Slate Star Codex

What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Scott Alexander

[Epistemic status: Speculative. I can’t make this post less condescending and elitist, so if you don’t like condescending elitist things, this might not be for you.]

Developmental psychology never struck my interest in the same way as a lot of other kinds of psychology. It didn’t seem to give me insight into my own life, help me understand my friends, or explain weird things about society.

I’ve changed my mind about all of that after reading David Chapman’s Developing Ethical, Social, and Cognitive Competence.

First, a refresher. Developmental psychology describes how children go from helpless infants to reasonable adults. Although a lot of it has to do with sensorimotor skills like walking and talking, the really interesting stuff is cognitive development. Children start off as very buggy reasoners incapable of all but the most superficial forms of logic but gradually go on to develop new abilities and insights that allow them to navigate adult life.

Maybe the most famous of these is “theory of mind”, the ability to view things from other people’s perspective. In a classic demonstration, researchers show little Amy a Skittles bag and ask what she thinks is inside. She guesses Skittles, but the researchers open it and reveal it’s actually pennies. Then they close it up and invite little Brayden into the room. Then they ask Amy what Brayden thinks is inside. If Amy’s three years old or younger, she’ll usually say “pennies” – she knows that pennies are inside, so why shouldn’t Brayden know too? If she’s four or older, she’ll usually say “Skittles” – she realizes on a gut level that she and Brayden are separate minds and that Brayden will have his own perspective. Sometimes the same mistake can extend to preferences and beliefs. Wikipedia gives the example of a child saying “I like Sesame Street, so Daddy must like Sesame Street too.” This is another theory of mind failure grounded in an inability to separate self and environment.

Here’s another example which tentatively sounds like a self-environment failure. Young children really don’t get foreign languages. I got a little of this teaching English in Japan, and heard more of it from other people. The really young kids treated English like a cipher; everybody started out knowing things’ real (ie Japanese) names, but Americans insisted on converting them into their own special American-person code before talking about them. Kids would ask weird things like whether American parents would make an exception and speak Japanese to their kids who were too young to have learned English yet, or whether it was a zero-tolerance policy sort of thing and the families would just not communicate until the kids went to English school. And I made fun of them, but I also remember the first time I visited Paris I heard somebody talking to their dog, and for a split second I was like “Why would you expect your dog to know French?” before my brain kicked in and I was like “Duuhhhh….”

The infamous “magical thinking” which kids display until age 7 or so also involves confused self-environment boundaries. Maybe little Amy gets mad at Brayden and shouts “I HATE HIM” to her mother. The next day, Brayden falls off a step and skins his knee. Amy intuits a cause-and-effect relationship between her hatred and Brayden’s accident and feels guilty. She doesn’t realize that her hatred is internal to herself and can’t affect the world directly. Or kids displaying animism at this age, and expecting that the TV doesn’t work because it’s angry, or the car’s not starting because it’s tired.

Psychology textbooks never discuss whether this progression in and out of developmental stages is innate or environmental, which is weird because psychology textbooks usually love that sort of thing. I always assumed it was innate, because it was on the same timeline as things like walking and talking which are definitely innate. But I’ve been moved to question that after reading some of the work comparing “primitive” cultures to primitive developmental stages.

This probably isn’t the most politically correct thing to do, but it’s notable enough that anthropologists have been thinking about it for centuries. For example, from Ethnicity, Nationality, and Religious Experience:

Primitive people are generally as intelligent as the people of any culture, including the contemporary industrial-electronic age cultures. that makes it all the more significant that their publicly shared cognitive style shows little identifiable formal operational thought. The probable explanation for this, if true, is simply that formal operational thought is more complexly difficult than earlier modes of thought and will be used in a culture in a publicly shared way only if that culture has developed techniques for training people in its use. Primitive cultures do not do that, and thus by default use easier styles of thought, ones closer in form to concrete oeprational and even pre-operational thought, as defined by Piaget.

Primitive cultures certainly exhibit the magical thinking typical of young children; this is the origin of a whole host of superstitions and witch-doctory. They exhibit the same animism; there are hundreds of different animistic religions worldwide. And although I didn’t talk much about theories of moral development, primitive cultures’ notion of taboo is pretty similar to Kohlberg’s conventional stage.

But if different cultures progress through developmental milestones at different rates or not at all, then these aren’t universal laws of child development but facts about what skills get learned slowly or quickly in different cultures. In this model, development is not a matter of certain innate abilities like walking “unfolding” at the right time, but about difficult mental operations that you either learn or you don’t depending on how hard the world is trying to cram them into your head.

So getting back to David Chapman: his post is mostly about Robert Kegan’s account of “stages of moral development”. I didn’t get much from Kegan himself, but I was fascinated by an idea just sort of dropped into the middle of the discussion: that less than half of the people in modern western countries had attained Kegan’s fourth stage, and only a small handful attained his fifth. This was a way of thinking about development that I’d never heard before.

On the other hand, it makes sense. Take General Semantics (please!). I remember reading through Korzybski’s giant blue book of General Semantics, full of labyrinthine diagrams and promises that if only you understood this, you would engage with the world totally differently, you’d be a new man armed with invincible cognitive weapons. And the key insight, maybe the only insight, was “the map is not the territory”, which seems utterly banal.

But this is a self-environment distinction of exactly the sort that children learn in development. It’s dividing your own representation of the world from the world itself; it’s about as clear a reference to theory of mind as you could ask for. Korzybski considered it a revelation when he discovered it; thousands of other people found it helpful and started a movement around it; I conclude that these people were missing a piece of theory-of-mind and Korzybski gave it to them. Not the whole deal, of course. Just a piece. But a piece of something big and fundamental, so abstract and difficult to teach that it required that whole nine-hundred-something page book to cram it in.

And now I’m looking for other things in the discourse that sound like developmental milestones, and there are oodles of them.

I remember reading this piece by Nathan Robinson, where he compares his own liberal principles saying that colleges shouldn’t endorse war-violence-glorifying film “American Sniper” to some conservatives arguing that colleges shouldn’t endorse homosexuality-glorifying book “Fun Home”:

It is hypocrisy for liberals to laugh at and criticize the Duke students who have objected to their summer reading book due to its sexual and homosexual themes. They didn’t seem to react similarly when students at other universities tried to get screenings of American Sniper cancelled. If you say the Duke students should open their minds and consume things they disagree with, you should say the same thing about the students who boycotted American Sniper. Otherwise, you do not really have a principled belief that people should respect and take in other opinions, you just believe they should respect and take in your own opinions. How can you think in one case the students are close-minded and sheltered, but in the other think they are open-minded and tolerant? What principled distinction is there that allows you to condemn one and praise the other, other than believing people who agree with you are better?

He proposes a bunch of potential counterarguments, then shoots each counterargument down by admitting that the other side would have a symmetrical counterargument of their own: for example, he believes that “American Sniper” is worse because it’s racist and promoting racism is genuinely dangerous to a free society, but then he admits a conservative could say that “Fun Home” is worse because in their opinion it’s homosexuality that’s genuinely dangerous to a free society. After three or four levels of this, he ends up concluding that he can’t come up with a meta-level fundamental difference, but he’s going to fight for his values anyway because they’re his. I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where “the thing” is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It seems silly when I’m saying it like this, and you should probably just read the article, but I’ve seen so many people who lack this basic mental operation that this immediately endeared him to me. I would argue Nathan Robinson has a piece of theory-of-mind that a lot of other people are missing.

Actually, I was kind of also thinking this with his most recent post, which complains about a Washington Post article. The Post argues that because the Democrats support gun control and protest police, they are becoming the “pro-crime party”. I’m not sure whether the Post genuinely believes the Democrats are pro-crime by inclination or are just arguing their policies will lead to more crime in a hyperbolic figurative way, but I’ve certainly seen sources further right make the “genuinely in favor of crime as a terminal value” argument. And this doesn’t seem too different from the leftist sources that say Republicans can’t really care about the lives of the unborn, they’re just “anti-woman” as a terminal value. Both proposals share this idea of not being able to understand that other people have different beliefs than you and that their actions proceed naturally from those beliefs. Instead of saying “I believe gun control would increase crime, but Democrats believe the opposite, and from their different perspective banning guns makes sense,” they say “I believe gun control would increase crime, Democrats must believe the same, and therefore their demands for gun control must come from sinister motives.”

(compare: “Brayden brought the Skittles bag with him for lunch, so he must enjoy eating pennies.” Or: “Daddy is refusing to watch Sesame Street with me, so he must be secretly watching it with someone else he likes better instead.”)

