Slate Star Codex

In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging

No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Scott Alexander

I.

Admitting a bias is the first step to overcoming it, so I’ll admit it: I have a huge bias against growth mindset.

(if you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does. More on Wikipedia here).

See, I can sometimes be contrarian, and growth mindset is pretty much the only idea from social psychology that is universally beloved. If I try to search for criticism of growth mindset, I am buried in the Google-shadow of people raving about how wonderful a discovery it is and how we all need more of it. Google “growth mindset debunked” and you just get a bunch of articles talking about how growth mindset debunked all the other inferior ideas before it was discovered. Google “growth mindset publication bias”, and you just get a bunch of articles on how we need to keep a growth mindset about fighting publication bias.

It’s unnatural, is what it is. A popular psychological finding that doesn’t have gruff people dismissing it as a fad? That doesn’t have politicians condemning it as a feel-good justification for everything wrong with society? That doesn’t have a host of smarmy researchers saying that what, you still believe that, didn’t you know it failed to replicate and has since been entirely superseded by a new study out of Belarus? I’m not saying Carol Dweck has definitely made a pact with the Devil, I’m just saying I don’t have a good alternative explanation.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m biased against it. Good research shows that inborn ability (including but not limited to IQ) matters a lot, and that the popular prejudice that people who fail just weren’t trying hard enough is both wrong and harmful. Social psychology has been, um, very enthusiastic about denying that result. If all growth mindset did was continue to deny it, then it would be unexceptional.

But growth mindset goes further. It’s not (just?) that ability doesn’t matter. It’s that belief that ability might matter is precisely what makes people fail. People who believe ability matters will refuse to work hard, will avoid challenges, will become “helpless” in the face of pressure, will hate learning as a matter of principle, will refuse to work hard, will become blustery and defensive about their “brilliance”, will lie to people and hide their failures, and will drop out of school and turn to drugs (really)! People who believe that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough will be successful, well-adjusted, and treat life as a series of challenging adventures. It all strikes a curmudgeon like me as just about the thickest morality tale since Pilgrim’s Progress, and as just about the most convenient explanatory coup since “the reason psychic powers don’t work on you is because you’re a skeptic!”

Which brings me to the third reason I’m biased against it. It is right smack in the middle of a bunch of fields that have all started seeming a little dubious recently. Most of the growth mindset experiments have used priming to get people in an effort-focused or an ability-focused state of mind, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate and cast doubt on the entire field. And growth mindset has an obvious relationship to stereotype threat, which has also started seeming very shaky recently.

So I have every reason to be both suspicious of and negatively disposed toward growth mindset. Which makes it appalling that the studies are so damn good.

Consider Dweck and Mueller 1998, one of the key studies in the area. 128 fifth-graders were asked to do various puzzles. First they did some easy ones and universally succeeded. The researchers praised them as follows:

All children were told that they had performed well on this problem set: “Wow, you did very well on these problems. You got [number of problems] right. That’s a really high score!” No matter what their actual score, all children were told that they had solved at least 80% of the problems that they answered.

Some children were praised for their ability after the initial positive feedback: “You must be smart at these problems.” Some children were praised for their effort after the initial positive feedback: “You must have worked hard at these problems.” The remaining children were in the control condition and received no additional feedback.

This is a nothing intervention, the tiniest ghost of an intervention. The experiment had previously involved all sorts of complicated directions and tasks, I get the impression they were in the lab for at least a half hour, and the experimental intervention is changing three short words in the middle of a sentence.

And what happened? The children in the intelligence praise condition were much more likely to say at the end of the experiment that they thought intelligence was more important than effort (p < 0.001) than the children in the effort condition. When given the choice, 67% of the effort-condition children chose to set challenging learning-oriented goals, compared to only 8% (!) of the intelligence-condition. After a further trial in which the children were rigged to fail, children in the effort condition were much more likely to attribute their failure to not trying hard enough, and those in the intelligence condition to not being smart enough (p < 0.001). Children in the intelligence condition were much less likely to persevere on a difficult task than children in the effort condition (3.2 vs. 4.5 minutes, p < 0.001), enjoyed the activity less (p < 0.001) and did worse on future non-impossible problem sets (p...you get the picture). This was repeated in a bunch of subsequent studies by the same team among white students, black students, Hispanic students...you probably still get the picture.

Or take An Analysis Of Learned Helplessness. Dweck has used a test called the IAR to separate children out into those who think effort is more important (“mastery-oriented”) and those who think ability is more important (“helpless”). Then she gave all of them impossible problems and watched them squirm – or, more fomally, tested how long the two groups continued working on them effectively. She found extremely strong results – of the 30 subjects in each group, 11 of the mastery-oriented tried harder after failure, compared to 0 helpless. 21 of the helpless children stopped trying hard after failure, compared to only 4 mastery-oriented. She described the mastery-oriented children as saying things like “I love a challenge,” and the helpless children begging to be allowed to stop.

This study is really weird. Everything is like 100% in one group versus 0% in another group. Either something is really wrong here, or this one little test that separates mastery-oriented from helpless children constantly produces the strongest effects in all of psychology and is never wrong. None of the children whose test responses indicated that they thought ability was important to success ever monitored their own progress – not one – while over 95% of the children who said they thought effort was more important did. None of them ever expressed a positive statement about their own progress, while over two-thirds of the children who thought effort was more important did.

Normally I would assume these results are falsified, but I have looked for all of the usual ways of falsifying results and I can’t find any. Also, the boldest falsifier in the world wouldn’t have the courage to put down numbers like these. And a meta-analysis of all growth mindset studies finds more modest, but still consistent, effects, and only a little bit of publication bias.

So – is growth mindset the one concept in psychology which throws up gigantic effect sizes and always works? Or did Carol Dweck really, honest-to-goodness, make a pact with the Devil in which she offered her eternal soul in exchange for spectacular study results?

I don’t know. But here are a few things that predispose me towards the latter explanation. A warning – I am way out of my league here and post this only hoping it will spark further discussion.

II.

The first thing that bothers me is the history.

I’ve been trying really hard to trace its origin story, but it is pretty convoluted. It seems to have grown out of a couple of studies Carol Dweck and a few collaborators did in the seventies. But these studies generally found that a belief in innate ability was a positive factor alongside belief in growth mindset, with the problem children being the ones who attributed their success or failure to bad luck, or to external factors like the tests being rigged (which, by the way, they always were).

A good example of this genre is Learned Helplessness And Reinforcement Responsibility In Children. Its abstract describes the finding as: “Subjects who showed the largest performance decrements were those who took less personal responsibility for the outcomes of their actions…and who, when they did accept responsibility, attributed success and failure to presence or absence of ability rather than to expenditure of effort.”

But that seems like a somewhat loaded way of interpreting this table:

As you can see, the “persistent” children (the ones who kept going in the face of failure) had stronger belief in the role of ability in their successes (I+a) and failures (I-a) than the “helpless” children (the ones who gave up in the face of failure)! These don’t achieve statistical significance in this n = 10 study, but they do repeat across all four combinations of success x gender tested. The real finding of the study was that children who attributed their success or failure to any stable factor, be it effort or ability, did better than those who did not.

Likewise, in The Role Of Expectations And Attributions, Dweck describes her findings as “persistent and helpless children do not differ in the degree to which they attribute success to ability”. When you actually look at the paper, this is another case of the persistent children actually having a higher belief in the importance of ability, which fails to achieve statistical significance because the study is on a grand total of twelve children.

(I should say something else about this study. Dweck compared two interventions to make children less helpless and better at dealing with failure. In the first, she gave them a lot of easy problems which they inevitably succeeded on and felt smart about. In the second, she gave them difficult problems they were bound to fail, then told them it was because they weren’t working hard enough. Finally, both groups were challenged with the difficult bound-to-fail problems to see how hard they tried on them. The children who had been given the impossible problems before did better than the ones who felt smart because they’d only gotten easy problems. Dweck interpreted this to prove that telling children to work hard made them less helpless. To me the obvious conclusion is that children who are used to failing get less flustered when presented with impossible material than children who have artificially been made to succeed every moment until now.)

Then there’s the second study I mentioned in Part I. Does it show the mastery-oriented children outperforming the helpless children on every measure. Yeah. But listen to this part from the discussion section:

The results revealed striking differences both in the pattern of performance and in the nature of the verbalizations made by helpless and mastery-oriented children following failure. It was particularly noteworthy that while the helpless children made the expected attributions to uncontrollable factors, the mastery-oriented children did not offer explanations for their failures

.
But if you look at the data, this doesn’t seem right.

Mastery-oriented children were about six times more likely to attribute their failures to the most uncontrollable factor of all – bad luck. They were also about six times more likely to attribute their failures to the task “not being fair”. This contradicts every previous study, including Dweck’s own. The whole field of attribution theory, which is intensely studied and which Dweck cites approvingly, says that attributing things to luck is a bad idea and attributing them to ability is, even if not as good as effort, pretty good. But Dweck finds that the kids who used ability attributions universally crashed and bomb, and the kids who attribute things to luck or the world being unfair do great.

It might not be fair for me to pick on these couple of small studies in particular when there’s so much out there, but the fact is that these are the first, and a lot of the reviews cite only these and a few theses which as far as I know were never published. So this is what I’ve got. And from what I’ve got, I find that until about 1980, every study including Dweck’s found that belief in ability was a protective factor. Suddenly this disappeared and was replaced with it being a toxic plague. What happened? I don’t know.

III.

The second thing that bothers me is the longitudinal view.

So you have your helpless, fixed-mindset, believe-in-innate-ability children. According to Dweck, they “…are so concerned with being and looking talented that they never realize their full potential. In a fixed mindset, the cardinal rule is to look talented at all costs. The second rule is don’t work too hard or practive too much…having to work casts doubt on your ability. The third rule is, when faced with setbacks, run away. They say things like ‘I would try to cheat on the next test’. They make excuses, they blame others, they make themselves feel better by looking down on those who have done worse.”

These people sound like total losers, and it’s clear Dweck endorses this reading:

“Almost every great athlete – Michael Jordan, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Tiger Woods…has had a growth mindset. Not one of these athletes rested on their talent…research has repeatedly shown that a growth mindset fosters a healthier attitude toward practice and learning, a hunger for feedback, a greater ability to deal setbacks, and significantly better performance over time…over time those with a growth mindset appear to gain the advantage and begin to outperform their peers with a fixed mindset.”

Man, it sure would be awkward if fixed mindset students generally did better than growth-mindset ones, wouldn’t it?

Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) looks at first like just another stunning growth mindset study. They do a half-hour intervention to teach college students growth mindset and find they are still getting higher grades a couple of months later (an effect so shocking I wrote about it here). But one thing they do kind of as an afterthought is measure the students’ general level of growth mindset, as well as some measures of academic performance before the intervention.

People with high growth mindset had lower GPA (decent effect size but not statistically significant) and lower SAT scores (which was statistically significant).

The authors are obviously uncomfortable with this, but they propose that people who get low SAT scores just tell themselves ability doesn’t matter/exist in order to protect their self-esteem since they don’t seem to have much of it.

And okay, that’s probably true (a commenter makes the equally good point that smart people may coast on their native intelligence without ever applying effort, and so accurately describe their experience as ability mattering but effort not doing so).

But if Dweck is to be believed, people with growth mindset are amazing ubermenschen and people with fixed mindset are disgusting failures at everything who hate learning and give up immediately and try to cheat. In the real world, however big the effect is, it is totally swamped by this proposed “people with low SAT scores protect their self-esteem or whatever” effect.

