=ll1&amp;tag=slatestarcode-20&amp;linkId=09c0d58ae12d932db4fbb765881811bd&amp;language=en_US" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach</a> by psychology professor Marco del Giudice. It starts by presenting the theory of “life history strategies”. Then it uses the theory – along with a toolbox of evolutionary and genetic ideas – to shed new light on psychiatric conditions. Some organisms have lots of low-effort offspring. Others have a few high-effort offspring. This was the basis of the old <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">r/k selection theory</a>. Although the details of that theory have come under challenge, the basic insight remains. A fish will lay 10,000 eggs, then go off and do something else. 9,990 will get eaten by sharks, but that still leaves enough for there to be plenty of fish in the sea. But an elephant will spend two years pregnant, three years nursing, and ten years doing at least some level of parenting, all to produce a single big, well-socialized, and high-prospect-of-life-success calf. These are two different ways of doing reproduction. In keeping with the usual evolutionary practice, del Giudice calls the fish strategy “fast” and the elephant strategy “slow”. To oversimplify: fast strategies (think “live fast, die young”) are well-adapted for unpredictable dangerous environments. Each organism has a pretty good chance of randomly dying in some unavoidable way before adulthood; the species survives by sheer numbers. Fast organisms should grow up as quickly as possible in order to maximize the chance of reaching reproductive age before they unpredictably die. They should mate with anybody around, to maximize the chance of mating before they unpredictably die. They should ignore their offspring, since they expect most offspring to unpredictably die, and since they have too many to take care of anyway. They should be willing to take risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) is already their default expectation, and the upside (becoming one of the few individuals to give birth to the 10,000 offspring of the next generation) is high. Slow strategies are well-adapted for safer environments, or predictable complex environments whose intricacies can be mastered with enough time and effort. Slow strategy animals may take a long time to grow up, since they need to achieve mastery before leaving their parents. They might be very picky maters, since they have all the time in the world to choose, will only have a few children each, and need to make sure each of those children has the best genes possible. They should work hard to raise their offspring, since each individual child represents a substantial part of the prospects of their genetic line. They should avoid risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) would be catastrophically worse than default, and the upside (giving birth to a few offspring of the next generation) is what they should expect anyway.

Book Review: Evolutionary Psychopathology

A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.” But I think it would have been true. A very careless plagiarist takes someone else’s work and copies it verbatim: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: “The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell”. A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: “In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos”. The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism. GPT-2 writes fantasy battle scenes by reading a million human-written fantasy battle scenes, distilling them down to the concept of a fantasy battle scene, and then building it back up from there. I think this is how your mom (and everyone else) does it too. GPT-2 is worse at this, because it’s not as powerful as your mom’s brain. But I don’t think it’s doing a different thing. We’re all blending experience into a slurry; the difference is how finely we blend it.

A machine learning researcher writes me in response to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/18/do-neural-nets-dream-of-electric-hobbits/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">yesterday’s post</a>, saying: I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.” But I think it would have been true. A very careless plagiarist takes someone else’s work and copies it verbatim: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: “The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell”. A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: “In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos”. The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism. GPT-2 <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/18/do-neural-nets-dream-of-electric-hobbits/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">writes fantasy battle</a> scenes by reading a million human-written fantasy battle scenes, distilling them down to the concept of a fantasy battle scene, and then building it back up from there. I think this is how your mom (and everyone else) does it too. GPT-2 is worse at this, because it’s not as powerful as your mom’s brain. But I don’t think it’s doing a different thing. We’re all blending experience into a slurry; the difference is how finely we blend it.