Here are some other mental operations which seem to me to rise to the level of developmental milestones:

1. Ability to distinguish “the things my brain tells me” from “reality” – maybe this is better phrased as “not immediately trusting my system 1 judgments”. This is a big part of cognitive therapy – building the understanding that just because your brain makes assessments like “I will definitely fail at this” or “I’m the worst person in the world” doesn’t mean that you have to believe them. As Ozy points out, this one can be easier for people with serious psychiatric problems who have a lot of experience with their brain’s snap assessments being really off, as opposed to everyone else who has to piece the insight together from a bunch of subtle failures.

2. Ability to model other people as having really different mind-designs from theirs; for example, the person who thinks that someone with depression is just “being lazy” or needs to “snap out of it”. This is one of the most important factors in determining whether I get along with somebody – people who don’t have this insight tend not to respect boundaries/preferences very much simply because they can’t believe they exist, and to simultaneously get angry when other people violate their supposedly-obvious-and-universal boundaries and preferences.

3. Ability to think probabilistically and tolerate uncertainty. My thoughts on this were mostly inspired by another of David Chapman’s posts, which I’m starting to think might not be a coincidence.

4. Understanding the idea of trade-offs; things like “the higher the threshold value of this medical test, the more likely we’ll catch real cases but also the more likely we’ll get false positives” or “the lower the burden of proof for people accused of crimes, the more likely we’ll get real criminals but also the more likely we’ll encourage false accusations”. When I hear people discuss these cases in real life, they’re almost never able to maintain this tension and almost always collapse it to their preferred plan having no downside.

Framed like this, both psychotherapy and LW-style rationality aim to teach people some of these extra mental operations. The reactions to both vary from enlightenment to boredom to bafflement depending on whether the listener needs the piece, already has the piece, or just plain lacks the socket that the piece is supposed to snap into.

This would have an funny corollary; the LW Sequences try to hammer in how different other minds can be from your own in order to develop the skill of thinking about artificial intelligences, but whether or not AI matters this might be an unusually effective hack to break a certain type of person out of their egocentrism and teach them how to deal with other humans.

This raises the obvious question of whether there are any basic mental operations I still don’t have, how I would recognize them if there were, and how I would learn them once I recognized them.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged psychology, rationality | 299 Comments

OT32: When Hell Is Full The Thread Will Walk The Earth

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Scott Alexander

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

1. Comment of the week is Linch’s response to my request to evaluate the DRACO funding bid. They say that it’s probably not a good use of money, and a couple other trustworthy people agreed. Unless I hear something very convincing, I’ve decided not to donate.

2. I often edit posts after they’re done, sometimes long after they’re done. In particular, I take out parts that I decide were ill-advised or wrong after reading the comments. That means a lot of comments look mysterious and seem to refer to problems in the post that no longer exist. If you see them, please be aware that it’s my fault and not that of the commenter.

3. I’ll be in Boston the week before Thanksgiving; if you want to arrange some kind of meetup, let me know. Also, I’ll be in the East Bay December 12 for the Bay Area Rationalist Solstice, and in Manhattan December 19 for the New York Rationalist Solstice. If you’re going to either, I’ll see you there. If you aren’t, there may be some room for an SSC meetup either before or afterwards, though I’ve got to figure out whether the event organizers have their own beforeparties and afterparties planned. If you’re interested in putting this on, contact me.

4. The way I know the subreddit has really come into its own: it’s spawned an hostile schismatic subreddit full of angry rants about it, its moderators, and me. Also, the (orthodox) subreddit is hosting a survey on gender to investigate ideas like being “cis by default”. If that’s the sort of thing you might be interested in, check it out.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged open | 1,043 Comments

Links 10/15: Bride of Linkenstein

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Scott Alexander

You probably know Alan Turing was pretty good with computers. But did you know he was also an Olympic-class marathoner?

Study predicts that US average IQ will rise 2-3 points in the next fifty years, driven by finding that minorities are catching up very quickly. Haven’t investigated their numbers yet, but excellent if true. [EDIT: more discussion here]

Rabbi, what are the Jewish laws regarding Halloween?

Not mentioned on the above, but I’m going to come out and guess this dog costume is probably treyf.

Omnilibrium is a social site that tries to improve online filtering. Instead of a big pot of Reddit-style karma that shows everyone the most upvoted posts, it tries to show everyone posts upvoted by people whose opinions have previously been correlated with theirs, with various customizable options to decide how much you want to be exposed to differing opinions. It needs more users for a good trial run, so check out their FAQ and then join in.

If you want to learn something important, compare the graph in Vox’s The Budget Deficit Is Way Too Low with anyone else’s graph of the budget deficit.

From the Department of Goodhart’s Law: economists sometimes use the Big Mac index to estimate the value of a country’s currency; knowing this, Argentina strong-armed their local McDonalds into changing the price of Big Macs.

This is the only proper response to a teacher taking off points because you didn’t “show your work”.

The Cuban government (not Castro, the one before) built the Panopticon as a real prison.

Pseudo-Erasmus gives a good introduction to the emerging study of cultural institutions.

Disney’s 101 Dalmatians was loosely based on the original novel. Disney’s sequel was not based on the original sequel. The original sequel involved an alien dog coming to Earth to save the Dalmatians from nuclear war.

10/21/15. No hoverboards, but the government did grudgingly allow us to use the genetic tests we were using just fine years ago until they took them away. Well, some of the genetic tests. At double the price.

Female education decreases teenage fertility, but does not have a more general lifetime effect on fertility.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how restrictive regulations let Turing Pharmaceuticals raise the price of Daraprim to $750/pill. Now one group has found a way around that – use compounding pharmacies, which are less bound by the regulations, to sell the same medicine for $1.

Evidence shows that evidence-based literary instruction doesn’t work. Which, if you think about it, means that it does work. Or something.

My new favorite thing – extraordinary overwrought Bollywoodesque portrayals of the climactic archery battle in the Mahabharata. Here’s how one movie handles it, here’s the same thing from a TV series handles it, and then and only then are you prepared to appreciate the consummate genius of this lentil cake ad

Michigan leads the nation in routing around democracy. The pessimistic view is that democracy shouldn’t be routed around. The optimistic view is that democracy should rarely be routed around, the catastrophes in Detroit and Flint are among those rare times, and this proves that people are good at limiting this extreme remedy to the times when it’s needed.

A history of people being excessively geeky and emotional about literature, from the Iliad to the present day.

Nostalgebraist, frequent commenter on Rationalist Tumblr and whose previous story Floornight got advertised here, has finished his latest work of online fiction, The Northern Caves. It’s the chronicle of “an online message board devoted to a cult fantasy author wrestling with his baffling final book” in a way that quickly turns weird. I have some commentary on it here and a review here.

Japan’s Yakuza are famous for…well, many things, but one of them is having great trick-or-treating on Halloween. To the dismay of children everywhere, this year they have announced suspension of their operations due to an especially big turf war.

Wikipedia: List of bizarre buildings. For example, Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron is a three hundred ton, fifty foot high steampunk device in rural Wisconsin.

Why we are really far away from successfully simulating the brain.

Chanda Chisala at Unz Report is on a roll. He’s been talking a lot about how the success of African immigrants to the US confounds a lot of simplistic explanations of the black-white achievement gap. Everybody figured this was just a result of those immigrants being heavily selected, but now he’s back with two posts arguing that it’s not selection effects. First, he points out that the immigrants’ children don’t seem to be regressing to the mean in a very specific Jensenian way that we would expect if they had been selected – this is more complex than I originally thought and not answered simply by “the offspring of two equally extreme parents will not regress”. Second, he points out that even the children of Somali refugees – an unselected population if ever there was one – seem to be doing better than native-born African-Americans. Some attempts at counterargument from James Thompson and Human Varieties. It’s good to see these issues being debated by such civil and mathematically sophisticated people, and also a sign of change how many people on both sides are black. Also by Chisala: book about Barack Obama debating Ayn Rand

Closely related to the recently linked Berniebro article: A Portrait Of The Person-Guy. “The Person-Guy is the cause of every evil and frustration in your life. The Person-Guy only wears odd socks, because he thinks that wasting our limited lifespan sorting them into matching pairs is indicative of a potentially authoritarian neurosis. The Person-Guy has a minor vocal tic, and it sends you into strange daylight fantasies”

Was World War I really a uniquely depressing and terrible war? Or were World War I soldiers just big wimps?

Designer makes a flag for Earth. Finally, something to burn when you just want to protest everything.

Franz Ferdinand is mostly famous for getting assassinated, but if that hadn’t happened maybe we’d know him for his plan to modernize the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a United States of Austria. Meanwhile, the modern heir to the Habsburg name used to host a game show.

Do extra police reduce crime? Many studies have converged upon the finding that they do. Here’s a recent one where a private university increasing police patrols cuts crime in nearby areas by 40 – 70%.

Genetic engineering has now reached the point where we can give dogs super-strength. And by “we”, I mean Chinese people. We can hold conferences about how we should form a commission to determine a framework for investigating the potential implications.