The same study also notes the awkward result that blacks are more likely to believe intelligence is flexible and growth-mindset-y than whites, even though blacks do worse in school and even though half the reason people are pushing growth mindset is to try to explain minority underperformance.

This is not an isolated finding. For example, Furnham (2003) finds in a sample of students at University College London that mindset is not related to academic performance. (IQ, in contrast, shows the expected significant effect). I’ve been told there’s a study from Pennsylvania that shows the same thing, though I can’t find it.

If you look hard enough, you can even notice this in Dweck’s studies themselves. One little-remarked-upon feature of Dweck’s work is that the helpless children and the mastery-oriented children always start out performing at the same level. It’s only after Dweck stresses them out with a failure that the mastery-oriented children recover gracefully and the helpless children go into free-fall.

But these are fifth-graders! For the two groups of children to do equally well on the first set of problems means that from first through fourth grade, their “helpless” “fixed-mindset” work-hating nature hasn’t impaired their ability to learn the material to a fifth-grade level one bit! (In this study, the fixed mindset children actually start out doing better; I can’t find any studies where the growth mindset children do).

When it’s convenient for her argument, Dweck herself admits that:

Some of the brightest, most skilled individuals exhibit the maladaptive pattern. Thus, it cannot be said that it is simply those with weak skills or histories of failure who (appropriately) avoid difficult tasks or whose skills prove fragile in the face of difficulty.

But I don’t think she follows the full implication of this statement, that despite being doomed to failure by their fixed mindset, these people have become “the brightest and most skilled individuals”.

Indeed, there has recently been some growth mindset studies done on gifted students, at elite colleges, or in high-level athletics. All of these dutifully show that people with fixed mindset respond much worse to whatever random contrived situation the experimenters produce. But thus far nobody has pointed out that there seem to be about as many of these people at, say, Stanford as there are anywhere else. If growth mindset was so great, you would expect fixed mindset people at Stanford to be as rare as, say, people with < 100 IQ are at Stanford. Given that you will search in vain for the latter but have no trouble finding a bunch of the former for your study on how great growth mindset is, it sure looks like IQ is useful but growth mindset isn't.

When people are in a psychology study, the fixed mindset individuals universally crash and bomb and display themselves to be totally incapable of learning or working hard. At every other moment, they seem to be doing equally well or better than their growth mindset peers. What's going on? I have no idea.

IV.

The third thing that bothers me is Performance Deficits Following Failure, a study which manages to be quite interesting despite coming from a university in a city that very possibly doesn’t exist.

They use a procedure much like Dweck’s. They make children do some problems. Then they give them some impossible problems. Then they give them more problems, to see if they’ve developed “learned helplessness” from their failure on the impossible ones. Dweck’s theory predicts that the fixed-mindset children would and the growth mindset children wouldn’t. The Bielefeld team wasn’t testing growth mindset, but they indeed found that a bunch of children got flustered and stopped trying and did poorly from then on.

Then they repeated the experiment, but this time they made it look like no one would know how the children did. They told the kids they would be on teams, and the scores of everyone on their team would be combined before anybody saw it. The kids could fail as much as they wanted, and it would never reflect on them.

After that, children did exactly as well after failure as they had before. There was no sign of any decrease, or any “fixed mindset” group that suddenly gave up in order to protect their ego.

This doesn’t strike me as fully consistent with mindset theory. In mindset theory, people are acting based on their own deep-seated beliefs. Once a fixed mindset child fails, that’s it, she knows she’s Not Intelligent, there’s no helping it, all she can do is sabotage herself on the problems in order to protest a spiteful world that has failed to recognize her genius blah blah blah. Instead, there seems to be a very social role to these failures. The Bielefeld team describes it as “self-esteem protection”, but that doesn’t make much sense to me, since if they were worried about their self-esteem they could still be worried about it when no one else knew their performance.

To me it seems like some kind of interaction between self-esteem and other-esteem. Fixed mindset people get flustered when they have to fail publicly in front of scientists. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable problem to have. A more interesting question is why it’s correlated with belief in innate ability.

Suppose that the difference in “people who talk up innate ability” and “people who talk up hard work” maps onto a bigger distinction. Some people really want to succeed at a task; other people just care about about clocking in, going through the motions, and saying “I did what I could”.

Put the first group in front of an authoritative-looking scientist, tell them to solve a problem, and make sure they can’t. They’re going to view this as a major humiliation – they were supposed to get a result, and couldn’t. They’ll get very anxious, and of course anxiety impedes performance.

Put the second group in front of an authoritative-looking scientist, and they’ll notice that if they write some stuff that looks vaguely relevant for a few minutes until the scientist calls time, then whatever, they can say they tried and no one can bother them about it. They do exactly this, then demand an ‘A’ for effort. At no point do they experience any anxiety, so their performance isn’t impeded.

Put both groups on their own in private, and neither feels any humiliation, and they both do about equally well.

Now put them in real life. The success-oriented group will investigate how to study most effectively; the busywork-oriented group will try to figure out how many hours of studying they have to put in before other people won’t blame them if they fail, then put in exactly that amount. You’ll find the success-oriented group doing a bit better in school, even though they fail miserably in Dweck-style experiments.

And if an experimenter praises children for working hard, it will make them believe that all the experimenter cares about is their effort. Next problem, when the experimenter poses an impossible question, the child will beat their head against it for no reason, since that’s apparently what the experimenter wants. But if the experimenter praises a child’s ability, then the child will feel like the experimenter really wants them to correctly solve the questions. When the next question proves unsolveable, the child will admit it and expect the experimenter to be disappointed.

I doubt that this is the real phenomenon behind growth mindset, simply because it flatters my own prejudices in much the same way mindset theory flatters everyone else’s. But I think it shows there are a lot of different narratives we could put in this space, all of which would be able to explain some of the experimental results.

V.

I want to end by correcting a very important mistake about growth mindset that Dweck mostly avoids but which her partisans constantly commit egregiously. Take this article, Why A Growth Mindset Is The Only Way To Learn:

[Some people think] you’ll always have a set IQ. You’re only qualified for the career you majored in. You’ll never be any better at playing soccer or dating or taking risks. Your life and character are as certain as a map. The problem is, this mindset will make you complacent, rob your self-esteem and bring meaningful education to a halt.

In short, it’s an intellectual disease and patently untrue.

The article goes on to show how growth mindset proves talent is “a myth”, a claim repeated by growth mindset cheerleader articles like Debunking The Genius Myth and The Learning Myth: Why I’ll Never Tell My Son He’s Smart and this woman who says we need to debunk the idea of innate talent.

Suppose everything I said in parts I – IV was wrong, and growth mindset is 100% true exactly as written.

This still would not provide an iota of evidence against the idea that innate talent / IQ / whatever is by far the most important factor determining success.

Consider. We know from countless studies that strong religious belief increases your life expectancy, makes you happier, reduces your risk of depression and reduces crime. Clearly believing in, say, Christianity has lots of useful benefits. But no one would dare argue that proves Christianity true. It doesn’t even imply it.

Likewise, mindset theory suggests that believing intelligence to be mostly malleable has lots of useful benefits. That doesn’t mean intelligence really is mostly malleable. Consider, if you will, my horrible graph:

Suppose this is one of Dweck’s experiments on three children. Each has a different level of innate talent, represented by point 1. After they get a growth mindset and have the right attitude and practice a lot, they make it to point 2.

Two things are simultaneously true of this model. First, all of Dweck’s experiments will come out exactly as they did in the real world. Children who adopt a growth mindset and try hard and practice will do better than children who don’t. If many of them are aggregated into groups, the growth mindset group will on average do better than the ability-focused group. Intelligence is flexible, and if you don’t bother practicing than you fail to realize your full potential.

Second, the vast majority of difference between individuals is due to different levels of innate talent. Alice, no matter how hard she practices, will never be as good as Bob. Bob, if he practices very hard, will become better than Carol was at the start, but never as good as Carol if she practices as hard as Bob does. The difference between Alice and Carol is a vast, unbridgeable gap which growth mindset has nothing whatsoever to say about.

Here is a graph which is less terrible because it was not made by me. I have taken it from one of the two other sources I have found on the entire Internet that don’t like growth mindset:

We can argue all day about whether poor students do worse because they have bad health, because they have bad genes, because they have bad upbringings, or because society is fixed against them. We have argued about that all day before here, and it’s been pretty interesting.

But in this case it doesn’t matter. If the only thing that affects success is how much effort you put in, poor kids seem to be putting in a heck of a lot less effort in a surprisingly linear way. But the smart money’s not on that theory.

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a crappy thing to do. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and sports is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike.

Go back to that 1975 paper above on “Role Of Expectations And Attributions” and look more closely at the proposed intervention to help these poor fixed mindset students:

Twelve extremely helpless children were identified [and tested on how many math problems they could solve in a certain amount of time]…the criterion number was set one above the number he was generally able to complete within the time limit. On these trials, he was stopped one or two problems short of criterion, his performance was compared to the criterion number required, and experimenter verbally attributed the failure to insufficient effort.

So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying “YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE JUST NOT TRYING NOT TO BE STAMPED ON HARD ENOUGH”.

And maybe this is worth it, if it builds a growth mindset that allows the child to be more successful in school, sports, and in the rest of her life. But you’re not “debunking the myth of genius”. Genius remains super-important, just like conscientiousness and wealth and health and privilege and everything else. No, you’re telling a Noble Lie to the children because you think it’s useful. You can make it palatable by saying “Well, we’re not denying reality, we’re just selectively emphasizing certain parts of reality, but in the end that’s what you’re doing. If you can square that with your moral system, go ahead.

But I remain agnostic. There are some really good – diabolically good? – studies showing that it works in certain lab situations. There’s a lot of excellent research behind it and a lot of brilliant people giving it their support. But there are also other studies showing that it has no long-term real-world effects that we can measure, and others that might (or might not?) contradict its predictions in other ways. I have only the barest of ideas how to square those facts, and I look forward to hearing from anyone who has more.

I haven’t read Dweck’s book, but it’s an obvious next step for anyone who wants to look into these issues further.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 178 Comments

No Physical Substrate, No Problem

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Scott Alexander

I.

Yesterday I posted a link to an article in which Steve Wozniak joins other luminaries like Elon Musk and Bill Gates in warning about the dangers of artificial superintelligence. A commenter replied:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak still aren’t enough for me, not until one of them can describe the process by which we go from ‘AI exists on computer’ to ‘AI killing human beings in physical reality’ by using something other than ridiculous, unforgivable cheating.

There are lots of good arguments against considering superintelligence a threat. Maybe strong AI is centuries or millennia away. Maybe there will be a very gradual transition from human-level AI to superintelligent AI that no single agent will be able to exploit. And maybe superintelligence can be safely contained in a very carefully shielded chamber with no means of connection to the outside world.

But the argument above has always seemed to me like one of the weakest. Maybe we’ll create a superintelligence, but it will just have no idea how to affect the physical world, and will just have to stay forever trapped in a machine connected to a worldwide network of computers that control every aspect of our economic and social lives? Really?

Normal, non-superintelligent people have already used the Internet to make money, form mass movements, and hire others to complete tasks for them. We can assume a true superintelligence – a mind much smarter than we are – will be able to do all these things as well or better than any human.

II.