GPT-2 as Step Toward General Intelligence

[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 media and in the blogosphere. As early as 2 or 3, defying the expectations of their family, those children show a persistent and insistent preference for many things associated with the other sex: little boys want long hair and love dresses, Barbie dolls, Disney princesses and mermaids; little girls, instead, dislike stereotypically feminine activities and prefer rough and tumble play, refuse to wear dresses and insist to have their hair shorter and shorter. Sometimes, from the very beginning, the toddler corrects the parents: “I’m a boy /girl!”, but more frequently cross-gender behavior is more prevalent. This is only sometimes followed with the child expressing preferences that would be termed gender dysphoria. The child (born and currently living as a as one sex) says to their parents something like “God made a mistake” or “something went wrong in Mommy’s tummy” because he should have been a girl, not a boy (or the other way around). The worried parents search information on the internet and seek out the advice of an expert. There, they usually find one or both of these contradicting opinions: Gender-affirming approach Listen to your child – he/she knows best his/her gender. Let your child be his/her true self. It’s your responsibility as a parent to support your child in all stages of his/her transition: social transition now, puberty blockers at the beginning of puberty, cross-sex hormones in adolescence, surgery at 18. To oppose it is child abuse. Transphobia costs lives: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you prefer a happy daughter or a dead son? Or: Therapeutic approach Your child is just confused. He/she is too young to understand gender and to take such important decision. 80% of gender nonconforming children desist. You, as a parent, have the responsibility to correct his/her wrong behavior. If you tolerate it, gender dysphoria will be reinforced by repetition and persist to adulthood. To encourage your child’s delusion is child abuse. Transgenders individuals face lifelong struggle and often suffer from poor mental health: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you really want that for your son, when he could instead come to accept the body he was born with? The first approach is promoted by transgender activists, the second by the conservative media, but both are supported by some experts. The “Gender-affirming approach” is supported by the Dutch team from the Gender Clinic at VU Medical Centre, Amsterdam, who elaborated the typical transition treatment for minors, with puberty blockers at 12 and cross-sex hormones at 16, and, in the US, by Kristina Olson and others from the TransYouth Project. The “Therapeutic approach” is supported by Kenneth Zucker and his team from the Gender Identity Service at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, and, in the US, by Paul McHugh at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There are also experts such as Debra Soh, once a gender nonconforming girl herself, that advise parents to wait and see until adolescence, because in many cases gender dysphoria desists spontaneously, without intervention. Who to believe when the experts disagree? Let’s see the evidence.

[This is an entry to the <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/03/this-week-adversarial-collaboration-entries/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Adversarial Collaboration Contest</a> 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: <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/whats-missing-from-the-conversation-about-transgender-kids.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Cut</a>, 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 media and in the blogosphere. As early as 2 or 3, defying the expectations of their family, those children show a persistent and insistent preference for many things associated with the other sex: little boys want long hair and love dresses, Barbie dolls, Disney princesses and mermaids; little girls, instead, dislike stereotypically feminine activities and prefer rough and tumble play, refuse to wear dresses and insist to have their hair shorter and shorter. Sometimes, from the very beginning, the toddler corrects the parents: “I’m a boy /girl!”, but more frequently cross-gender behavior is more prevalent. This is only sometimes followed with the child expressing preferences that would be termed gender dysphoria. The child (born and currently living as a as one sex) says to their parents something like “God made a mistake” or “something went wrong in Mommy’s tummy” because he should have been a girl, not a boy (or the other way around). The worried parents search information on the internet and seek out the advice of an expert. There, they usually find one or both of these contradicting opinions: Gender-affirming approach Listen to your child – he/she knows best his/her gender. Let your child be his/her true self. It’s your responsibility as a parent to support your child in all stages of his/her transition: social transition now, puberty blockers at the beginning of puberty, cross-sex hormones in adolescence, surgery at 18. To oppose it is child abuse. Transphobia costs lives: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you prefer a happy daughter or a dead son? Or: Therapeutic approach Your child is just confused. He/she is too young to understand gender and to take such important decision. 80% of gender nonconforming children desist. You, as a parent, have the responsibility to correct his/her wrong behavior. If you tolerate it, gender dysphoria will be reinforced by repetition and persist to adulthood. To encourage your child’s delusion is child abuse. Transgenders individuals face lifelong struggle and often suffer from poor mental health: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you really want that for your son, when he could instead come to accept the body he was born with? The first approach is promoted by transgender activists, the second by the conservative media, but both are supported by some experts. The “Gender-affirming approach” is supported by the Dutch team from the Gender Clinic at VU Medical Centre, Amsterdam, who <a href="https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/00918369.2012.653300" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">elaborated the typical transition treatment for minors, with puberty blockers at 12 and cross-sex hormones at 16</a>, and, in the US, <a href="https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.jaac.2015.11.015" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">by Kristina Olson</a> and others from the TransYouth Project. The “Therapeutic approach” is supported <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">by Kenneth Zucker</a> and his team from the Gender Identity Service at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, and, in the US, <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/growing-pains" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">by Paul McHugh</a> at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There are also experts such as <a href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/why-transgender-kids-should-wait-to-transition" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Debra Soh</a>, once a gender nonconforming girl herself, that advise parents to wait and see until adolescence, because in many cases gender dysphoria desists spontaneously, without intervention. Who to believe when the experts disagree? Let’s see the evidence.

[ACC Entry] Should Transgender Children Transition?

I.  Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does. In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US. I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion’s Seed argues that this is basically the process that formed several early US states. Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the 1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s. II. A: The Puritans I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn’t get away quick and build something better. They really liked “city on a hill” metaphors. I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse. But I didn’t know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream. Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.” Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.

I. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1487533337&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=albion%27s+seed&amp;linkCode=ll1&amp;tag=slatestarcode-20&amp;linkId=9cb7e7ccd8e93a105159e71c2c6522a8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Albion’s Seed</a> by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does. In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US. I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion’s Seed argues that this is basically the process that formed several early US states. Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the 1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s. II. A<a href="http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Human_Hive_%28SMAC%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">:</a> The Puritans I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn’t get away quick and build something better. They really liked “city on a hill” metaphors. I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/28/the-story-of-thanksgiving-is-a-science-fiction-story/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse</a>. But I didn’t know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream. Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.” Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.

Book Review: Albion's Seed [Classic]

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 seconds. I completely believe my patients when they say their insurance is demanding the three month odyssey. Or sometimes they don’t have insurance and it would be a major financial burden for them to consult another doctor. Also, I’ve seen these other doctors and they have no objective test for back pain. 90% of the time they just have the patient stand in front of them, make whatever movement it is that hurts their back, ask the patient if it hurt their back, and when the patient says yes, the doctor says “That’s back pain all right, take some aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever”. Against writing the note: I am a psychiatrist. I usually treat patients via telemedicine, which means that in many cases I have literally never seen their back. All I remember about back pain from medical school is that some people call it “lumbago”, a word that stuck in my head because it sounds like a cryptid or small African nation. I know even less about the ergonomics of chairs, or when people do vs. don’t require better ones. Any note I write about back pain and chair recommendations is going to be a total sham, bordering on medical fraud. I could demand my patient take time off work to come in for an examination, sometimes from several hours away, just so I can do the thing where they bend their back in front of me and tell me it hurts. But that’s kind of just passing the shamminess a little bit down the line in a way that seriously inconveniences them.

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 seconds. I completely believe my patients when they say their insurance is demanding the three month odyssey. Or sometimes they don’t have insurance and it would be a major financial burden for them to consult another doctor. Also, I’ve seen these other doctors and they have <a href="https://www.painscience.com/articles/mri-and-x-ray-almost-useless-for-back-pain.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">no objective test for back pain</a>. 90% of the time they just have the patient stand in front of them, make whatever movement it is that hurts their back, ask the patient if it hurt their back, and when the patient says yes, the doctor says “That’s back pain all right, take some aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever”. Against writing the note: I am a psychiatrist. I usually treat patients via telemedicine, which means that in many cases I have literally never seen their back. All I remember about back pain from medical school is that some people call it “lumbago”, a word that stuck in my head because it sounds like a cryptid or small African nation. I know even less about the ergonomics of chairs, or when people do vs. don’t require better ones. Any note I write about back pain and chair recommendations is going to be a total sham, bordering on medical fraud. I could demand my patient take time off work to come in for an examination, sometimes from several hours away, just so I can do the thing where they bend their back in front of me and tell me it hurts. But that’s kind of just passing the shamminess a little bit down the line in a way that seriously inconveniences them.

Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞)

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 promoting sleep. But they made a big mistake. They assumed that the FDA would want to regulate the hormone and its use as a sleep therapy. They also thought the FDA wouldn’t allow companies to sell melatonin in doses 3-times, 10-times, even 15-times more than what’s necessary to promote sound sleep. Much to MIT’s surprise, however, the FDA took a pass on melatonin. At that time, the FDA was focusing on other issues, like nicotine addiction, and they may have felt they had bigger fish to fry. Also, the FDA knew that the research on melatonin showed it to be non-toxic, even at extremely high doses, so they probably weren’t too worried about how consumers might use it. In the end, and as a way of getting melatonin on to the market, the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong. So he’s saying that…in order to get around a patent on using the correct dose of melatonin…supplement manufacturers…used the wrong dose of melatonin? I enjoy collecting stories of all the crazy perversities created by our current pharmaceutical system, but this one really takes the cake.

Yesterday <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">I wrote about melatonin</a>, 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, <a href="https://www.healthydirections.com/making-sense-of-melatonin-dosing" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">writes</a>: 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 promoting sleep. But they made a big mistake. They assumed that the FDA would want to regulate the hormone and its use as a sleep therapy. They also thought the FDA wouldn’t allow companies to sell melatonin in doses 3-times, 10-times, even 15-times more than what’s necessary to promote sound sleep. Much to MIT’s surprise, however, the FDA took a pass on melatonin. At that time, the FDA was focusing on other issues, like nicotine addiction, and they may have felt they had bigger fish to fry. Also, the FDA knew that the research on melatonin showed it to be non-toxic, even at extremely high doses, so they probably weren’t too worried about how consumers might use it. In the end, and as a way of getting melatonin on to the market, the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong. So he’s saying that…in order to get around a patent on using the correct dose of melatonin…supplement manufacturers…used the wrong dose of melatonin? I enjoy collecting stories of <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">all the</a> <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">crazy</a> <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">perversities</a> created by our current pharmaceutical system, but this one really takes the cake.

Did a Melatonin Patent Inspire Current Dose Confusion?

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