Astral Codex Ten Podcast

This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please  take the survey if you haven't already. Please don't read on until you've taken it, since this post could bias your results. 1. Can we confirm or disconfirm  different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts ? 2. Can we replicate  the study  showing that people who eat more beef jerky are mo...

0. Introduction I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation. What  happened  to t...

Please take  the 2019 Slate Star Codex Survey . The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me with useful informal research data for questions I'm interested it, which I then turn into interesting posts. My favorite from last year was  Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong , which I think made a real contributio...

Aquinas famously  said : beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In the best case scenario the average study will find the true result –...

Ribbonfarm likes to talk about  refactoring , a conceptual change in how you see the world. I'm not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means things like memetics – where you go from the usual model of people deciding what ideas they want, to a weird and inside-out (but not objectively wrong) model of ideas competing to colonize people. Here is a refactoring I think about a lot: imagine a...

A recent discussion: somebody asked why people in Silicon Valley thought that only high-tech solutions to climate change (like carbon capture or geoengineering) mattered, and why they dismissed more typical solutions like international cooperation and political activism. Another person cited statements from the relevant Silicon Valley people, who mostly say that they think political solutions and...

Donald Trump has been called a setback for many things. America. The global community. The environment. Civil service. Civil society. Civility. Civilization. The list goes on. One might think he has at least been useful to his own cause. That he could at least claim to have benefited the ideas of populism, nationalism, immigration control, and protectionism. That if anything could avoid being deva...

One interesting thing I took from  Evolutionary Psychopathology  was a better understanding of the diametrical theory of the social brain. There's been a lot of discussion over whether schizophrenia is somehow the "opposite" of autism. Many  of the genes  that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics...

[Content note: eating disorders] Anorexia has a cultural component. I'm usually reluctant to assume anything is cultural – every mediocre social scientist's first instinct is always to come up with a cultural explanation which is simple, seductive, flattering to all our existing prejudices, and wrong. But after seeing enough ballerinas and cheerleaders who became anorexic after pressure to lose we...

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 th...

I. The Mind Illuminated  is a guide to Buddhist meditation by Culadasa, aka John Yates, a Buddhist meditation teacher who is also a neuroscience PhD. At this point I would be more impressed to meet a Buddhist meditation teacher who  wasn't  a neuroscience PhD. If I ever teach Buddhist meditation, this is going to be my hook. "Come learn advanced meditation techniques with Scott Alexander, whose la...

[This post was up a few weeks ago before getting taken down for complicated reasons. They have been sorted out and I'm trying again.] Is scientific progress slowing down? I recently got a chance to attend a conference on this topic, centered around a paper by  Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb (2018) . BJRW identify areas where technological progress is easy to measure – for example, the number of trans...

[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...

I. A lot of people pushed back against my  post on preschool , so it looks like we need to discuss this in more depth. A quick refresher: good randomized controlled trials have shown that preschools do not improve test scores in a lasting way. Sometimes test scores go up a little bit, but these effects disappear after a year or two of regular schooling. However, early RCTs of intensive "wrap-aroun...

In 2016, I wrote  Ketamine Research In A New Light , which discussed the emerging consensus that, contra existing theory, ketamine's rapid-acting antidepressant effects had nothing to do with NMDA at all. I discussed some experiments which suggested they might actually be due to a related receptor, AMPA. The latest development is  Attenuation of Antidepressant Effects of Ketamine by Opioid Recepto...

Four years ago I  examined the claim  that SSRIs are little better than placebo. Since then, some of my thinking on this question has changed. First , we got  Cipriani et al's meta-analysis  of anti-depressants. It avoids some of the pitfalls of Kirsch and comes to about the same conclusion. This knocks down a few of the lines of argument in my part 4 about how the effect size might look more like...

[Originally to be titled "Marijuana: I Was Wrong", but looking back I was suitably careful about everything, and my reward is not having to say that.] Five years ago,  I reviewed the potential costs and benefits of marijuana legalization  and concluded that there wasn't enough evidence for a firm conclusion. I found that using some  made-up math , the effects looked slightly positive, but this was...

Kelsey Piper has written an article for Vox:  Early Childhood Education Yields Big Benefits – Just Not The Ones You Think . I had previously followed various studies that showed that preschool does not increase academic skill, academic achievement, or IQ, and concluded that it was useless. In fact, this had become a rallying point of movement for evidence-based social interventions; the continuing...

These are my preliminary choices for California elected positions and ballot initiatives. Some of them are based on  Ozy's recommendations  and the  Berkeley EA and rationalist community's recommendations . I agree with the latter's note that because California ballot propositions are weird superlaws that permanently overrule the legislature unless repealed by voters, in general we should be very...

[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.] Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – see for example his  Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics  or  Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious . I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Ex...

[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a small online ad startup. You know the ads on Facebook and Twitter? We tell companies how to get them the most clicks. This startup – I won't tell you the name – was going to add deep learning, because inve...

I've gotten a chance to discuss  The Whole City Is Center  with a few people now. They remain skeptical of the idea that anyone could "deserve" to have bad things happen to them, based on their personality traits or misdeeds. These people tend to imagine the pro-desert faction as going around, actively hoping that lazy people (or criminals, or whoever) suffer. I don't know if this passes an Intell...

[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.] There's been recent interest in "smart drugs" said to enhance learning and memory. For example, from the  Washington Post : When aficionados talk about nootropics, they usually refer to substances that have supposedly few side effects and low toxicity. Most often they mean...

[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they've put up their own synopsis. It will be back up eventually; please accept this post instead for now.] In Jewish legend, the Chamber of Guf is a pit where all the proto-souls hang out whispering and murmuring. Whenever a child is born, an angel reaches into th...

The best thing about personalized medicine is that it's obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But outside a few special cases like cancer, we don't know how to predict which treatment will work for which person. Some psychiatric researchers claim they can do this at a high level;  I think they're wron...