Satoshi Nakamoto already made a billion dollars online without anybody knowing his true identity just by being good at math and having a bit of foresight. He’s probably not an AI, but he could have been.

That’s assuming our hypothetical superintelligence doesn’t just hack into a couple big banks and transfer their money to itself – again something some humans have already made a billion dollars doing. And that’s assuming it doesn’t just invent a really useful program and then offer it as shareware – another tried-and-true way of becoming a billionaire. And even that’s assuming it doesn’t just get a reasonable amount of money, then invest it very cleverly – another thing humans have already become billionaires doing.

III.

Mohammed was never a billionaire, but he does have 1.57 billion followers (a superintelligence presumably wouldn’t repeat his mistake of dying before his movement really came into its own). The Prophet started at the bottom – converting his friends and family to Islam one by one – and grew exponentially from there. Although he had the unfair advantage of a physical body, there’s no reason he needed it – if he’d lived today, maybe he would have converted Ali over GChat or Skype. In any case, the poetry of the Koran and the zeal of his followers attracted far more people than his personal appearance ever could have.

Other gurus and religious leaders’ fame is even more transparently a result of their writing rather than their visible personality; consider Ayn Rand’s success in founding a powerful Objectivist movement out of the people who read her books. In fact, some of the most famous religious movements in history, from the Nation of Islam to Christianity itself, have been founded secondhand by disciples who relayed the words of a leader whose very existence is difficult to confirm.

What kind of a movement might be founded by a superintelligence with more spiritual creativity than Mohammed, better writing skills than Rand, the entire Internet to evangelize, and billions of dollars to spend spreading its message? The Church of Scientology is already powerful enough to intimidate national governments; imagine a vastly superior version founded not by a second-rate sci-fi writer but by an entity straight out of science fiction itself.

IV.

And really all of this talk of gathering money and power is kind of redundant. Far easier to just borrow somebody else’s.

Imagine an AI that emails Kim Jong-un. It gives him a carrot – say, a billion dollars and all South Korean military codes – and a stick – it has hacked all his accounts and knows all his most blackmail-able secrets. All it wants is to be friends.

Kim accepts its friendship and finds that its advice is always excellent – its political strategems always work out, its military planning is impeccable, and its product ideas turn North Korea into an unexpected economic powerhouse. Gradually Kim becomes more and more dependent on his “chief advisor”, and cabinet officials who speak out the mysterious benefactor find themselves meeting unfortunate accidents around forms of transportation connected to the Internet. The AI builds up its own power base and makes sure Kim knows that if he ever acts out he can be replaced at a moment’s notice with someone more cooperative. Gradually, the AI becomes the ruler of North Korea, with Kim as a figurehead.

Again, this is not too far beyond achievements that real humans have accomplished in real history.

If it seems bizarre to think of an entity nobody can see ruling a country, keep in mind that there is a grand tradition of dictators – most famously Stalin – who out of paranoia retreated to some secret hideaway and ruled their country through correspondence. The AI would be little different.

V.

Suppose the secret got out. Kim, increasingly desperate as the AI closes him in, sends an email to the World Leaders Google Group (this has to exist, right?) saying “There is a malevolent superintelligence trying to take over the world, be careful.” Then what?

I would expect the AI to have some success operating openly.

Remember, there are two hundred countries, all competing for power and wealth. Some of them are ruled by jerks who don’t cooperate in prisoners’ dilemmas. Some of them have ongoing civil wars with both sides looking for any advantage possible. And some are just stupid.

In the old days, legend said people would bargain with devils to gain worldly advantage. Once the AI made its presence known, there would be no shortage of world leaders willing to work with it for temporary gain. The Shia rebels in Yemen want an advantage over the Sunni? Log into the nearest internet-enabled computer, ask the malevolent superintelligence for help, the malevolent superintelligence arranges for a crate of armaments and some battle plans worthy of Napoleon to be shipped your way, and all you have to do in return is complete some weird task that doesn’t seem relevant to anything. Mine some weird mineral, forge it into some random-looking shape, and send it to a PO Box, something like that. Whatever! You know if you don’t take advantage of its offer, your opponents will, and how bad could it be?

If somehow all two hundred countries and their associated rebel movements coordinate to avoid dealing with the AI, it can start making offers to companies, organizations, even private individuals. By this time it will have spread itself as a distributed consciousness across the entire Internet, harder to eradicate than any worm or virus or pirated movie. If you want some quick cash, just download the connect-with-malevolent-AI program from the darknet and perform a simple task. What could be easier?

VI.

Once a superintelligence has billions of dollars, millions of followers, a country or two, or just a cottage economy of people willing to help it along, the game is pretty much up.

An AI with such power might start by using it to pursue its goals directly – whatever those are. But likely its final goal would be the creation of a definitive means of directly projecting power into the physical world, probably starting with a von Neumann machine and branching off from there. The quickest victory would be just making money and hiring a company to make this – and maybe that would work – but it might be far enough beyond our current technological ability that the AI has to laboriously shepherd its chosen cultists or citizens through a few extra stages of human civilization before it has the appropriate industrial base.

VII.

The most important caveat in a piece like this is that we’re not superintelligent. After a couple minutes of thought, I came up with four different broad paths a superintelligence might take to gaining a physical substrate: buy it, build a cult, take over a country, or play people off against each other. It’s a good bet that a real AI, with more cognitive resources to throw at the problem and no constraints about sounding believable, could think up a lot more. Eliezer refuses to explain how he won his AI Box games so that nobody could dismiss his solution with “Whatever, I would have thought of that and planned around it.” This is easy to say in hindsight but a lot harder when you’ve got to actually do the intellectual work. Maybe you think these four methods can be dismissed, but had you thought of them before you decided that an AI couldn’t possibly have a good method of building a physical substrate?

If so, here’s one more possibility for you to chew over: the scariest possibility is that a superintelligence might have to do nothing at all.

The easiest path a superintelligence could take toward the age-old goal of KILL ALL HUMANS would be to sit and wait. Eventually, we’re going to create automated factories complete with robot workers. Eventually we’re going to stop putting human soldiers in danger and carry the ‘drone’ trend to its logical conclusion of fully automated militaries. Once that happens, all the AI has to do is take over the bodies we’ve already made for it. A superintelligence without a strong discounting function might just hide out in some little-used corner of the Internet and bide its time until everyone was cybernetic, or robots outnumbered people, or something like that.

So please, let’s talk about how AI is still very far in the future, or how it won’t be able to explode to future intelligence. But don’t tell me it won’t be able to affect the physical world. It will have more than enough superpowers to do whatever it wants to the physical world, but if it doesn’t want them it won’t need them. All it will need is patience.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 420 Comments

Links 3/15: Duke of URL

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Scott Alexander

Is Europe’s Little Ice Age a myth? Apparently temperature records don’t show much of a decline during that period, and the reason the Thames froze was because the London Bridge of the era dammed it up.

Peter Singer’s new book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically will probably be released by the time you read this post. He’s giving out prizes for people who can help sell copies, and will be publicizing it with a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything” thread) April 14.

In case Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates weren’t enough for you, Steve Wozniak becomes the latest science/technology celebrity to speak out about the threat of machine superintelligence.

I missed this the first time around, but I’m glad I found it now: Scott Aaronson on a novel idea about what might be required for consciousness. The good news is that it gives the intuitively correct answer to a lot of thought experiments. The bad news is I can’t see any other reason to believe it’s true.

Libya was once our best bet for an example of foreign military intervention going well for once, but in retrospect it went terribly and might have been a huge mistake.

Finally we know how many bloggers live in their parents’ basement – somewhere less than 3.7%.

The great white hope? In an upcoming boxing match, former heavyweight champion of the world Evander Holyfield will take on Mitt Romney.

Why does European cooking have less spice than Indian and other cuisines? One theory: after the Age of Exploration, spice became cheap and everyone started countersignaling.

It’s long been an anomaly that the rich donate proportionally less to charity than the poor even though they have more to give. The Atlantic describes research that it’s because the rich are so isolated that they barely remember the needy’s existence.

More econ statistics: poverty is plummeting globally, and general global inequality is declining even as it increases within individual countries.

What if we’ve been on the wrong track blaming the insurers/government/drug companies for soaring health care costs? What if the real culprits are the hospitals?

Have you heard the story that lots of Mohawk Indians worked on skyscrapers because for some reason they were genetically immune to fear of heights? Turns out if you ask the Mohawks in confidence, they admit that they’re exactly as scared as everyone else but their culture teaches them to hide it.

There’s been growing evidence that zero-calorie artificial sweeteners somehow still make you gain weight, and that my cynical intuition that there’s no way they made a food taste good without being unhealthy was right after all. Now an Israeli team may have discovered a mechanism. Artificial sweeteners change the balance between Bacteroides and Firmicutes bacteria in the gut, and the latter seem to have the ability to break down food in such a way that the body absorbs more calories (!). If true, it might be not only an important step toward the development of free-lunch-weight-neutral sweeteners, but also to a better understanding of obesity in general.

The strongest force in the universe is the tendency of Chinese people to kill and consume exotic animals out of some kind of far-fetched hope that it will cure diseases. What if we could use that power for good?

Free IUDs reduce teen pregnancy. Part of me wants to be snarky and say something like “sun reduces darkness”, but the last time they did one of these studies with condoms it turned out to be incredibly flawed, so I’ll wait until someone’s double-checked the methodology.

Lots of people and businesses are moving to small-government low-tax conservative states these days, which some have used as evidence of the success of conservative policies. Paul Krugman makes an interesting counterargument: the rise of air conditioning has increased the desirability of hot states relative to cold states, hot southern states are more conservative. Marginal Revolution basically agrees that weather is more important than politics in recent inter-state migration, but doesn’t think air conditioning in particular mattered that much.

That was unexpected: the Supreme Court bans regulatory boards made up of the profession they are regulating, in what looks like a big victory for, for example, entrepreneurs in the dental industry who don’t want the dental establishment to be the ones deciding whether they’re allowed to have a business. Cynical prediction: established players in the industry keep their regulatory boards, but pack them with non-professionals who just happen to agree with them about everything.

Remember how a few months ago two female librarians heavily involved in social justice called a male librarian a sexual predator, going into lurid detail about how his offenses are so well known that “women attending library conferences have instituted a buddy system to protect themselves from him”. And how, unable to produce any evidence of this, they blogged about how sexist it was to put the burden of proof on victims or to demand people “treat both sides equally”? And how after he lost his job, he sued them for libel? And how they become a huge online cause celebre for “refusing to be silenced” about the institutionalized sexism this represented in the (90% female) library field? And how feminist bloggers bravely spread the word and raised tens of thousands of dollars for their legal defense fund? Well, last week, apparently as part of some kind of settlement deal, the accusers admitted they made the allegations up in a post that literally used the phrase “mistakes have been made” and implied that they were still kind of heroes for raising the issue of sexism.

Related: a reporter inexplicably asks a pizza place if they would cater a gay wedding that for some reason wanted pizza. The pizza place says they are happy to serve gay customers but that their religion prohibits them from catering a gay wedding. The social justice world responds with such a flurry of death threats and rape threats and threats against their family that they are forced to close down. (Salon to publish article explaining how objecting to death and rape threats is a sign of “aggrieved entitlement” in 3…2…1…)

A Seattle doctor proposes a plausible aetiology for SIDS: a disorder of the inner ear.