Joe Biden has decided not to run for the Presidency, likely ending his career. That makes it a good time to go beyond the stereotype of the gaffe-prone crazy uncle and look back on his the highlights of his forty years in politics.

Very large randomized controlled preschool study finds abysmal results of pre-K education; recipients of pre-K do better in kindergarten, but by third grade the trend reverses and they have worse behavioral and academic outcomes (hey, remember that study from last month how entering school too early may exacerbate ADHD)? This echoes results from the last few large randomized well-conducted preschool studies, so even the educational establishment is vaguely starting to notice a trend. James Heckman leads the pro-pre-K response, saying that past studies have found the same lack of advantage in later school performance but then later found better adult employment and prosociality outcomes; his explanation is that preschool doesn’t necessarily increase IQ but does increase “social and emotional skills that are greater determinants of late-life success”. But then how come the pre-K children had worse behavior in school in the new study? Possible explanation: the old studies Heckman cites were preschool plus a bunch of early life care and parenting help; maybe the latter helped and the former was at best neutral? Vox has a really excellent summary.

Facebook: Classical art memes.

David Burdeny (click on the link, then on the “Russia: A Bright Future” tab on the bottom of the page) photographs Moscow’s astonishly opulent subway stations. Also from Russia: Putin introduces ~~inelegant hack~~ bill to prevent religious scriptures from being banned as extremist hate speech. When you’ve got to officially declare “right, but this doesn’t apply to things we like”, it’s probably a good sign you’re insufficiently meta.

American? Vipul Naik explains how to test your filter bubble, eg how much your friends differ from the general population. Go to his list of candidates’ Facebook pages and see how many of your friends support each.

Speaking of filter bubbles, if you’re surrounded by terrible people, consider that you might inadvertantly be selecting for them.

Before: obesity set point is just speculation. Now: obesity set point is an effect of melanocortin sensitivity in the hypothalamus.

Type 2 poliovirus has been declared eradicated (“declared” means it hasn’t been spotted in years and people are finally confident it’s gone). Type 3 is probably gone but not yet official; type 1 is still around but rapidly declining. The end is in sight.

Disrupting urban violence with culture, including that time all the gangs in the Bronx held a truce meeting, agreed that killing each other was unpleasant, and decided to invent hip-hop instead. This is maybe the most Hobbesian thing I’ve ever read, not in the “absolute monarchy” sense but in the “eventually people get tired of the state of nature and explicitly decide on civilization as an alternative” sense. Although better not to think too much about what it means that people have to pull a Hobbesian invent-civilization manuever in the middle of the most densely populated areas of the United States, which some people would have considered already a civilization.

Adopting good curricula – not even inventing it, just using the ones that are already out there and well-tested – is probably the cheapest way to make education more “effective”. Why are so few people doing it?

Sarah C has been writing a lot about structural issues in modern cancer research. See for example Is Cancer Progress Stagnating?, Chemotherapy Then And Now, A Note On Protocols, and much more on her blog.

People imitating Lovecraft’s short stories are a dime a dozen, but at least one person is trying to imitate Lovecraft’s sonnets, and they’re not bad, albeit they go way too heavy on name-dropping various mythos references in a way Lovecraft himself never did.

Some effective altruists are doing their own analyses of the offset costs of various kinds of vegetarianism (see mine here) and get broadly similar results. Jeff Kaufman finds that giving an extra $2/year offsets any harms of eating dairy. Gregory Lewis thinks that being vegan is equivalent to a 46 cent donation to the Humane League.

More real maps of fictional landscapes: the Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region. Less Wrong gets a prairie, for some reason. I guess we should be grateful – all they got was a white box on our map.

We know about Stanislav Petrov, Vasili Arkhipov, and other Soviet close-calls with nuclear war. We know about them in part because the Soviet Union collapsed so we got lots of records. There are probably a lot of American close-calls with nuclear war we still haven’t heard about, but it’s starting to look like one of them was during the 60s in Okinawa.

An argument against affirmative action: suppose a student with mid-tier grades ends up in a high-tier school. That student may be surrounded by students with high-tier grades who are faster learners; ie she may be the slowest person in her class. First, this can be frustrating and disspiriting. Second, it means she’s in trouble on anything graded on a curve. Third, the professor might aim their teaching to the median student and end up going too fast or over the head of students below the median. All of these mean a mid-tier student might do worse at a high-tier school than she would at a mid-tier school which she could get into on her grades alone. If this negative effect is larger than the positive effect from going to a more prestigious school, the overall effect of affirmative action could be negative. A long essay by Gail Heriot argues this is what’s happening and gives various statistics in support. Especially worrying is the possibility that affirmative action drives minorities out of STEM classes – which are very hard and might exacerbate the dynamic above – and into easy-A classes where they don’t have to worry so much; could this be why black students in all-black universities succeed at STEM at a much higher rate than black students at mostly-white universities where affirmative action is commonplace? Maybe – but I kind of want to see this argument made by someone other than the Heritage Foundation before I sign on.

Did you know: our modern word “dunce” comes from some theologians who thought that Duns Scotus was really stupid.

New study suggests that good ventilation in buildings increases cognitive test scores as much as 100% – a figure so high that it seems impossible no one noticed this before. Possible mechanisms include decreasing CO2 concentrations – which is being played up for the global warming angle. If this replicates everyone should stop everything they’re doing and improve their ventilation however possible – if being the key word..

For only $76, you can have a cube made of 62 different elements. That’s only $1.23 per element!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged links | 625 Comments

Meat Your Doom

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Scott Alexander

[Epistemic status: Very dirty and approximate, but I think roughly correct. Check my calculations and tell me if I’m wrong.]

A recent formative experience: a seriously ill patient came in and I recommended a strong psychiatric drug. She looked it up online and told me she wouldn’t take it because was associated with an X% increase in mortality.

“But,” I pointed out, “you’re really miserable.”

“But I don’t want to die!”

So I looked it up, did the calculations, and found that it would on average take a couple of months off her life. And I asked her, “Which would you prefer – living 80 years severely ill, or living 79.5 years feeling mostly okay?”

She still wasn’t convinced, so I asked her if she ate cookies. She said yes, almost every day. I told her that the cookies were probably taking more time off her life than the medication would, and I assured her the medication would probably add more value to her life than cookies.

She took the drug.

I thought of this the other day when everyone started sharing that study about meat causing colon cancer. A lot of people used headlines like Processed Meats Rank Alongside Smoking As Cancer Causes. This was very correctly debunked by infographics like this one:

But I feel like this leaves something to be desired. Eating meat is not as bad as smoking. But that’s still a lot of room for it to be bad. Can we quantify the risk better?

From the BBC article: “‘[There would be] one extra case of bowel cancer in 100 lifetime bacon-eaters,’ argues Sir David Spiegelhalter, a risk professor from the University of Cambridge.”

This teaches us something important: “risk professor” is an awesome job title and “David Spiegelhalter, Risk Professor” ought to be a BBC television show starring Harrison Ford.

But also: use absolute risk instead of relative risk! “21% of bowel cancers are caused by meat” doesn’t give you a really good handle on how worried you should be. “One extra case of bowel-cancer in 100 lifetime bacon-eaters” is better.

But let me try to give even more perspective. A bit less than half of colon cancers are fatal. So one extra case per hundred means if you eat bacon daily then there’s an 0.4% chance you will die from a cancer you would not otherwise have gotten.

The average age at diagnosis of colon cancer is 69; the average life expectancy is 79. Sweeping a lot of complexity under the rug and taking a very liberal estimate, the average death from colon cancer costs you ten years of your life.

Multiply out and an 0.4% chance of losing 10 years means that you lose on average two weeks.

Suppose that every case of cancer, fatal and non-fatal alike, causes you additional non-death-related distress equal to two years of your life. That’s about another week.

So overall, if you eat processed meat every day your entire life, you’ll lose about three weeks of life expectancy from colon cancer. That means each serving of meat costs you a minute of your life. You probably lose twenty times that amount just cooking and preparing it.

II.

Note that I am not saying “eating meat will only decrease your lifespan by three weeks”. That is the amount that we have clear evidence for, from this study. It is an example of why this study needs to be put in context so that you don’t worry about it too much.

There are nevertheless a lot of other studies that suggest greater risks, mostly cardiovascular or metabolic. For example, as per this article, some studies suggest that a serving of red meat per day increases mortality 13%, and a serving of processed meat per day increases it 20%. But it also quotes another study of half a million people that finds meat to be slightly protective (sigh) and finds a higher all-cause mortality in the non-meat-eaters.

Whatever. Forget the object-level question for a minute. What are we to make of a claim like “processed meat increases mortality 20%”?

