Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don't like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believ...

[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I've renamed him here to "Andrew Cord" to protect his identity.] I. Andrew Cord  criticizes me  for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try...

I was surprised how many people responded to my  APA photo-essay  with comments like "Seems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair" or "This proves you should never trust psychiatrists". The mood I was going for was more "let's share a laugh at the excesses of the profession" than "everything must be burned down". Looks like I missed it. I was disappointed to see a lot of the most hostile c...

The first thing  you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people. Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men al...

Enquist et al  on lactation fetishes is one of my favorite papers. They wonder – as we've all wondered at one point or another – how people develop fetishes. One plausible hypothesis is "sexual imprinting". During childhood, you have a critical period (maybe ages 1 to 5) where you figure out what sex is. If you see some weird stuff during that time, you could end up with a fetish. For example, a c...

Psychologists are split on the existence of  "birth order effects" , where oldest siblings will have different personality traits and outcomes than middle or youngest siblings. Although some studies detect effects, they tend to be weak and inconsistent. Last year, I posted  Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong , finding a robust 70-30 imbalance in favor of older siblings among SSC readers...

There's been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it's worth reviewing whether there's a case for skepticism. I think it would look something like this: 1. Psychedelics have mostly been investigated in small studies run by true believers. These are the conditions...

In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3  here  lists 46). Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see  here for list)...

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours. An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal. A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between th...

A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people's moral valuation of different kinds of animals  scaled pretty nicely with the animals' number of cortical neurons  (see  here  for more on why we might expect that to be true). A commenter, Tibbar, did a larger survey on Mechanical Turk and got very different results, so I  retracted  the claim. I wasn't sure why w...

( Epistemic status : Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.) I. There is  a national shortage of buspirone. Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it's in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It's not a very strong medication, but it's safe, it's non-addictive, it's off-paten...

[ Epistemic status:  Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most of the good ideas are his, any errors are mine.] I. In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they pr...

HalTheWise  discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it): One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at variou...

0: Introduction This is from  businessstudent.com   Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. The pressure of getting into a good university may even be  leading to suicides at elite high schools. Some people have dismissed the problem, saying that a misplaced focus on Harvard and Yale ignores t...

Reciprocity  is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You can put a checkmark next to their name to indicate you want to date them (they can't see this). If you both checkmark each other, then the site reveals you've matched. This seemed like an obvious great idea. But I started to hear a lot of stories li...

Timothy Carey's  Method Of Levels  teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The  Crackpot List  is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for psychiatry, Method of Levels would score a perfect 100%. It somehow manages to do okay on the physics one despite not discussing any physics. The Method of Levels is the correct solution to every psychological probl...

RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies  public support for eugenics . He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like "encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children" or "encouraging intelligent people to have more children"; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for euge...

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. "Mutton" takes the popular vote, but "grass" wins in the Electoral College. The wolves wish they hadn't all moved into the same few trendy coastal cities. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The Timber Wolf Party and the Gray Wolf Party spend most of their energy pandering shamelessly to the tie...

Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals. After getting 263 responses (to my 50), he reports  different results : Chicken: 25 Chimpanzee: 2 Cow: 3 Elephant: 1 Lobster: 60 Pig: 5 Human: 1 On the one hand, Mechanical Turkers sometimes aren't a great sample, and some of them seem to have just put the same number for every an...

[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.] Yesterday's post  reviewed research showing that animals' intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder. Here are the numbers from  this list . I can't find ch...

Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren't they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as "it takes a big brain to control a body that size". But it really doesn't. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, di...

Wired  wrote  a good article about  Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I've  puzzled over  here before. Raviv writes: Friston's free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy. Put this way, it's clearly just per...

They say "don't judge a book by its cover". So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in fact, communist.  Inventing The Future  isn't technically Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' manifesto – that would be the equally-striking-looking  Accelerate Manifesto . But it's a manifesto-ish description of their plan for achieving a postcapitalist...

Gwern has answered my prayers and  taught GPT-2 poetry . GPT-2  is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on the  Gutenberg Poetry Corpus , a 117 MB collection of pre-1923 English poetry, to create a specialized poetry AI. I previously tested the out-of-the-box...

Here's a graph of US air pollution over time:   During the discussion of 90s environmentalism, some people pointed out that this showed the Clean Air Act didn't matter. The trend is the same before the Act as after it. This kind of argument is common. For example, here's the libertarian Mercatus Institute arguing that OSHA didn't help workplace safety:   I've always taken these arguments pretty se...