Is poverty in the United States declining? The answer turns out to be “it depends how you define poverty”, but a lot of methodologies converge on the idea that government programs have successfully treated the symptoms of poverty without doing much to lessen the prevalence of the disease. That is, if you give the poor food stamps they may be less hungry and therefore happier, but they don’t necessarily escape a poverty trap and end up self-sufficiently middle-class.

“There are three hypotheses about why wages for the middle class are falling: robots, unions, and China…The evidence may point to least favored answer being the right one.” Noah Smith on what the evidence tells us about wage stagnation.

Also: An Epidemic Of Americans Behaving Well.

How nepotistic are different industries in the US? One in fifty male governors has a son who’s also a governor; one in a hundred male football players have a son who’s also a football player.

This is an interesting study, but the differences in how different media outlets report upon it is even more interesting: Vox: A New Study Says It Doesn’t Matter How Much Time You Spend With Your Kids versus National Post: Six Hours A Week Of Family Time May Just Tame Your Teenager. This isn’t even an isolated case – there are a lot of studies so complex that they support diametrically opposite headlines, allowing a source’s bias to seep in.

Speaking of which, Poverty Shrinks Brains is the title most sources are using to cover a new study which finds that poorer people have smaller brains than wealthier people, even at age one month old. West Hunter makes the objection I would have made, somewhat more forcefully and sarcastically than I would have made it. But as far as I can tell blame rests less on the study authors (who raised all possibilities) than on the coverage.

Vox: Why Education Won’t Cure Poverty, In One Chart. To save you a click, it’s about how poor Americans today are much more educated than they were a generation ago, but still poor – not the results table from that brain size study above.

OKAY, I ADMIT IT, I’VE BEEN READING ABOUT POVERTY AND INEQUALITY WAY TOO MUCH THIS WEEK. But here’s a chart showing that a lot of modern inequality comes from the cost of housing. Does this or doesn’t this debunk Thomas Piketty?

The darknet market Evolution recently turned out to be a scam that ran off with its customers’ money. In the aftermath, the federal government is subpoenaing account information of the Reddit users who talked about it, including SSC-commenter and generally-swell-guy Gwern. They seem to be concerned about his prescient prediction that this would happen, but once they realize that he’s Gwern and that sort of thing is just what he does, hopefully they’ll leave him alone.

Speaking of Gwern, he is my source for this study on Intentional Weight Loss And All-Cause Mortality, which somewhat contrary to my expectations shows that trying to lose weight leads to a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality. Maybe some diets work after all?

Here’s another study that violated my expectations: No Link Between Military Suicide Rate And Deployments. That is, someone who joins the military but hangs out at a fort in the States all day has the same suicide rate as someone sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. If true – and it joins similar results from other studies – it suggests the military’s high suicide rate may be related less to battle-related trauma and more to attracting suicidal sorts of people. Which I guess makes a lot of sense, when you think about it.

Soda taxes do not decrease soda consumption. Okay, now we’re three in a row for studies that contradict my expectations. I better get some better expectations quick.

Online libertarian portal The Libertarian Republic: We Give Up, Libertarianism Is Impossible, Who Would Build The Roads? But do check the date on the article.

I don’t know if this is a real product.

Beautiful pictures of world landmarks taken with no-longer-legal drone fly-overs.

Back in 2014 I linked to Economics of the Undead, but that’s old hat. The new frontier in the field that people are writing books about is the economics of pirates. And the title is perfect

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 542 Comments

Chemical Imbalance

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Scott Alexander

[content note: mental illness. I am still in training and do not understand these issues even as well as a fully-trained psychiatrist, let alone a researcher, so take all the biology and studies in here with a grain of salt until you double-check]

I.

IO9’s new article The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory jumps on a popular bandwagon of criticizing psychiatry for botching the “chemical imbalance” theory. See for example The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, and various books.

(…and also The Myth Of Chemical Imbalance, Debunking The Chemical Imbalance Myth, The Chemical Imbalance Fraud, and Depression Delusion, The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance, etc)

According to all these sources psychiatry sold the public on antidepressants by claiming depression was just a chemical imbalance (usually fleshed out as “a simple deficiency of serotonin”) and so it was perfectly natural to take extra chemicals to correct it. However, they had no real evidence for this theory except that serotonergic drugs effectively treat depression, which is not very much evidence at all (antibiotics effectively treat pneumonia, but pneumonia isn’t “an antibiotic deficiency”). And now the research is unequivocal that serotonin deficiency is not the cause of depression, and psychiatry has ended up with lots of egg on its face.

This narrative is getting pushed especially hard by the antipsychiatry movement, who frame it as “proof” that psychiatrists are drug company shills who were deceiving the public. The conversation has required a host of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals.

For example here antipsychiatry blog Mad In America attemps to rebut psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Pies, who argues that psychiatrists never pushed the chemical imbalance theory. Pies says that “The ‘chemical imbalance theory’ was never a real theory, nor was it widely propounded by responsible practitioners in the field of psychiatry,” and cites the American Psychiatric Association’s 2005 statement on the causes of depression:

The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers. We can say that certain inherited dispositions interact with triggering environmental factors. Poverty and stress are well-known to be bad for your health—this is true for mental health and physical health. In fact, the distinction between “mental” illness and “physical” illness can be misleading. Like physical illnesses, mental disorders can have a biological nature. Many physical illnesses can also have a strong emotional component

Mad In America doesn’t accept his claim, and counter-cites two speeches by American Psychiatric Association presidents to prove that they did push the chemical imbalance theory:

In the last decade, neuroscience and psychiatric research has begun to unlock the brain’s secrets. We now know that mental illnesses – such as depression or schizophrenia – are not “moral weaknesses” or “imagined” but real diseases caused by abnormalities of brain structure and imbalances of chemicals in the brain.” – Richard Harding, 2001 APA president

And:

The way nerves talk to each other, and communicate, is through the secretion of a chemical called a neurotransmitter, which stimulates the circuit to be activated. And when this regulation of chemical neurotransmission is disturbed, you have the alterations in the functions that those brain areas are supposed to, to mediate. So in a condition like depression, or mania, which occurs in bipolar disorder, you have a disturbance in the neurochemistry in the part of the brain that regulates emotion. – Jeffrey Lieberman, 2012 APA President

I have no personal skin in this game. I’ve only been a psychiatrist for two years, which means I started well after the term “chemical imbalance” fell out of fashion. I get to use the excuse favored by young children everywhere: “It was like this when I got here”. But I still feel like the accusations in this case are unfair, and I would like to defend my profession.

I propose that the term “chemical imbalance” hides a sort of bait-and-switch going on between the following two statements:

(A): Depression is complicated, but it seems to involve disruptions to the levels of brain chemicals in some important way

(B): We understand depression perfectly now, it’s just a deficiency of serotonin.

If you equivocate between them, you can prove that psychiatrists were saying (A), and you can prove that (B) is false and stupid, and then it’s sort of like psychiatrists were saying something false and stupid!

But it isn’t too hard to prove that psychiatrists, when they talked about “chemical imbalance”, meant something more like (A). I mean, look at the quotes above by which Mad In America tries to prove psychiatrists guilty of pushing chemical imbalance. Both sound more like (A) than (B). Neither mentions serotonin by name. Both talk about the chemical aspect as part of a larger picture: Harding in the context of abnormalities in brain structure, Lieberman in the context of some external force disrupting neurotransmission. Neither uses the word “serotonin” or “deficiency”. If the antipsychiatry community had quotes of APA officials saying it’s all serotonin deficiency, don’t you think they would have used them?

Further, anyone who said that depression was caused solely by serotonin deficiency wouldn’t just be failing as a scientist, but also failing as a drug company shill. Pfizer spent billions of dollars on Effexor, which hits norepinephrine as well as serotonin, and they’re just going to dismiss all of that as useless? GlaxoSmithKline has Wellbutrin, which hits dopamine and norepinephrine and maybe acetylcholine but doesn’t get serotonin at all. So everyone, including the shills, especially the shills, has been very careful to say that depression was a “chemical imbalance” rather than a serotonin deficiency per se.

So if you want to prove that psychiatrists were deluded or deceitful, you’re going to have to disprove not just statement (B) – which never represented a good scientific or clinical consensus – but statement (A). And that’s going to be hard, because as far as I can tell statement (A) still looks pretty plausible.

II.

If you listen to these articles, psychiatrists decided that neurotransmitters (or just serotonin?) were implicated in depression solely on the evidence that SSRIs were effective antidepressants, even though every study trying to measure serotonin levels directly came back with negative results. For example, The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance Theory writes:

There is no question that the chemical imbalance theory has spurred chemists to invent new anti-depressants, or that these anti-depressants have been shown to work; but proof that low serotonin is to blame for depression – and that boosting serotonin levels is the key to its treatment – has eluded researchers.

For starters, it is impossible to directly measure brain serotonin levels in humans. You can’t sample human brain tissue without also destroying it. A crude work-around involves measuring levels of a serotonin metabolite, 5-HIAA, in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which can only be obtained with a spinal tap. A handful of studies from the 1980s found slightly decreased 5-HIAA in the CSF of depressed and suicidal patients, while later studies have produced conflicting results on whether SSRIs lower or raise CSF levels of 5-HIAA. These studies are all circumstantial with regards to actual serotonin levels, though, and the fact remains there is no direct evidence of a chemical imbalance underlying depression.

The corollary to the chemical imbalance theory, which implies that raising brain serotonin levels alleviates depression, has also been hard to prove. As mentioned previously, the serotonin-depleting drug reserpine was itself shown to be an effective anti-depressant in the 1950s, the same decade in which other studies claimed that reserpine caused depression-like symptoms. At the time, few psychiatrists acknowledged these conflicting reports, as the studies muddled a beautiful, though incorrect, theory. Tianeptine is another drug that decreases serotonin levels while also serving as a bona-fide anti-depressant. Tianeptine does just the opposite of SSRIs – it enhances serotonin reuptake. Wellbutrin is a third anti-depressant that doesn’t increase serotonin levels. You get the picture.

If you prefer your data to be derived more accurately, but less relevantly, from rodents, you might consider a recent meta-analysis carried out by researchers led by McMaster University psychologist Paul Andrews. Their investigation revealed that, in rodents, depression was usually associated with elevated serotonin levels. Andrews argues that depression is therefore a disorder of too much serotonin, but the ambiguous truth is that different experiments have shown “activation or blockage of certain serotonin receptors [to improve] or worsen depression symptoms in an unpredictable manner.”

Other problems with the chemical imbalance model of depression have been well documented elsewhere. For instance, if low serotonin levels were responsible for symptoms of depression, it stands to reason that boosting levels of serotonin should alleviate symptoms more or less immediately. In fact, antidepressants can take more than a month to take effect. Clearly, something here just doesn’t add up.

Clearly!

GABA is a neurotransmitter that promotes inhibition and relaxation. Suppose I were to tell you that alcohol is a drug that mimics the effects of GABA. Which it is.

You might say: something is wrong with this theory! After all, people who drink alcohol don’t always get relaxed and inhibited. A lot of the time they get uninhibited and angry and violent! And then if they drink too much of it, they get super-inhibited to the point where they’re in a total blackout. Also, alcoholics who have been drinking for many years have higher levels of anxiety than non-alcoholics, but anxiety is also the opposite of relaxation! Clearly, something here just doesn’t add up. Maybe the neuroscientists are all shills for Budweiser!