If you’re like me, you want to think “Okay, average life expectancy is eighty years, subtract 20% off of that, and you get 64 years. I’ll live 64 years if I eat bacon every day.” WRONG. Mortality rates are much more complicated, but the key insight is that very few people die when they’re young. If you have approximately a 0% chance of dying at age 30, then adding 20% to 0 is still 0. Chance of mortality creeps upward very slowly and so even large changes in mortality barely affect the underlying distribution. The only good presentation of this I have ever seen anywhere is on Josh Mitteldorf’s blog, which includes the following chart:

This is decrease and we’re talking increase, but but it shouldn’t make much difference here. A 20% increase in mortality isn’t going to bring you from 80 to 64. It’ll probably just bring you from 80 to 78.

Indeed, later in the BBC article, they bring in David Spiegelhalter (RISK PROFESSOR!) who explains that:

If the studies are right…you would expect someone who eats a bacon sandwich every day to live, on average, two years less than someone who does not. Pro rata, this is like losing an hour of your life for every bacon sandwich you eat. To put this into context, every time you smoke 20 cigarettes, this will take about five hours off your life.

That’s for processed meat. Red meat is safer. Also, we still don’t know if these studies are right.

This is why it’s important to distinguish between absolute and relative risk. You hear all of these scary numbers – 21% increase in bowel cancers! 20% increase in all-cause mortality! – and it sounds like you’re going to drop dead the moment you take a bite of a hot dog. And there’s always that chance. Being healthy is good. Being unhealthy is bad. But is life so dear ~~or peace so sweet~~, that you’re never going to want to sacrifice an hour to have a bacon sandwich?

All these hours do add up. I’m not saying dietary recommendations aren’t important. But the recommendations are important in aggregate. If you stick to the spirit of not eating in a horribly unhealthy way, you have a lot of leeway to continue to eat specific things you like even if you know they’re not the best for you. And meat falls firmly within that category.

(though you might also want to consider how to manage the moral issues)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged medicine, statistics | 199 Comments

Contra Huemer On Morals

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Scott Alexander

Michael Huemer thinks there are objective moral truths, because we’ve been moving in toward a particular coherent ethical perspective for the past few centuries, and for all we know this could be because that ethical perspective is Objective Truth.

Achitophel: That’s a pretty uncharitable way of putting it.

Berenice: But does this view really deserve more charity? Suppose I said that in the past, almost nobody wore ties. Now lots of people do. This is probably because ties are the objectively correct fashion choice.

Achitophel: What if people in a dozen different civilizations independently converged on wearing ties? Wouldn’t that provide much stronger evidence?

Berenice: People in a dozen different civilizations have converged on wearing ties. Go to France, Russia, China, or Nigeria, and chances are that the most important people you meet there will be wearing ties. Sure, the convergence isn’t independent, but neither was the convergence in values. You don’t think that India becoming a bicameral parliamentary democracy with a bill of rights had anything to do with Britain being a bicameral parliamentary democracy with a bill of rights?!

Achitophel: You’re trying to make it sound like imperial Britain forced their values down India’s throat. And maybe they did. But how come things like representative government, human rights, and decreased torture took off in a bunch of countries that were never colonized at all?

Berenice: Which countries?

Achitophel: Japan? Russia? China?

Berenice: Japan requires an overly restrictive definition of “never colonized”. And China and Russia require a frankly insane definition of “representative government, human rights, and decreased torture taking off”.

Achitophel: Not in an absolute sense! Relative to before!

Berenice: Give me the Yongle Emperor over Mao any day of the week.

Achitophel: Mao was bad. But he pretended not to be. He didn’t say “Let’s go kill a bunch of people because killing is glorious.” He said “We shouldn’t kill people, but sometimes we have to.” He didn’t say “You’re all my slaves, because I have divine right.” He said “We’re all going to work towards freedom together, but the best way to do that is by doing what I say.” He still had more liberal values than the Yongle Emperor, he just did evil despite them.

Berenice: I feel like this is an odd distinction to insist upon when you are sitting atop a pile of skulls.

Achitophel: And Xi is better than Mao.

Berenice: Not too different from Yongle, honestly.

Achitophel: All right. Fine. Let’s forget about independent development by different civilizations. Let’s say we’re mostly talking about the West – which remember, is still a lot of different countries. Britain. France. Germany. Italy –

Berenice: I am aware which countries are in the West.

Achitophel: These countries all converged on the same couple of values. And those values were all coherent with one another. It seems pretty clear that “emancipation of slaves”, “”freedom of speech”, “decolonization”…

Berenice: Wait a second. Sure, we’ve done a lot of decolonizing the past fifty years. But we did a lot of colonizing the five hundred years before that. In fact, around 1450 the West switched from barely colonizing at all, to colonizing lots of stuff all the time. If Huemer had lived in 1750, wouldn’t he have argued that the arc of the moral universe is long but it tends toward colonialism? And then declared colonialism an objectively correct moral truth?

Achitophel: Stop interrupting! “Emancipation”, “freedom of speech”, “decolonization”, “women’s rights”, and “democratic governance” are all kind of in the same moral direction, so to speak. Do you agree that Western values, today, not in 1750, TODAY, are all going in a certain coherent direction instead of varying randomly?

Berenice: You know, it’s not just ties.

Achitophel: What?

Berenice: If you think about it, practically every item of clothing has become less ornate. Think of Louis XIV in his huge expensive wig, his shiny blue fleur-de-lis filled fur robes, his carefully sculpted gold cane, his bejeweled ceremonial sword, his shiny red heels encrusted with diamonds, his gigantic outrageous hat, all sorts of weird neckbands and armbands. The Yongle Emperor would have had a more Chinese style, but it wouldn’t have been so different in conception. But nowadays nobody does that, not even the rich people who could afford it. The only time you’ll get shiny jewel-filled robes and fifty different things going around your neck is when somebody wants to look old-fashioned and traditional, like a Pope or Cardinal. And this is true everywhere. De Gaulle dressed more simply than Louis, and Mao dressed more simply than the Yongle Emperor. And when we picture the future, everyone’s dressed in featureless skin-tight suits. Evidence for objectively correct fashion?

Achitophel: There’s probably some driving force that made simplicity of clothing desirable, and which applied equally everywhere. For example, ornate clothing was a good signal of wealth back in Louis’ time. But after the Industrial Revolution, anyone could wear ornate clothing. Once the middle-class starts showing up to their bear-baitings in ornate fleur-de-lis gowns, wearing it just meant you were too clueless to know that it had no value anymore. So countersignaling took over – haven’t we talked about this before? The clothing thing isn’t because of some objectively correct fashion choice, it’s just a side effect of increasing wealth?

Berenice: Ding ding ding! Gold star for you! But why don’t you follow your theory to its logical conclusion and realize that the change in morality is also an effect of increasing wealth? Robin Hanson has just written about this in response to Huemer. Here, I’ll quote him for you:

One of the two main factors by which national values vary correlates strongly with average national wealth. At each point in time, richer nations have more of this factor, over time nations get more of it as they get richer, and when a nation has an unusual jump in wealth it gets an unusual jump in this factor. And this favor explains an awful lot of the value choices Huemer seeks to explain. All this even though people within a nation that have these values more are not richer on average.

The usual view in this field is that the direction of causation here is mostly from wealth to this value factor. This makes sense because this is the usual situation for variables that correlate with wealth. For example, if length of roads or number of TVs correlate with wealth, that is much more because wealth causes roads and TVs, and much less because roads and TV cause wealth. Since wealth is the main “power” factor of a society, this main factor tends to cause other small things more than they cause it.

This seems obviously correct to me and I don’t know why you and Huemer can’t see it.

Achitophel: You didn’t quote Huemer’s response! Here:

Perhaps there is a gene that inclines one toward illiberal beliefs if one’s society as a whole is primitive and poor, but inclines one toward liberal beliefs if one’s society is advanced and prosperous. Again, it is unclear why such a gene would be especially advantageous, as compared with a gene that causes one to be liberal in all conditions, or illiberal in all conditions. Even if such a gene would be advantageous, there has not been sufficient opportunity for it to be selected, since for almost all of the history of the species, human beings have lived in poor, primitive societies.

Berenice: Which gene that inclines us to take an airplane when we want to get somewhere quickly, but inclines us to take the bus if economy is more important? Is it DRD4 or SERT? I always forget that one.

Achitophel: You’re saying that it isn’t genetic.

Berenice: Or differently genetic, or complicatedly genetic, or gene-environmental-interactionic. This is what Robin Hanson says:

Well if you insist on explaining things in terms of genes, everything is “unclear”; we just don’t have good full explanations to take us all the way from genes to how values vary with cultural context. I’ve suggested that we industry folks are reverting to forager values in many ways with increasing wealth, because wealth cuts the fear that made foragers into farmers. But you don’t have to buy my story to find it plausible that humans are just built so that their values vary as their society gets rich.

Achitophel: That’s your argument? “We just don’t have good full explanations to take us all the way from genes to how values vary with cultural context?” Your whole point is just an argument from ignorance? Forgive me if I wait until you can come up with a plausible mechanism.

Berenice: You want plausible mechanisms? I’ve got your plausible mechanism RIGHT HERE. To put it in Haidtian terms, the Purity moral foundation, plus a sort of ethnocentrism that corresponds roughly to his Loyalty and Authority moral foundations, are carefully evolutionarily regulated by the prevalence of disease. Purity is the most obvious, given that the disgust reflex is obviously an evolutionary defense against pathogens. The reason you’re grossed out at the thought of touching feces, blood, or rats is that they’re full of plague; the reason you’re even more grossed out by the thought of eating them is that eating things is an even better way to get plague than touching things. Likewise, the best reason to avoid strangers is that they might have strange germs; about twenty million Native Americans who learned that lesson the hard way. Humans have an evolved behavior of upping their levels of purity and ethnocentrism under germ threat. Invent sanitation and antibiotics, eliminate most germs, and people naturally tend toward lower purity-concern and ethnocentrism. You get less racism, more sex, nontraditional families, cultural mixing, and all that good stuff. That’s why you get great correlations between the levels of pathogens in a region and the moderrness of their values. Go somewhere cold and lifeless like Sweden and you’ll get a liberal utopia. Go to a jungle in the Congo full of creepy-crawlies and everyone will be slashing everyone else with machetes. Really, read the article!

Achitophel: You think antebellum Southerners didn’t like black people because they thought they had cooties? Forgive me if the whole enslavement thing doesn’t seem to follow.

Berenice: I’m not saying that’s the only explanation or even the main explanation. You asked for a possible mechanism. I gave you one.

Achitophel: Fine. Give me a mechanism that explains slavery, then. And don’t you dare say it’s not the main explanation afterwards. Give me the best you’ve got.

Berenice: Have you ever noticed how much more virtuous rich people are than poor people? Poor people shoplift all the time, but rich people almost never do.

Achitophel: I don’t know where you’re going with this, but rich people commit white-collar crime and defraud people out of millions of dollars.

Berenice: Which just goes to show their moral superiority all the more! The poor person sells his principles for a dollar; the rich person holds fast until the temptation becomes absolutely overwhelming.

Achitophel: Shut up and make your point.

Berenice: A lot of moral decisions are a conflict between a principle and a temptation. People with fewer temptations have an easy time looking more principled. Not shoplifting is easy for a rich person, not because they’re more virtuous, but because they’re not in a position where they gain anything by doing so.

Achitophel: And this relates to slavery how?

Berenice: I would argue that we have many different drives and needs, some of which can be raw materials for making morality. Compassion is a drive. Xenophobia’s also a drive. Either one can be emphasized or deemphasized based on what’s useful or practical. If the most important thing for you is coming up with an excuse to enslave other people to make cotton, you might cultivate this primitive xenophobia into a complicated system of institutionalized racism that becomes the value system of your entire culture. If you’re not doing that, maybe compassion wins out. I mean, isn’t it interesting that all of the moral decent liberal people were north of a certain imaginary line, and all of the immoral bigoted people were south of it? And that imaginary line just happened to separate the climate where you could grow cotton from the one where you couldn’t? I’d argue instead that given a sufficiently lucrative deal with the Devil, the South took it. The Devil didn’t make the North an offer, and so they courageously refused to yield to this total absence of temptation.

Achitophel: You make the Southerners sound pretty Machiavellian.

Berenice: No more than the rest of us. I expect that once somebody invents vatburgers, we’ll all gain an sudden respect for animal rights, and recoil in horror that we ever engaged in factory farming. Until then, we come up with various moral justifications for the thing we’re not going to stop doing.

Achitophel: So liberal values are real morality, and older values are just excuses to justify greed?

Berenice: Not necessarily greed. “Necessity” is too strong, “convenience” is too weak, but somewhere in between the two. Back in the old days nobody really knew what STDs were. They just knew if you had sex too many times, you would break out in a horrible pox and die. And so would anyone else you had sex with, no matter how otherwise-pure they were themselves. Under those circumstances, having a very sex-negative morality where the promiscuous people are shunned and driven from society is a basic concession to the survival instinct. You’d be insane not to. But once we figured out testing and pencillin, the reasoning behind that morality died out and we stopped trying to cultivate those values. The sex-negative morality isn’t trying to justify greed. It’s making basic concessions necessary for survival. And you know what? If we suddenly had a zombie apocalypse and all of the gains of civilization evaporated, we’d be back to the old illiberal morality in the blink of an eye.

Achitophel: It still sounds kind of liberal modern values are the real morality, and other values are just sort of necessary evils.

Berenice: I think it’s more symmetrical than that. A lot of modern values would disappear if we stopped facing modern problems. We worry a lot about racial sensitivity, but if we ever got a society where racism was as thoroughly neutralized as syphilis, we’d probably drop that value pretty quickly too. If we ever totally conquer poverty, so that everyone’s got more than enough, maybe we’ll even stop worrying about compassion and fairness. Likewise, a lot of the democratic values – freedom of speech, freedom from slavery, equality, etc – are based on most countries being democracies which in turn is based on the historical situation. One of the big shifts was from the medieval system of “mostly super-well-trained professional warriors ie knights matter in projecting military force” to “any warm body with a gun matters”. That gave the common people a new level of power and probably led to democracy and the democratic virtues of equality and freedom. Likewise, technology has connected the world to the degree where different races and cultures and ideas are frantically mixing and mutating, making things like tolerance and freedom of thought much more relevant.

Achitophel: What about not torturing people? What about trying to solve poverty?

Berenice: So we’re too egalitarian to worry much about Authority and Loyalty. We’ve got too many antibiotics and contraceptives to care about Purity. But Care/Harm and Fairness seem as relevant as ever. Maybe even moreso. Given the advances in journalism, communication, and art, we have the ability to learn about and appreciate the struggles of others in a way we never have before.

Achitophel: That sounds a little forced. I could come up with a counter-story where given the worldwide increase in wealth and our lack of real-life exposure to any starving people or smallpox victims, the Care foundation atrophies away, but given our increasing crowding and exposure to superplagues like HIV and Ebola, Purity becomes obsessively important.

Berenice: *shrug* Maybe Care/Harm really is just the fundamental moral foundation, and the others are epiphenomena to be abandoned as we outgrow them. How does that saying go? – “The last enemy to be destroyed is submaximal global utility; destroying Death just buys us more time.”

Achitophel: So you kind of agree with Huemer after all?

Berenice: Perish the thought! Huemer thinks that this change in values proves there’s an objective morality and we’re moving toward it. The strongest claim I would dare is that one of these axes has always been the one that, all else being equal, would dominate the balance – and this is just the first time all else has been equal.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged morality | 717 Comments

OT31: Open Water

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Scott Alexander

This is an experiment to test more frequent open threads. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Six months ago I posted a therapist recommendation open thread. Since there are some new people here since then, and some people have asked for it, I have briefly reopened comments there. If you want to recommend a therapist in a certain area or are looking for such recommendations, go post them there.

2. I am experimentally tabooing the words “neoreaction”, “neoreactionary”, and “NRx” in this blog’s comments effective immediately. It’s emotionally charged and politicized in a way that I think potential substitutes aren’t. I got my first exposure to far-right ideas from the neoreactionaries and so historically I’ve viewed rightism through their lens and spread that to my readers, but I think that this emphasis was a mistake. Also, nobody agrees on what “neoreactionary” means, least of all self-identified neoreactionaries. If you want to talk about monarchists, call them monarchists. If you want to talk about traditionalists, call them traditionalists. If you want to talk about the far right, call it the far right. If you want to talk about HBD, call it HBD. If you want to talk about Mencius Moldbug, call him Mencius Moldbug. First infraction will be punished with a warning, second with burning eternally in the caldera of the Volcano God.

3. Comment of the week goes jointly to a bunch of people who pointed out that I was ignoring the evolutionary angle on prestige (example). Mistakes were made. SSC regrets the error. I still think that it’s probably not either of the two explanations I argued against there, but all I have to go on is vague intuitions I can’t verbalize, and I should have admitted that.

4. When I post a comment, for a while the page won’t let me scroll and instantly takes me back to the comment I just posted whenever I try. Does anyone else have this problem or know a way to solve it?