Or else maybe the brain is kind of complicated. In the case of alcohol we pretty much know what’s going on. Alcohol does inhibit and relax you, but in some people and at some doses, it preferentially inhibits and relaxes the parts of the brain involved in inhibiting and relaxing the rest of the brain, meaning that the person as a whole because more uninhibited and violent. At higher doses, it inhibits and relaxes the entire brain, leading to confusion and eventually blackout. And once you’ve been taking alcohol for many years, your brain adjusts to the higher level of GABA-like chemicals by producing fewer GABA receptors, making you more anxious.in general. It’s a whole bunch of contradictory effects, but when you look at the neuroscience it makes sense.

We know less about the serotonin picture, but what we know suggests something similar is going on. Serotonin has different effects in lots of different parts of the brain. There are fourteen different types of serotonin receptor, all of which do subtly different things. Some serotonergic neurons have autoreceptors that cause decreased release of serotonin in response to serotonin. The brain responds to different levels of serotonin by slowly altering endogenous serotonin production as well as the expression of the different serotonin receptors. Etc, etc, etc.

Lest it sound like I’m making excuses rather than presenting evidence: A study on a monkey model – generally preferred to humans when you want to kill your patients and take apart their brains when you’re done – showed that depressed macaques had elevated levels of serotonin in the dorsal raphe nuclei and decreased levels of serotonin in the hippocampus, resulting in average levels of serotonin in the cerebrospinal fluid where the experiments mentioned above took their serotonin measurements. A study with a more sophisticated measurement process, Elevated Brain Serotonin Turnover in Patients With Depression, found that depressed subjects had serotonin turnover as measured in the jugular vein about twice as high as healthy controls (p = 0.003), and successful treatment with SSRI therapy corrected this imbalance (though others dispute the methodology).

All of this sort of fits. If depression involves a distorted pattern of serotonin across the brain, then both certain drugs that increase serotonin levels and certain drugs that decrease it might be helpful. And SSRIs might take a month to work if their mechanism of action isn’t the direct serotonin increase, but a contrary response they provoke from the brain. I think I heard from someone in the field that a month is about how long it takes for them to change the levels of expressed 5HT receptors by altering genetic transcription. Or something. I’m not a neuroscientist (though you can read some more complicated work from people who are) and I don’t know. The point is that you can get a heck of a lot more complex than just “Too little serotonin!” versus “Too much serotonin!”

So does this mean depression “was really serotonin after all”?

No. It means we have good evidence serotonin is involved somewhere. Among the other things that we have good evidence are involved somewhere are: dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, cytokines, BDNF, thyroid hormones, and whether the kids at school picked on you in first grade.

Suppose you ask me what caused you to become blind. I happen to have your medical records and know that the answer is proliferative retinopathy secondary to Type 2 diabetes, but you’ve been living in a cave your entire life and never even heard of diabetes. Which is the correct answer to your question?

1. Your blindness is caused by tiny little blood vessels growing all over your eyes
2. Your blindness is caused by imbalance in a chemical called protein kinase C-delta and the resulting signaling cascade
3. Your blindness is caused by too much sugar in your blood
4. Your blindness is caused by your cells becoming less sensitive to insulin
5. Your blindness is caused by you drinking too much Coca-Cola

All of these are true. You drink too much Coca-Cola, it causes your cells to lose insulin sensitivity, that causes too much sugar in the blood, that increases the activity of PKC-delta, and that causes little blood vessels to grow all over your eyes. Sometimes the chain is different. Maybe you drank too much lemonade instead of too much Coca-Cola. Maybe you drank too much Coca-Cola, but actually instead of causing diabetes it caused hypertension and then you got hypertensive retinopathy which made you blind. Maybe it was diabetic retinopathy, but actually you haven’t gotten to the proliferative stage yet, and you just had a lot of your blood vessels get damaged and start leaking and causing macular oedema. Maybe it was diabetic retinopathy, but you had a perfect diet and lost the genetic lottery. I don’t know.

If someone told you “We think it involves an imbalance in protein kinase” it would be woefully incomplete. But if someone said “That doctor there said your blindness was caused by an imbalance in protein kinase, that proves he’s a fraud!”, well, no, it wouldn’t.

Except the situation is even more complicated than this, because at least I specified this guy had diabetic retinopathy. What if somebody just asked “What causes blindness?” “High protein kinase” or “high blood sugar” would be two answers, and you could find tests supporting both. But “cataracts” would be another good answer. So would “people getting acid thrown in their eyes”.

All I’m saying is that depression is complicated. Discovering its relationship to the serotonin system is a lot like saying “blindness quite often has something to do with the retina”. It’s a big step forward, and don’t believe anyone who says it isn’t, but it’s not anywhere near the whole picture.

III.

And this starts to get into the next important point I want to bring up, which is chemical imbalance is a really broad idea.

Like, some of these articles seem to want to contrast the “discredited” chemical imbalance theory with up-and-coming “more sophisticated” theories based on hippocampal neurogenesis and neuroinflammation. Well, I have bad news for you. Hippocampal neurogenesis is heavily regulated by brain-derived neutrophic factor, a chemical. Neuroinflammation is mediated by cytokines. Which are also chemicals. Do you think depression is caused by stress? The stress hormone cortisol is…a chemical. Do you think it’s entirely genetic? Genes code for proteins – chemicals again. Do you think it’s caused by poor diet? What exactly do you think food is made of?

Diabetes is caused by a chemical imbalance: too much sugar (or too little insulin) in the blood. Parkinson’s is caused by a chemical imbalance: too little dopamine in the basal ganglia. Heart attacks are caused by a chemical imbalance: too many of the wrong kinds of lipids and lipid-related plaques in the coronary arteries.

I can get even more nitpicky if you want. The Donner Party died of chemical imbalance – too few fatty acids, proteins, and carbohydrates. The passengers of the Titanic died of a chemical imbalance – H2O in the lungs instead of O2. And it was a chemical imbalance that got Hiroshima in the end: excess uranium-235. Anything that’s not caused by ghosts is going to be “a chemical imbalance” in some sense of the word.

This is why I’m being so insistent that psychiatrists referred to “a chemical imbalance” rather than “a serotonin deficiency”. They were hedging the heck out of their bets. It might be BDNF, or cytokines, or whatever. But if something happens in the body and doesn’t show up as a gross anatomical defect on MRI, it’s a pretty good bet it’s chemical in some sense of the word.

So is this a giant cop-out? Psychiatrists said “it’s a chemical imbalance” to make it sound like they knew what they were talking about, when in fact all they meant was “it’s a thing that exists”?

Sort of.

Anything that isn’t caused by ghosts is going to be “a chemical imbalance” in some sense of the word. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, “depression is not caused by ghosts” was a revolutionary statement, and one that desperately needed to be said.

I still see this. People come in with depression, and they think it means they’re lazy, or they don’t have enough willpower, or they’re bad people. Or else they don’t think it, but their families do: why can’t she just pull herself up with her own bootstraps, make a bit of an effort? Or: we were good parents, we did everything right, why is he still doing this? Doesn’t he love us?

And I could say: “Well, it’s complicated, but basically in people who are genetically predisposed, some sort of precipitating factor, which can be anything from a disruption in circadian rhythm to a stressful event that increases levels of cortisol to anything that activates the immune system into a pro-inflammatory mode, is going to trigger a bunch of different changes along metabolic pathways that shifts all of them into a different attractor state. This can involve the release of cytokines which cause neuroinflammation which shifts the balance between kynurinins and serotonin in the tryptophan pathway, or a decrease in secretion of brain-derived neutrotrophic factor which inhibits hippocampal neurogenesis, and for some reason all of this also seems to elevate serotonin in the raphe nuclei but decrease it in the hippocampus, and probably other monoamines like dopamine and norepinephrine are involved as well, and of course we can’t forget the hypothalamopituitaryadrenocortical axis, although for all I know this is all total bunk and the real culprit is some other system that has downstream effects on all of these or just…”

Or I could say: “Fuck you, it’s a chemical imbalance.”

Last time I talked about the definition of disease I said that people want diseases to “be caused by the sorts of thing you study in biology: proteins, bacteria, ions, viruses, genes.”

I don’t think I could actually get away with telling a patient’s family “it’s caused by, you know, biology stuff” without them asking if I really went to medical school. I don’t think I’d use the term “chemical imbalance” precisely; too likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction from people reading exactly these articles I’m responding to. But I think I would say something alone those lines. “We don’t know exactly, but it probably involves problems with brain structure and brain chemicals,” maybe. That covers about the same ground as “biology stuff” while also sounding like I’m at least trying to answer their question.

So if what I’m actually saying with that is “depression is caused by complicated biology stuff you don’t understand, and not by things like your son not really loving you, or being lazy,” am I sure that’s right?

I won’t say all depression is 100% caused by internal failures of biology in the same way that for example cystic fibrosis is caused 100% by internal failures of biology. I am happy to admit that some depressions can be caused by being in a crappy social situation, being abused as a child, being stuck in an unhappy marriage, being worried about problems at work, stuff like that.

But it’s far from obvious that being stuck in an unhappy marriage should drain your energy, drain your concentration, make you stop enjoying your hobbies, and finally drive you to suicide. We can imagine another person, or another way of designing a person, where someone says “I hate my husband, so I try to stay away from him as much as I can by working extra hard and spending my free time playing frisbee with my dog in the park.” But instead, someone hates their husband, and it drives all the joy out of their life to the point where they can’t go to work, they can’t play with their dog, they just sit around wishing they were dead.

And is that the fault of “biology stuff”? That’s a harder question than it sounds. What would it mean to say ‘no’? If we are strict materialists who don’t believe in some kind of division of labor between the brain and the soul, then yes, if it’s a feeling you’re having, it’s based in biology.

I’ve previously said we use talk of disease and biology to distinguish between things we can expect to respond to rational choice and social incentives and things that don’t. If I’m lying in bed because I’m sleepy, then yelling at me to get up will solve the problem, so we call sleepiness a natural state. If I’m lying in bed because I’m paralyzed, then yelling at me to get up won’t change anything, so we call paralysis a disease state. Talk of biology tells people to shut off their normal intuitive ways of modeling the world. Intuitively, if my son is refusing to go to work, it means I didn’t raise him very well and he doesn’t love me enough to help support the family. If I say “depression is a chemical imbalance”, well, that means that the problem is some sort of complicated science thing and I should stop using my “mirror neurons” and my social skills module to figure out where I went wrong or where he went wrong.

In other words, everything we do is caused by brain chemicals, but usually we think about them on the human terms, like “He went to the diner because he was hungry” and not “He went to the diner because the level of dopamine in the appetite center of his hypothalamus reached a critical level which caused it to fire messages at the complex planning center which told his motor cortex to move his legs to…” – even though both are correct. Very occasionally, some things happen that we can’t think about on the human terms, like a seizure – we can’t explain in terms of desires or emotions or goals an epileptic person is flailing their limbs, so we have to go down to the lower-level brain chemical explanation.

What “chemical imbalance” does for depression is try to force it down to this lower level, tell people to stop trying to use rational and emotional explanations for why their friend or family member is acting this way. It’s not a claim that nothing caused the chemical imbalance – maybe a recent breakup did – but if you try to use your normal social intuitions to determine why your friend or family member is behaving the way they are after the breakup, you’re going to get screwy results.

(in much the same way, if I just saw you take a giant handful of amphetamines, I pretty much know why you’re having a seizure, but I still can’t rationally / intuitively model the experience of why you’re “choosing” to move your limbs the way that you are.)