5. Last open thread a commenter brought up the link to MIT researcher Todd Rider’s crowdfunding campaign for DRACOs, an experimental therapy that is supposed to treat many or all viruses. I’ve heard good things about these in the past, but it seems strange that this guy has to go to crowdfunding, and it seems stranger that the crowdfunding isn’t even doing very well. I’m thinking of donating but I want more opinions first. Do any knowledgeable people (Sarah? Douglas? Anyone?) have more information or any thoughts on whether or not it’s an effective use of money?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged open | 1,513 Comments

A Whiter Shade of Candidate

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Scott Alexander

Vox says that Donald Trump practices the “politics of white insecurity”. US News says that Trump shows “the rising power of the white vote”. Salon wants to tell you “eight reasons why white America falls for demagogues like Donald Trump”. The Week says Donald Trump represents “the rise of white identity politics”. The National Journal says Trump is creating problems by “preaching to a shrinking white electorate”.

Read enough of these articles, and you might start to get the feeling that Donald Trump’s supporters are disproportionately white. You would be wrong.

Well, probably. Data are sketchy. There aren’t a lot of polls that sort their questions by race, and when they do there are sufficiently few non-white Republicans that they have trouble getting a good sample size. Nevertheless, the ones we have suggest that Donald Trump’s supporters are about as diverse as any other Republican’s and maybe moreso.

An August YouGov poll with a sample of 30 Hispanic Republicans finds Trump in the lead with that demographic, getting 28% of the vote to runner-up Ben Carson’s 19%. A Gravis poll with about 40 Hispanic Republicans finds Trump with 37% of their vote to runner-up Marco Rubio’s 20%. A Nevada poll also finds Trump leading among Hispanics in that state, though I don’t know their Hispanic Republican sample size. And finally, head-to-head matchups of Trump vs. Clinton show Trump outperforming some past Republican candidates, including Mitt Romney and George Bush, in the share of Hispanic votes he would likely receive.

This picture is confused by articles asserting either that Trump has the highest favorability ratings among Hispanics, or that Trump has the lowest favorability ratings among Hispanics. In fact, both are true! Favorability ratings allow you to rate someone favorable, unfavorable, neutral, or never-heard-of-em. Everybody has heard of Trump, and nobody is neutral about him, allowing both his favorability and his unfavorability to be sky-high (with news sources reporting whichever one of those two facts suits their narrative). Some people have done a little better work and reported his “net favorability”, or favorability-minus-unfavorability, which is very low and indeed negative. But this isn’t what matters in a real election. What matters in a real election is who people vote for. If 40% of Hispanics view him favorably, but they all vote for him, and 60% of Hispanics view him unfavorably, but split their votes among the other ten candidates, Trump has won the Hispanic vote.

As hard as it is to find good data about Hispanics, it’s even harder to investigate black Republicans. The YouGov poll that had thirty Hispanics has only five blacks; it looks like three vote for Carson, one for Rubio, and one for Trump.

Probably more useful are the head-to-head Trump vs. Hillary polls, which survey all blacks (not just Republicans). One finds Trump doing shockingly well and tripling Romney’s (admittedly miniscule, admittedly decreased by opposing Obama) level of support among black voters, but the Washington Post is skeptical and cites others with less extreme results – although even most of those show Trump doing at least as well as Romney and other historical Republicans. In terms of boots on the ground, African-American Daily Beast correspondent Barrett Pitner agrees that “Donald Trump has black supporters – really”, explaining that Trump’s “fear mongering and us-vs.-them tactics have not only created a large supporter base among conservative white Americans, but also black Americans who have been disproportionately hit by the economic downturn.”

There are too few data to say anything for sure. But all of the data that exist suggest that if the Republican primary were held today and restricted to non-whites, Trump would still win. And if Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

In other words, the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data.

On the other hand, there is a candidate whom the media narrative fits like a glove. A candidate who may win primary among whites, but loses in a landslide among minorities. A candidate whose black support is almost an entire order of magnitude lower than his white support.

That candidate is Bernie Sanders.

According to the same YouGov poll mentioned above, 38% of whites support Bernie Sanders for President, compared to 37% of whites who support Hillary for President. However, only 13% of Hispanics support Sanders, compared to 63% for Hillary. And only 4% of blacks support Sanders, compared to 64% for Hillary!

A South Carolina poll from this month broadly agrees. CNN finds that the two candidates are in a statistical dead heat among whites (48-47) but that Hillary has an overwhelming advantage among blacks (84-7).

Other polls are slightly less extreme but tell the same picture. Gravis (early August) found Hillary leading comfortably among all races, but Sanders’ support among whites was still twice as high as among blacks. The Washington Post also found Sanders doing abysmally overall, but his support among blacks was super-abysmal – only 5 percent!

Suppose we measure a candidate’s “whiteness” by the ratio of their level of white support to their level of nonwhite support within their party. Donald Trump seems to be somewhere around 1.3 – 1.5. Bernie Sanders is somewhere from 3 – 10. It isn’t even close. If any candidate is “playing to the politics of white insecurity” or “preaching to the white electorate” or “harnessing the white vote”, it is he.

(though I should clarify that in a general election, Sanders would no doubt garner much higher nonwhite support than Trump just because of the D after his name. We’re only talking about relative to other people in their own party here)

This explains a couple of otherwise mysterious things. How is Sanders on track to win in Iowa and New Hampshire when he is losing so badly nationally? Well, because Iowa and New Hampshire are two of the whitest states in the country. And how come I keep hearing people say “I’m sure Sanders will win, because even though the media and Big Business support Hillary, everybody I know supports Sanders”? Well, are those people white? Is their entire friend group white? Do they live in very strongly white areas? Then Sanders probably has much higher support among their friends and neighbors than he does nationally.

This might just be a transitory matter of two candidates with different styles and no relevance beyond this particular primary. Or it could represent the first cracks in the alliance that makes up the Democratic Party.

Racially, the Democrats are more diverse than the nation as a whole; since few nonwhites are Republicans, the Democrats are 60-40 white/minority. Socially, the Democrats combine enlightened college-educated creative professionals who want to help the poor, with poor people who want to be helped. And ideologically, the Democrats combine old-school quasi-socialists very concerned about Big Business and income inequality, with social justice activists who think the real issues are race and gender. So far these have been very benign splits. Everyone’s interests basically line up the same and nobody has a lot of reason to fight with anyone else – unlike the Republicans, who are already in civil war.

But the current election brings all three splits into near-alignment. The quasi-socialists, whites, and enlightened professionals generally support Sanders. The social justice activists, nonwhites, and poor people generally support Clinton – this bizarre situation of the guy most vocal about helping the least fortunate getting support from everyone except the least fortunate themselves. While I don’t really expect any fireworks to fly, it’s a risky situation and makes this an interesting time to be watching politics.

But mostly I bring this up not because the presidential primary is interesting in itself, but because it really drives home two important points that I’ve tried to make before.

First, in this post, I suggest that when talking politics “white” sometimes literally means people of European descent, but other times means what I dubbed the “Red Tribe”, very loosely corresponding to Republican voters, but also with connotations of southern, poor, uneducated, religious, and exaggeratedly patriotic. This seems to be one of those second times. Even if Donald Trump had 100% support from all minorities, he would still be “the white people candidate”, or even, as some people have called him, “the white power candidate”. Likewise, even if 100% of Sanders’ supporters were white and no black or Hispanic person had ever had the tiniest positive thought about him, we would never get the same kind of “is Bernie Sanders a demagogue harnessing white voters?” story that Trump inspires every day. Sanders supporters aren’t white! They have degrees from Ivy League colleges! They’re the good guys!

Second, in this post, I argue against the theory that groups with few black members are necessarily racist or exclusive (frequently seen as “Silicon Valley is problematic because of how few black techies there are”). I note that black people are severely underrepresented in groups as diverse as runners, BDSM participants, atheists, fanfiction readers, Unitarian Universalists, furries, and bird watchers. They’re also underrepresented in movements with apparently impeccable leftist and anti-racist credentials, like Occupy Wall Street and the US Communist Party. Given the frequency with which the “your group has few minorities, that means you’re racist and need to become more explicitly leftist in order to shrieve yourself” argument gets used to punch down at nonconformist or “weird” groups, there can never be too many counterexamples. And Bernie Sanders’ campaign is such a counterexample. It fits poorly with the “low nonwhite representation is caused by insufficiently strong social justice orientation” theory, but very well with the counter-theory I propose in that post: nonwhites are just generally less eager to join weird intellectual signaling-laden countercultural movements.

I take immense schadenfreude in imagining the people who like to write thinkpieces that “call out” polyamory or atheism for their insufficient minority representation, fidgeting and sweating and trying to justify their support for Sanders. I deeply enjoy the thought of them reading the article on ‘Berniebros’ (warning: possibly literally the worst article ever written, I am not kidding) and maybe realizing that wait, this is what they’ve been doing to other people all along, and it’s kind of unfair and hurtful. I mean, this will never happen. But it makes me happy to think about.