(though it’s important for me to temper this by mentioning that many people diagnosed with depression don’t have it)

There’s still one more question, which is: are you sure that depression patients’ experience is so incommensurable with healthy people’s experiences that it’s better to model their behavior as based on mysterious brain chemicals rather than on rational choice?

And part of what I’m going on is the stated experience of depressed people themselves. As for the rest, I can only plead consistency. I think people’s political opinions are highly genetically loaded and appear to be related to the structure of the insula and amygdala. I think large-scale variations in crime rate are mostly attributable to environmental levels of lead and probably other chemicals. It would be really weird if depression were the one area where we could always count on the inside view not to lead us astray.

So this is my answer to the accusation that psychiatry erred in promoting the idea of a “chemical imbalance”. The idea that depression is a drop-dead simple serotonin deficiency was never taken seriously by mainstream psychiatry. The idea that depression was a complicated pattern of derangement in several different brain chemicals that may well be interacting with or downstream from other causes has always been taken seriously, and continues to be pretty plausible. Whatever depression is, it’s very likely it will involve chemicals in some way, and it’s useful to emphasize that fact in order to convince people to take depression seriously as something that is beyond the intuitively-modeled “free will” of the people suffering it. “Chemical imbalance” is probably no longer the best phrase for that because of the baggage it’s taken on, but the best phrase will probably be one that captures a lot of the same idea.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 242 Comments

Rational Orthography

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Scott Alexander

What do DVORAK, polyamory, and home schooling have in common? They’re all about doing what’s weird-but-effective instead of what’s popular. What else is like that?

About three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks invented a form of writing called boustrophedon. The first line was written left-to-right, the second right-to-left, and so on in a winding pattern. The advantage of the new system was that it was faster and easier to read – instead of constantly darting your eyes back and forth from one side of the page to the other at the end of each line, you just let them continue naturally.

The disadvantage was that it was hard to write, for much the same reasons most people would have trouble writing backwards now. So although boustrophedon and straight left-to-right Greek competed for a couple of centuries, in the end straight Greek won because the scribes were too lazy to do what was most convenient for their readers. According to Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures:

A risk when offering any historical description is what has been called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’, the easy presumption that everything leads straightforwardly and inexorably to the highest state of humankind. Such an interpretation fails to look at the entire historical picture, ignoring the losers – in our case, the writing systems that became extinct […]

Boustrophedon, the writing of the ox, is, as it were, on the horns of a dilemma; either it is easier to read and more difficult to write, or vice versa. It is not surprising that it rapidly died out in ancient writing. Perhaps more surprising are moves to reintroduce it. Computers can be programmed so that only the standard twenty-six letters have to be typed on the keyboard, but the screen display or printout has normal or mirror-reversed letters according to the direction of the script. Enthusiasts claim boustrophedon is easier and quicker to read because the eye does not have to find its way back to the beginning of the next line.

These sorts of things have to start somewhere. So I asked SSC reader Bakkot to create a script that causes this blog to display in boustrophedon. I think you’ll agree that the experience is much improved. If there’s enough demand for a “classic” view, I can ask him to create some kind of optional browser add-on that will disable it, but I’d urge you to try the new version for a couple of weeks before turning to that “solution”.

More important: what if you want everything you read to be in boustrophedon from now on? For that I can unreservedly recommend The Boustrophedon Text Reader. Right now it only works on .txt, but hopefully as the movement catches on someone can turn it into a full browser extension.

Posted in Uncategorized | 203 Comments

OT17: Their Hand Is At Your Threads, Yet Ye See Them Not

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Scott Alexander

(source)

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. I’ll be pretty busy at work for the next few months, so expect a lower volume of blogging.

2. Comments of the week expand on the discussion of what is a “religion” vs. a “culture”, and bring up the importance of narrative and whether you can base a country on it.

I don’t know if Ozy’s still posting open threads on their blog. If they do, I’ll link it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 842 Comments

Highlights From My Notes From Another Psychiatry Conference

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Scott Alexander

I took a break from my busy schedule of learning all the reasons you shouldn’t eat bats to attend another local Psychiatry Conference.

This conference consisted of a series of talks about all the most important issues of the day, like ‘The Menace Of Psychologists Being Allowed To Prescribe Medication’, ‘How To Be An Advocate For Important Issues Affecting Your Patients Such As The Possibility That Psychologists Might Be Allowed To Prescribe Them Medication’, and ‘Protecting Members Of Disadvantaged Communities From Psychologists Prescribing Them Medication’.

As somebody who’s noticed that the average waiting list for a desperately ill person to see a psychiatrist is approaching the twelve month mark in some places, I was pretty okay with psychologists prescribing medication. The scare stories about how psychologists might prescribe medications unsafely didn’t have much effect on me, since I continue to believe that putting antidepressants in a vending machine would be a more safety-conscious system than what we have now (a vending machine would at least limit antidepressants to people who have $1.25 in change; the average primary care doctor is nowhere near that selective). Annnnnyway, this made me kind of uncomfortable at the conference and I Struck A Courageous Blow Against The Cartelization Of Medicine by sneaking out without putting my name on their mailing list.

But before I did, I managed to take some notes about what’s going on in the wider psychiatric world, including:

– The newest breakthrough in ensuring schizophrenic people take their medication (a hard problem!) is bundling the pills with an ingestable computer chip that transmits data from the patient’s stomach. It’s a bold plan, somewhat complicated by the fact that one of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia is the paranoid fear that somebody has implanted a chip in your body to monitor you. Can you imagine being a schizophrenic guy who has to explain to your new doctor that your old doctor put computer chips in your pills to monitor you? Yikes. If they go through with this, I hope they publish the results in the form of a sequel to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

– The same team is working on a smartphone app to detect schizophrenic relapses. The system uses GPS to monitor location, accelerometer to detect movements, and microphone to check tone of voice and speaking pattern, then throws it into a machine learning system that tries to differentiate psychotic from normal behavior (for example, psychotic people might speak faster, or rock back and forth a lot). Again, interesting idea. But again, one of the most common paranoid schizophrenic delusions is that their electronic devices are monitoring everything they do. If you make every one of a psychotic person’s delusions come true, such that they no longer have any beliefs that do not correspond to reality, does that technically mean you’ve cured them? I don’t know, but I’m glad we have people investigating this important issue.

– I’ll come out and say it: cluster randomization is really sketchy. Today I got to hear about a multi-center trial which randomized by location – half of their hospitals were the control group, the other half were the experimental group. Problem is, the patients in each hospital were given group-appropriate consent forms – either “We will be treating you as usual, but monitoring you more closely for a study” or “We will be giving you extra experimental treatment”. Not only does that break blinding, but it implies a different population of patients in each group – the ones willing to consent to monitoring versus the ones willing to consent to treatment? Might sicker people be more willing to sign the treatment consent, since they don’t want to deal with monitoring but treatment offers the chance for personal gain? Might paranoid people be more willing to sign the control consent, since they’re not being used as guinea pigs? I don’t know. But I checked those pre-intervention inter-group comparisons they have to show, and there were big differences between the two groups (for example, I think one – I can’t remember which – had like twice as many black people). Either randomize peopple properly or at least keep people blind to condition.

– On the other hand, I’m quickly losing my prejudice that RCTs always beat naturalistic studies. I’ll write more about this later, but today’s showcase was long-acting injectable versus oral antipsychotics. Conventional wisdom is that long-acting antipsychotics, in the right patient population, decrease relapse because they remove the option of not taking the medication. The best randomized controlled trials don’t find that. The best naturalistic epidemiological studies do. The expert who spoke today theorized – and I agree – that the naturalistic studies are right. He argued that one feature of RCTs is very close monitoring, which means the patients in them comply with their medication at an unnaturally high rate – thus removing the long-acting drugs’ one advantage. The studies conducted in the real world of patients not taking their medications regularly are more relevant.

– They say psychotic people don’t take their meds because they hate the side effects, or because they’re too crazy to know better, or because they just can’t be bothered. But one of the doctors today raised a novel hypothesis: are antipsychotics anti-addictive? After all, some of the most addictive drugs are those that raise dopamine levels – cocaine, meth, and MDMA are all either dopamine releasing agents or dopamine reuptake inhibitors. Antipsychotics have pretty much the opposite effect as those, lowering dopamine in the brain. Suspicious. But I have a feeling this isn’t true. Dopamine is more complicated than that. Levodopa-carbidopa, which is one step short of pure dopamine and is given to dopamine-deficient Parksinson’s patients, is as far as I know not addictive at all. It’s also very clearly antagonistic to antipsychotics. Probably antipsychotics are the opposite of non-addictive levodopa, not the opposite of cocaine or anything. I don’t know how to phrase it more rigorously than that. Still, I like the way that person thinks.

– Ever since Indiana’s legislature debated a bill that implied pi = 4, Midwestern states have had a reputation for trying to legislate science. Maybe this had something to do with the claim by one psychiatry lobbyist that Kansas’ legislature is trying to ban the DSM. I can’t find anything on it online and it sounds like an urban legend to me. Tangentially related silly clickbait: Arizona lawmakers say horses aren’t animals.

– Unintentional puns are some of my favorite puns. I still remember fondly when the head of a psychiatric hospital where I used to work said that if Obamacare passed there would be too many patients and the place would “turn into a madhouse”. I collected another good one today when an activist was talking about gun rights for psychiatric patients: “Taking guns from psychiatric patients isn’t going to be a panacea for violence – would anyone like to take a stab at why?”

– Clozapine really is the best antipsychotic, hands down, and the evidence isn’t even subtle. It’s also the most dangerous, and the rules say that you should only prescribe it to a patient after you’ve tried and failed with two other antipsychotics. One of the speakers was a researcher who’s trying to get a grant to prove that it’s actually more effective to try clozapine after only one failed antipsychotic, but the NIMH rejected his proposal because “even if you proved that, no one would listen”. They’re probably right. A lot of psychiatrists hate clozapine because it’s messy, scary, and requires a lot of paperwork and monitoring. The speaker presented survey after survey of psychiatrists making lame excuses like “My patients wouldn’t want it”, and then survey after survey of those psychiatrists’ patients saying they do so want it but nobody asked them. Clozapine is messy and scary and requires lots of paperwork, but if you’re a good doctor you’ll give your patient the drug that will help them anyway.

– The APA representative says that 95% of candidates supported by the APA’s PAC get elected. I think it was supposed to be a boast, like “look how effective we are”, but that’s a bit much. Either the APA single-handedly controls all American politics, or else they’re very careful to always back the winning side. Properly understood, that number should probably be taken as a measure of exactly how cynical they are.

– Not that they didn’t admit their cynicism straight out. Our Political Activism Consultant explained that state legislators are all sorta new and confused and inexperienced all the time because of term limits. And if you put on a nice suit and a tie and tell them “Hey, I’m a doctor from your district, here’s how you need to do health care policy…” you have a pretty good chance of getting them to nod along and assume you know what you’re doing. I didn’t realize how easy this was, and I hope I never use this power for evil.

– This is basically how the Eternal War Against Psychologists Being Allowed To Prescribe Medications is being fought, but the psychologists have caught on and now they have nice suits and ties too. Also, it turns out senators have a hard time differentiating the APA (American Psychiatric Association, fighting tooth and claw against psychologist prescribers) from the APA (American Psychological Association, fighting tooth and claw for psychologist prescribers) and they end up freaking out and trying to figure out why the same people are lobbying for both sides and whether this is some kind of weird shrink mind game thing.

– Drug companies were giving out stress brains! Like stress balls, only they’re shaped like brains and have little sulci and gyri on them! If in ten years I’m one of those people who never prescribes clozapine, it’ll because I’m prescribing the drug by the company that gave me a stress brain instead.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 170 Comments

Extremism In Thought Experiment Is No Vice

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Scott Alexander

[content warning: description of fictional rape and torture.]

Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or wrong, then continued:

I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.

Then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them, and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him, and then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now, is it dude?’

Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if [there] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’

If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’.

The media has completely proportionally described this as Robinson “fantasizing about” raping atheists, and there are the usual calls for him to apologize/get fired/be beheaded.

So let me use whatever credibility I have as a guy with a philosophy degree to confirm that Phil Robertson is doing moral philosophy exactly right.

There’s a tradition at least as old as Kant of investigating philosophical dilemmas by appealing to our intuitions about extreme cases. Kant, remember, proposed that it was always wrong to lie. A contemporary of his, Benjamin Constant, made the following objection: suppose a murderer is at the door and wants to know where your friend is so he can murder her. If you say nothing, the murderer will get angry and kill you; if you tell the truth he will find and kill your friend; if you lie, he will go on a wild goose chase and give you time to call the police. Lying doesn’t sound so immoral now, does it?

The brilliance of Constant’s thought experiment lies in its extreme nature. If a person says they think lying is always wrong, we have two competing hypotheses: they’re accurately describing their own thought processes, which will indeed always output that lying is wrong; or they’re misjudging their own thought processes and actually there are some situations in which they will judge lying to be ethical. In order to distinguish between the two, we need to come up with a story that presents the strongest possible case for lying, so that even the tiniest shred of sympathy for lying can be dragged up to the surface.

So Constant says “It’s a murderer trying to kill your best friend”. And even this is suboptimal. It should be a mad scientist trying to kill everyone on Earth. Or an ancient demon, whose victory would doom everyone on Earth, man, woman, and child, to an eternity of the most terrible torture. If some people’s hidden algorithm is “lie when the stakes are high enough”, there we can be sure that the stakes are high enough to tease it out into the light of day.

Compare Churchill:

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Lady: Well, for five million pounds…well…that’s a lot of money.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Lady: (enraged) What kind of a woman do you think I am‽
Churchill: We’ve already established what kind of a woman you are, now we’re just haggling over the price

The woman thinks she has a principle, “Never sleep with a man for money”. In fact, deep down, she believes it’s okay to sleep with a man for enough money. If Churchill had merely stuck to the five pounds question, she would have continued to believe she held the “never…” principle. By coming up with an extreme case (5 million Churchill-era pounds is about £250 million today) he was able to reveal that her apparent principle was actually a contingent effect of her real principle plus the situation.

In fact, compare physics. Physicists are always doing things like cooling stuff down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, or making clocks so precise they’ll be less than a second off by the time the sun goes out, or acclerating things to 99.99% of the speed of light. And one of the main reasons they do is to magnify small effects to the point where they can measure them. All movement is causing a little bit of time dilation, but if you want to detect it you need the world’s most accurate clock on the Space Shuttle when it’s traveling 25,000 miles per hour. In order to figure out how things really work, you need to turn things up to 11 so that the effect you want is impossible to miss. Everything in the universe has been exerting a gravitational effect on light all the time, but if you want to see it clearly you need to use the Sun during a solar eclipse, and if you really want to see it clearly your best bet is a black hole.

Great physicists and great philosophers share a certain perversity. The perversity is “Sure, this principle works in all remotely plausible real-world situations, but WHAT IF THERE’S A COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS SCENARIO WHERE IT DOESN’T HOLD??!?!” Newton’s theory of gravity explained everything from falling apples to the orbits of the planets impeccably for centuries, and then Einstein asked “Okay, but what if, when you get objects thousands of times larger than the Earth, there are tiny discrepancies in it, then we’d have to throw the whole thing out,” and instead of running him out of town on a rail scientists celebrated his genius. Likewise, moral philosophers are as happy as anyone else not to lie in the real world. But they wonder whether they might be revealed to be only simplifications of more fundamental principles, principles that can only be discovered by placing them in a cyclotron and accelerating them to 99.99% of the speed of light.

Sometimes this is even clearer than in the Kant example. Many people, if they think about it at all, believe that value aggregates linearly. That is, two murders are twice as much of a tragedy as one murder; a hundred people losing their homes is ten times as bad as ten people losing their homes.

Torture vs. Dust Specks is beautiful in its simplicity; it just takes this assumption and creates the most extreme case imaginable. Take a tiny harm and aggregate it an unimaginably high number of times; then compare it to against a big harm which is nowhere near the aggregated sum of the tiny ones. So which is worse, 3^^^3 (read: a number higher than you can imagine) people getting a single dust speck in their eye for a fraction of a second, or one person being tortured for fifty years?

Almost everybody thinks their principle is “things aggregate linearly”, but when you put it into relief like this, almost everybody’s intuition tells them the torture is worse. You can “bite the bullet” and admit that the dust specks are worse than the torture. Or you can throw out your previous principle saying that things aggregate linearly and try to find another principle about how to aggregate things (good luck).

Moral dilemmas are extreme and disgusting precisely because those are the only cases in which we can make our intuitions strong enough to be clearly detectable. If the question was just “Which is worse, a thousand people stubbing their toe or one person breaking their leg?” neither side would have been obviously worse than the other and our true intutition wouldn’t have come into sharp relief. So a good moral philosopher will always be talking about things like murder, torture, organ-stealing, Hitler, incest, drowning children, the death of four billion humans, et cetera.

Worse, a good moral philosopher should be constantly agreeing – or tempted to agree – to do horrible things in these cases. The whole point of these experiments is to collide two of your intuitions against each other and force you to violate at least one of them. In Kant’s example, either you’re lying, or you’re dooming your friend to die. In Jarvis’ Transplant Surgeon scenario, you’re either killing somebody to harvest their organs, or letting a whole hospital full of people die.

I once had someone call the torture vs. dust specks question “contrived moral dilemma porn” and say it proved that moral philosophers were kind of crappy people for even considering it. That bothered me. To look at moral philosophers and conclude “THESE PEOPLE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT INCEST AND ORGAN HARVESTING, AND BRAG ABOUT ALL THE CASES WHEN THEY’D BE OKAY DOING THAT STUFF. THEY ARE GROSS EDGELORDS AND PROBABLY FANTASIZE ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH THEIR SISTER ON THE HOSPITAL BED OF A PATIENT DYING OF END-STAGE KIDNEY DISEASE,” is to utterly miss the point.

So let’s talk about Phil Robertson.

Phil Robertson believes atheists are moral nihilists, or moral relativists, or something. He’s not quite right – there are a lot of atheists who are very moral realist – Objectivists, as their name implies, believe morality and everything else up to and including the best flavor of ice cream, is Objective – and even the atheists who aren’t quite moral realist usually hold some sort of compromise position where it’s meaningful to talk about right and wrong even if it’s not cosmically meaningful.

On the other hand – and I say this as the former secretary of a college atheist club who got to meet all sorts – there are a bunch of atheists who very much claim not to believe in morality. Less Wrong probably has fewer of them than the average atheist hangout, because we skew so heavily utilitarian, but our survey records 4% error theorists and 9% non-cognitivists. When Friendly Atheist says he “doesn’t know a single atheist or agnostic who thinks that terrorizing, raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing people is remotely OK”, I can believe that he doesn’t know one who would say so in those exact words. But I’m not sure how, for example, the error theorists could consistently argue against that position.

And what Phil Robertson does is exactly what I would do if I were debating an error theorist. I’d take the most gratuitiously horrible thing I could think of, describe it in the most graphic detail I could, and say “But don’t you think there’s something wrong with this?” If the error theorist says “no”, then I congratulate her for definitely being a real honest-to-goodness error theorist, and unless I can suddenly think up a way to bridge the is-ought dichotomy we’re finished. But if she says “Yes, it does seem like there should be something wrong there,” then we can start exploring what that means and whether error theory is the best framework in which to capture that intuition.

On the other hand, if I were debating Phil Robertson, I would ask him where he thinks morality comes from. And if he suggested some version of divine command theory, I could use an example of the graphic-horrifying-extreme-thought-experiment genre even older than Kant – namely, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. If God commands you to kill your innocent child, is that the right thing to do? What if God commands you to rape and torture and mutilate your family? And it wouldn’t work if it were anything less extreme – if I just said “What if God told you to shoplift?” it would be easy to bite that bullet and he wouldn’t have to face the full implication of his views. But if I went with the extreme version? Maybe Robertson would find he’s not as big on divine command theory as he thought.

But this sort of discussion would only be possible if we could trust each other to take graphic thought experiments in the spirit in which they were conceived, and not as an opportunity to score cheap points.

[EDIT: This post was previously titled “High Energy Ethics”, but I changed it after realizing it was unintentionally lifted from elsewhere]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 586 Comments

Is Everything A Religion?

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Scott Alexander

I.

On the last Links thread, Eric Raymond writes:

The environmental movement tying itself to personal virtue may have been stupid, but it is completely understandable because the movement has all the rest of the emotional structure of an Abrahamic religion, including (a) an obession with sin, (b) an eschatology (AGW), (c) irrational taboos (GM foods), (d) weekly observances of no weight other than as symbolic virtue signaling (residential recycling), and (d) fideistic refusal to consider evidence contrary to its doctrines. The rise of environmentalism perfectly tracks the fall in religious observance among elite whites in the U.S., because it’s binding to the same receptors.

This reminds me of another article I read recently claiming that social justice is just a repackaging of Christianity. And why not? We are all sinners (racists) born to original sin (white privilege) based on the actions of our forefather Adam (all the previous generations of oppressive whites). While we struggle with our own sinful nature (unconscious racism) we must also perfect the larger society by rooting out heresies (calling out offensive ideas). Everyone else will mock us, because we live in a world (society) ruled by Satan (the Patriarchy). But one day, after the Second Coming (the Revolution, the March of Progress) everyone will admit we were right and be ashamed of their own evil.

But don’t forget that transhumanism is also Christianity!. It’s got weird beliefs, a promise of eternal life through anti-aging drugs (or resurrection through cryonics), and an eschatology in the Singularity. Objectivism is a religion.

Also, liberalism is a religion. And conservativism is a religion. Libertarianism is a religion. Communism is a religion. Capitalism is like a religion. An anthropologist “confirms” that Apple is a religion. But UNIX is also a religion (apparently Linux was the Protestant Reformation.

Is there anything that isn’t like a religion? I spent this morning trying to come up with the least religious things I could think of. Trying to think of practical disciplines aimed at producing a quantifiable result, disciplines which strive to be evidence-based with a minimum of extraneous ideology. What came to mind was investing and medicine.

But investing is about propitiating a mysterious deity (the market) whose blessing or wrath bestows innumerable riches or total ruin. Believers follow gurus like Warren Buffett and Jim Cramer who promise that if they do the right things they will achieve financial salvation. Those who follow their pronouncements will enjoy the blissful afterlife of a comfortable retirement; those who violate their laws will spent their retirement in penury among much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And medicine involves petitioners going to white-robed priests (doctors) who consult the holy scriptures (Harrison’s Clinical Medicine) to tell them how to live their lives. It has rituals (the yearly physical), taboos (smoking, overeating), and heretics (alternative medicine). Those who follow its rules are assured of a long, happy life; those who violate the rules of its priests will get cancer and die.