Bernie hasn’t done much specific to upset minorities; I doubt those stunts by the Black Lives Matter protesters mattered much one way or the other. And I would naively have expected his message of income equality and helping the least fortunate to go over better with people who are pretty unequal and unfortunate. And although Bill Clinton was pretty popular among nonwhites, I don’t see anything super-special about Hillary that would make her attractive to them.

So I think the explanation here might just be the same explanation as with the atheism and BDSM: Hillary has better name recognition and is more mainstream and less weird, in the same way not-BDSM and not-atheism are more mainstream and less weird. This is also my explanation for Trump’s relative success with minorities: he’s a household name in a way that Marco Rubio and Scott Walker aren’t, and he has vague good associations of strong leadership and economic savvy among the TV-viewing public.

And if Sanders supporters accept that in their own case, maybe they’ll be more understanding when other people plead the same.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged politics, race/gender/etc | 678 Comments

Contra Simler on Prestige

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Scott Alexander

su3su2u1 challenged status/signaling theories of human behavior: can they make any real-life predictions? His example was a recent medical conference that threw together three groups of people – high-status top professors, medium-status established doctors, and low-status new residents. The women in one group (female doctors + male doctors’ wives/girlfriends) were wearing conspicuous fancy jewelery. The women in the other groups weren’t. Which group had the jewelery?

His point was that status/signaling theories don’t answer this question for us with any degree of confidence. Maybe the high-status top professors wear the jewelery to signal wealth and dominance. Maybe the low-status new residents wear it aspirationally and because they need to impress. Maybe the medium-status established doctors wear it, because the residents can’t afford it and the professors countersignal that they don’t need it.

Now, in fact su3su2u1 was a no-good sneaky sneak, because the residents had all just attended a wedding that gave out the fancy jewelery as gifts and this was probably all that was going on. But his point is well-taken. Status and signaling theories are hard to use in practice. So it’s always nice when people try to do some theoretical work on them and tease them apart into their different components. This is the task Kevin Simler takes on in Social Status: Down The Rabbit Hole.

His theory (which he adopts from various psychologists and animal behaviorists) is that status separates neatly into two systems: dominance and prestige. Dominance is “respect me because I’ll kill you if you don’t.” Prestige is “Respect me because I’m awesome”. The two systems have different origins and different behavioral effects; conflate the two and you’ll end up very confused.

If you hate your boss, but you do what she says anyway because she’ll fire you if you don’t, that’s dominance. If you’re very respectful to a police officer because he has a gun and you don’t, that’s dominance too. Principals have dominance, parents have dominance, psychiatrists keeping you in a hospital against your will have dominance. Prestige is different. A rock star has prestige. He can’t hurt you. You don’t necessarily need anything from him. But you still want his autograph, want to meet him, maybe want to sleep with him. Star athletes have prestige. Actors and actresses. Good bosses who you work hard for not because you’re afraid of them but because you don’t want to let them down. Your parents, if you do what they say out of respect/love and not out of fear of punishment. Heroic leaders like George Washington (except more alive).

Having prestige can be better than being dominant. If you’re dominant, your subordinates will do exactly as much as necessary to avoid your wrath; if you’re prestigious, they may go above and beyond to help you. On the other hand, sometimes good old-fashioned dominance does the trick; your boss can ask you to drop everything and spend a week of long nights on a sudden project, but if your favorite rock star asked you to spend a week doing his taxes for him you might politely decline.

Dominance has clear animal analogies (alpha chimps, chicken pecking orders, etc), and we can pretty well guess why it evolved. The evolutionary origins of prestige are murkier, and this is the focus of Simler’s piece.

First he flirts with the theory of a guy called Henrich, who says prestige comes from a desire to learn. I admire and flatter my favorite rock star because I’m hoping I can hang out around him, some of his genius will rub off on me, and I’ll be able to play a wicked guitar riff and win a couple of Grammies myself. This theory makes no sense to me. It’s not just that there’s zero chance of Bowie teaching me, or that I might not have the talent anyway. Maybe in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness that didn’t matter so much. It’s that I don’t want to be a rock star, and if Bowie offered to train me, I’d say I wasn’t interested.

Simler doesn’t like this much either, so he moves on to the theory of two guys named Zahavi and Dessalles. I’ll quote him at length:

Unlike Henrich, whose account of prestige is unique to our species, Zahavi and Dessalles find analogues among non-human animals — most vividly, in the Arabian babbler.

The Arabian babbler is a small brown bird found in the arid brush of the Sinai Desert and (you guessed it) the Arabian Peninsula. It spends most of its life in small groups of three to 20 members. These groups lay their eggs in a communal nest and defend a small territory of trees and shrubs that provide much-needed safety from predators.

When it’s living as part of a group, a babbler does fairly well for itself. But babblers who get kicked out of a group have much bleaker prospects. These “non-territorials” are typically badgered away from other territories and forced out into the open, where they often fall prey to hawks, falcons, and other raptors. So it really pays to be part of a group. (Keep this in mind; it’ll be crucial in a moment.)

Within a group, babblers assort themselves into a linear and fairly rigid dominance hierarchy, i.e., a pecking order. When push comes to shove, adult males always dominate adult females — but mostly males compete with males and females with females. Very occasionally, an intense “all-out” fight will erupt between two babblers of adjacent rank, typically the two highest-ranked males or the two highest-ranked females. This is the babblers’ version of a Wild West showdown, as if one babbler suddenly turns to the other and says, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” A showdown always results in death or permanent exile for one of the combatants.

Most of the time, however, babblers get along pretty well with each other. In fact, they spend a lot of effort actively helping one another and taking risks for the benefit of the group. They’ll often donate food to other group members, for example, or to the communal nestlings. They’ll also attack foreign babblers and predators who have intruded on the group’s territory, assuming personal risk in an effort to keep others safe. One particularly helpful activity is “guard duty,” in which one babbler stands sentinel at the top of a tree, watching for predators while the rest of the group scrounges for food. The babbler on guard duty not only foregoes food, but also assumes a greater risk of being preyed upon, e.g., by a hawk or falcon.

Helpfulness, bravery, heroism: these birds seem like regular Boy Scouts. At least on the surface.

But here’s where things take a turn for the weird. Babblers don’t just passively or occasionally offer to help each other. Instead they compete intensely for the privilege of doing so.

Unlike chickens, who compete to secure more food and better roosting sites for themselves, babblers compete to give food away and to take the worst roosting sites. Each tries to be more helpful than the next. And because it’s a competition, higher-ranked (more dominant) babblers typically win, i.e., by using their dominance to interfere with the helpful activities of lower-ranked babblers. This competition is fiercest between babblers of adjacent rank. So the alpha male, for example, is especially eager to be more helpful than the beta male, but doesn’t compete nearly as much with the gamma male. Similar dynamics occur within the female ranks.

Now: what in Darwin’s name is going on here? Why are babblers so eager to help each other?

The naive answer is that they’re simply doing what’s best for the group — because when the group succeeds, everyone ends up better off. But this kind of straightforward altruism simply isn’t found in nature.[1] It’s not game-theoretically stable, thanks to the free-rider problem. Also note that babblers actively interfere with the helpful behavior of their rivals. If their ultimate goal were the success of the group, interfering with others would be entirely counter-productive.

So the logic of natural selection compels us to ask, “What selfish motive does an individual babbler have to help others?”

The answer, in a word, is prestige. A second form of social status that lives alongside the babblers’ dominance hierarchy — a kind of “credit” reflecting the amount of good each individual has done for others. So when two babblers compete to stand guard duty, for example, they’re actually jockeying, selfishly, for prestige within the group.

And suddenly the intense competition makes sense.

But as in our species, so too in babblers: prestige means nothing without admiration. If other babblers weren’t willing to defer and pay respect to prestigious individuals, there’d be no incentive to compete for prestige.

But other babblers are willing to pay respect to prestigious individuals, in two main ways. The first is mating opportunities.[2] Babblers are constantly trying to interfere with their rivals’ mating attempts — but when a babbler has high prestige, his or her rivals interfere less. Among males, this translates to more mating opportunities; among females, it translates to earlier mating opportunities (giving one’s offspring a head start in the communal nest)

The other perk of high prestige is a reduced risk of being challenged to an all-out showdown. The higher a babbler’s prestige, the less likely its rivals are to pick a fight — even if they stand a good chance of winning.

All of which brings us, finally, to the point. Why do other babblers voluntarily defer to prestigious ones? The answer is simply(!) that babblers with lots of prestige are useful to the group, and therefore useful to keep around.[3] This is how it ends up being in the selfish interest of other babblers to defer to those with high prestige.

When a babbler is useful enough, in other words, it’s in the self-interest of others to “suck up” or pay respect to that babbler (by backing down from fights and interfering less in its mating attempts) in order to keep it happily in the group.