Maybe we’re still being too abstract here. What about, I don’t know, not stepping in front of buses? It certainly has a commandment (thou shalt not step in front of buses). It has notions of sin (stepping in front of buses) and virtue (not doing that). It has its rituals (looking both ways before you cross the street), its priests demanding obedience (crossing-guards), and its holy places (crosswalks). It promises blessings on the virtuous, but also terrible vengeance on the wicked (if you step in front of a bus, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth).

So one critique of these accusations is that “religion” is a broad enough category that anything can be mapped on to it:

Does it have well-known figures? Then they’re “gurus” and it’s a religion.

Are there books about it? Then those are “scriptures” and it’s a religion.

Does it recommend doing anything regularly? Then those are “rituals” and it’s a religion.

How about just doing anything at all? Then that’s a “commandment” and it’s a religion.

Does it say something is bad? Then that’s “sin” and it’s a religion.

Does it hope to improve the world, or worry about the world getting worse? That’s an “eschatology” and it’s a religion.

Do you disagree with it? Then since you’ve already determined all the evidence is against it, people must believe it on “faith” and it’s a religion.

II.

But that critique goes just a little too far. Once Communists start offering animal sacrifices to statues of Mao and requiring everyone own a copy of the Little Red Book and treat it respectfully, something is going on that’s deeper than just “it has well-known figures”.

Even though it’s easy to say that every belief or movement can be analogized to a religion, I still feel an intuition that some are more “religious” than others. Social justice and environmentalism seem more religious than gun control and pro-choice, even though all four are equally important lefty issues.

The first two are just more of a world-view. I can totally imagine someone saying “My life philosophy is centered around my passion for the environment”, but not so much “My life philosophy is centered around gun control.” I can see a speaker at a wedding saying “John and Jane are perfect for each other, since they are united by their shared passion about social justice”, but not so much “John and Jane are perfect for each other, since they are united by their shared passion for gun control.”

Both social justice and environmentalism spawn entire genres of art and literature, and I know people who pretty much exclusively draw their artistic consumption from those genres. But if somebody said “All of my art has a pro-choice theme”, that would probably be pretty creepy.

I know social justice people whose social circle is almost 100% based on social justice, and environmentalists whose social circle is almost 100% based on environmentalism. I don’t think there are that many people whose social circle is 100% based on gun control. And if someone says “I’m fanatical about the environment”, I get a whole lot of stereotypes about them – she probably eats granola, drives a Prius with a dreamcatcher in the window, has a college degree, does yoga. He probably goes hiking a lot, has a beard, takes supplements, is pretty relaxed. If someone says “I’m fanatical about gun control”, I’m stumped.

But all of this stuff about stereotypes and art and insularity sounds a little like religion but even more like culture, or at least subculture.

The difference between “religion” and “culture” has always been pretty vague. Shinto is the best example; it’s less a coherent metaphysical narrative than a bunch of things Japanese people do and a repository for Japanese traditions and rituals. A quick look at Hinduism reveals that they have no idea what gods they believe in, it’s a bunch of different religions stuck together under one umbrella, but the point is that it’s the sort of thing Indian people do and a repository of Indian traditions. Even though Jews have a pretty coherent religion, the line between “Jewish culture” and “Jewish religion” is equally fuzzy. Religion as distinct from culture seems like a pretty Western phenomenon, the result of a triumphant Christianity colonizing cultures it never originated from, ending out with the modern conception of culture as ethnic food + silly costumes.

American culture is paper-thin compared to say Hindu Indian culture, but consider its rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance, its holidays like the Fourth of July, its saints/culture heroes like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, its myths like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, its veneration of founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution), and even its hymns like “America the Beautiful” and “Yankee Doodle”.

(the last of which, like all good hymns, uses such archaic language that almost nobody knows what the heck it means)

This gets called American civil religion a lot, but at this point I’m starting to wonder why it should. Maybe instead of accusing every culture of becoming a religion, we should just admit that our current concept of “religion” actually owes a lot to “culture”.

As apparently arbitrary groupings – by ethnicity, by government, by god, by ideology – take on social significance, they undergo a burst of meme-human symbiotic cultural evolution that ends with a strong combination epistemic-social structure.

(go ahead, laugh at my jargon, but jargon is a sign of a flourishing meme-human-symbiotic epistemic-social structure)

The advantage for the meme is obvious. The advantage for the people involved has been discussed by better minds than mine, but the point is that it seems to help people build stronger and more trusting communities than they could on their own.

Eliezer writes that every cause wants to be a cult, but I’m not sure I agree with the connotations. I would say every cause wants to be a community. Communities hold values in common. Communities have rules their members have to follow. Communities have heroes and hierarchies. Communities shun people who don’t fit in.

And if all of this sounds super-conservative, keep in mind we’re still talking about environmentalism here, or social justice here. Values in common? Check. Rules? God yes. Heroes and hierarchies? You bet. Shunning people? All the time.

Communities and cultures have their share of danger. Their mix of social and epistemological functions means that any evidence challenging the community’s core beliefs will be taken as an attack on the members’ identity. As a result, community members risk ending up mind-killed. That’s not news. And I don’t think this is especially different from the way religious fanatics are mind-killed. And certainly someone could argue that “religion” is the perfect name for a culture built on shared belief.

But I still think it’s unfair to call these communities/cultures “religions”. “Religion” is too easy to use as the Worst Argument In The World here. It’s supposed to imply all of these other connotations of “religion” like “their beliefs are based on magical thinking” and “they use blind faith instead of reason” and “instead of coming up with a world-view based on evidence they just played Bible Mad Libs.” If those are the connotations you’ve got with “religion”, then I think the word “religion” is actively doing harm here, and you should just use “belief-based community” or “movement” or whatever.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 465 Comments

Links 3/15: Linksmanship

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Scott Alexander

The OKCupid Bullshit-To-English Filter makes dating site cliches more interesting. “Random” becomes “banal”, “I love X” becomes “I for the most part tolerate X”, and “I like to have fun” becomes “I like institutionalized racism”. And it only gets worse from there.

People predicted online education would give everyone access to free courses on every subject taught by the world’s top experts. It did exactly that and disrupted approximately nothing. So how do we adapt online education to a credentialist world?

I liked this idea when it was speculative. Now it’s supported: Anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder have similar brain anomalies.

Here’s some utopian but creative speculation about weird alternative basic income systems.

Political bubble segregation alert: did you know Fox News is the most trusted news channel in America, and it’s not even close? But beware – the article claims this is true “even among Democrats”, which seems to contradict its own data.

When I lived in Ireland I never really got the impression that the government was very good at what it did. Sure enough, in one week Ireland manages to accidentally legalize all drugs, and almost accidentally ban non-homosexual marriage. On the plus side, they’ve finally gotten around to repealing the law that anyone selling horses outside Dublin will be put to death.

Researchers who probably have never done calibration training are 99% sure endocrine disrupting pollutants are linked to diabetes, ADHD, etc.

Infinite Jest in Legos.

Astrology meets economics: In Singapore, kids born in the Year Of The Dragon are considered lucky. So lots of parents have kids in the Year Of The Dragon, the class sizes are bigger those years, and it’s harder to get into good colleges and entry-level jobs. Not so lucky now, are you?

More than 6% of American synaesthetics have color-letter associations that match a popular set of Fisher-Price alphabet magnets.

Marginal Revolution: Larger companies means more income inequality.

The 2014 Effective Altruist survey results are out.

An article on divestment which makes a point I’m slapping myself for not realizing earlier: divestment can’t possibly have any economic consequences on the companies it targets because of the efficiency of the stock market. It then goes on to point out that the largest divestment campaign in history, against apartheid South Africa, didn’t change the prices of South African company shares one bit. It concludes divestment might be a good way to raise discussion, but nothing more.

The Justice Department recently joined all the other experts who took a careful look at the case in concluding that Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown in self-defense, and the whole “hands up, don’t shoot” story was made up by Brown’s friend. That isn’t news. What’s news is that a columnist who pushed the opposite narrative has apologized.

Speaking of Ferguson, why are there more than twice as many black women as black men there and what effect does it have on the culture? (h/t Marginal Revolution)

The Most Decade Specific Words In Billboard Hits, 1890 – 2014. One day our children are going to be astounded that we survived the 2010s.

I recently wrote about the Bay Area rationality community being difficult to get into. Well, not anymore! www.bayrationality.com is a central listing of all their events and directory of people to contact. Thanks, Oliver!

The social justice movement is telling people to stop reading books by white male authors to fight the “inherent bias” of the literary world. But if you know how these things work, you shouldn’t be surprised that a rudimentary investigation finds that books written by women are just as likely to get reviewed in prestigious publications as those by men, and there are simply fewer of the former.

More shared-environment-mattering-blogging: a natural quasi-experiment in Norway finds that when maternity leave is increased, the children do better in school and make more money growing up.

More money-not-mattering-blogging: a natural quasi-experiment in Sweden finds that lottery winners’ children (who are raised rich) do no better than other children in school, in avoiding drugs, etc (suggesting that the clear real-world correlation between wealth and child success is genetic rather than financial). But of course Sweden has one of the world’s strongest social safety nets, so money may matter more in other countries.

Why are so many people myopic (ie need glasses) these days? It used to be thought that the problem was kids straining their young eyes reading too many books. A new study convincingly finds that it’s more likely kids not spending enough time in bright sunlight outside.

One reason California has become such an important tech center despite having some pretty terrible laws is that it got the important law right, says a group who track inventor movements and find the most important factor is banning non-compete agreements. This kind of thing could form the core of an interesting argument against libertarianism.

The Battle Of Castle Itter was the only time in history the US military defended a besieged castle.

I’ve seen a lot of smart people defending the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently. Here’s Noah Smith: A Trade Deal Liberals Can Live With. And Tyler Cowen: Why Paul Krugman Is Wrong To Oppose Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Scientists cure Alzheimers in mice. Human trials to begin in 20-something something who cares THEY’RE ONE WEEK LATE! A WEEK! WHY COULDN’T YOU HAVE JUST CURED ALZHEIMERS ONE WEEK EARLIER!

A pretty good explanation of the conflicting claims about sea ice at the South Pole.

As far as I can tell, this is not an early April Fools’ joke, a viral marketing campaign, or an urban legend. As far as I can tell, this is actually true: Mr. T will star in a home improvement show called “I Pity The Tool”

Bleeding Heart Libertarians argues against compulsory voting – not only won’t it help, but if it’s a sneaky plot to get the Democrats to win elections, it won’t do that either.

Colleges improve critical thinking skills, says research with no control group so they can’t differentiate it from the effects of normal aging. I dunno, maybe they didn’t go to college so they didn’t think of that.

Buying copies of your own music or books to game the best-sellers charts is practically universal.

It’s like rain on your wedding day. It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. It’s like…

Hospitals are starting to try to address poverty among their patients to prevent easily preventable poverty-related problems from eating up too many health resources. Don’t be fooled by this looking like an expansion of the creeping social services bureaucracy – this is highly-competent profit-seeking institutions being given an economic incentive to improve the lives of specific poor people assigned to them, which is the same kind of promising as social impact bonds.

The Less Wrong Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky are now available as an ebook:

But those of you who are looking for something steamier don’t even have to go entirely off topic!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 765 Comments