Bottom line: Prestige-seeking and admiration (deference) are complementary teaming instincts. They help babblers stay attached to a group, keep groupmates happy, and secure a larger share of the group’s reproductive “spoils.”

I hope this account of the babbler prestige system sounds familiar, because it’s more or less equivalent to the prestige system found in our own species; both are derived from the same Platonic form.

This is better. It sort of makes sense as an evolutionary explanation. But I think extending it from there to modern human prestige is a big stretch.

Take the rock star again. Let’s say David Bowie. When people admire Bowie, are they trying to get him to not leave the group? Is that why people scream and throw themselves at him? What would it even mean for Bowie to leave the group? If he doesn’t have enough groupies, will he defect to North Korea?

And don’t we sometimes admire people who we do want to leave the group? Suppose that for some reason I was stuck on a plane sitting next to the Koch Brothers – maybe all their private jets broke down at once. I would probably treat them in the classic way someone treats prestigious people. I’d feel really nervous striking up a conversation with them because they’re high-status and important. If I did strike up a conversation with them, I’d be really deferential and overthink everything they said. After the flight was over, I would immediately post to Twitter “I SPENT A WHOLE FLIGHT TALKING TO THE KOCH BROTHERS!” and then post the photo I’d roped them into taking with me. But none of this is because I don’t want them to leave the group. If the Koch Brothers defected to North Korea, that would be great.

And what about prestigious people who don’t bring any special talents to the group? Helen Keller, for example, can do less than most other people. We admire her not because we need to make use of her mad skillz, but because given all her handicaps it’s amazing that she can do anything at all.

We could potentially dismiss all of these by saying that evolved instincts don’t have to work in the present day. If there were no cavemen like David Bowie (probably a safe bet), then maybe our evolutionary instincts don’t apply to his case. But even in evolutionary time, admiration has a free-rider problem. Suppose that we want to make sure David Bowie stays in the West rather than North Korea, but he’ll defect unless at least three people flatter him per day. Assuming that flattering David Bowie involves some kind of cost – maybe you have to buy the t-shirt with his face on it – why should I pay the cost when there are millions of other Westerners invested in the same project? Should we be more impressed with the altruistic spirit of people who have sex with famous rock stars, seeing as they are sacrificing their bodies to the project of keeping their heroes out of Kim Jong-un’s clutches?

I think I might be straw-manning the babbler hypothesis here, so let’s skip down a few paragraphs to the next time Simler explains it:

The point is, we want to be friends, allies, and teammates with people who do good things for their friends, allies, and teammates. It’s in our self-interest to cultivate access to such people — which we do, in part, by paying them respect and granting them the perks of prestige.

More generally, however, we admire not only those who actually do good things for their teammates, but also those who show the potential to do good things, i.e., by demonstrating useful skills. The student who gets straight As from a good college, for example, is advertising her value to future employers, and her prestige makes her highly sought-after on the job market. She’ll be actively courted by hiring managers and given various perks (a better starting salary, more time to make her decision) that aren’t accorded to her less-impressive classmates.

Simler treats this as a summary of his previous point, but this is a very different theory!

The previous point was that prestigious people do good things for their community. The new point is that prestigious people do good things for their flatterers in particular. It’s a tit-for-tat relationship: show David Bowie your tits, and he gives you some tat. Money? Access to the best clubs? A copy of his latest album?

This makes sense except that it’s not the way most admiration-interactions actually work.

Forget David Bowie. Let’s talk about Justin Bieber. I see about a zillion teenage girls hanging posters of Justin Bieber in their room, fighting for the last ticket to Justin Bieber concerts, buying magazines with Justin Bieber on the cover. But the chance that Justin Bieber gives any tat for all of these tits is practically nil.

And we can’t dismiss this as a form of irrationality restricted to teenage girls. A lot of people I know geek out about Elon Musk; I’ve been to more than one party/meetup where the topic of conversation turns to how great Elon Musk is. I don’t hang posters on my wall, but if I did, they would probably have his face on them. But I don’t expect any repayment from him; I doubt he even knows about my flattery. What about all those Catholics who obsess over the Pope? What about people who obsess over J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman or LeBron James or Derek Jeter?

And what about me on that airplane with the Koch Brothers? Am I thinking to myself “If I ever need an entire field of science discredited, now I’ve got an in with some people who are really good at it”? What about Helen Keller? “If the world is plunged into eternal darkness, and also there’s some global super-loud hum that makes it impossible to hear anything, now I’ll have a friend who can operate regardless?” Even in evolutionary times, we should have some need to reflect on “can this person actually help me?”

I worry no one theory can completely explain prestige. It seems to me to be a combination of several different things:

1. Group signaling. The people I admire say a lot about me. If I admire Elon Musk, it means that I’m really into space, technology, and maybe the free market. If I admire the Pope, it means I’m really into Catholicism. If I admire David Bowie, it means I’m fabulous. Learning about these people, celebrating their accomplishments, and joining their Official Fan Clubs is an important method of bonding with other peopel.

2. Coattail riding. If a prestigious person becomes more prestigious, I might “look good” for having supported them “before they got big”. It suggests that I’m a good judge of character, or “hip” enough to know which acts will take off and which ones will never achieve broader appeal. Just as a fan feels good when his sports team wins the Superbowl, and a patriot feels good every time her country wins a war, so being a known Elon Musk fan means I get to feel a tiny fragment of the glory whenever Elon Musk invents a new rocket.

3. Prestige by association. Prestigious people hang out with other prestigious people. Nonprestigious people hang out with other nonprestigious people. If I have access to prestigious people, even in some boring trivial way, that makes me seem more prestigious. I think this is what’s going on with the hypothetical airplane conversation with the Koch brothers. Yes, in some sense it’s sheer coincidence that I run into them on a flight. In another sense it isn’t; at the very least, it probably means I was flying first class, and I must have had some rudimentary level of social skills to engage them in conversation. I’m signaling that I’m the sort of person who, at least when everything goes right, can shmooze with billionaires. Even if deep down people know that it was mostly a coincidence, on some gut level that’s kind of impressive.

4. Tit for tat. Yes, in some cases we will be close enough to prestigious people that we can expect rewards for our support. It’s probably easier to flatter my boss or my favorite teacher effectively than to flatter Justin Bieber or the Koch brothers, and you can reasonably expect special treatment. This is a good way of forging an alliance. If I praise my boss, she benefits from my elevation: having a nobody admire you is boring, but having a somebody admire you is both flattering practically useful. Therefore, the more I admire and support my boss, the more she is incentivized to help me become a somebody.

5. Virtuous cycles. Suppose that, for reasons 1 through 4, people want to be associated with prestigious people. Note that this is different from “associate with prestigious people” in the sense of meeting them directly; anything that gets their name linked to the prestigious person will work. In fact, suppose that specifically, there are a bunch of conservatives who are really into the Koch brothers and are jockeying for position as Koch brother fan #1. Some of these people might play the strategy of according me prestige for having met the Koch brothers as a way of better signaling their own respect for the Koch brothers to third parties. That gives me a separate incentive to seek such prestige by association.

This is still woefully incomplete, especially by “predict which of these doctors will wear jewelery”-level standards. Maybe prestige shouldn’t be treated as a single thing at all. Maybe the admiration I feel for my boss (a real person in my social circle who I interact with daily) comes from a totally different part of the brain and has totally different evolutionary origins from the admiration I feel for Elon Musk (who I expect never to meet).

But I think separating dominance from prestige is a good start. Do consider reading the full Melting Asphalt essay, as well as Simler’s follow-up thoughts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ecclesiology, rationality | 568 Comments

Links 10/15: Take Back Your Link

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Scott Alexander

In 1926, a rich guy died and willed all of his money to whichever Toronto woman could have the most babies in the next ten years. So began the Great Stork Derby.

For the past four decades or so, rich-country inequality has been increasing as labor gradually takes less and less of the pie; most people have blamed this on political or structural factors and expected it to get worse. A London economics professor suggests that it’s actually two demographic factors – the baby boom and the rise of China – creating lots and lots of new workers and driving the price of labor down. He predicts that from now on, as baby boomers retire and China shrinks, the trend will reverse and inequality will start decreasing back toward 1970s levels. Alternate still-pretty-good possibility: Africa booms as the new cheap labor source.

On the other hand, here are some people saying that 100% of the decline in labor’s share of income is due to intellectual property products.

The Yuan Percent: the children of China’s billionaires have nearly limitless wealth, but face the usual sorts of ennui and maladjustment that come with unearned riches. Their coping strategies range from taking over their parents’ businesses to becoming socially aware to retreating into a bubble of other rich kids to just partying a lot all the time. Also, one of them got a job with Uber and drives random people around in his Maserati.

The Wikipedia Entry For Guam, Retold As A YA Dystopian Novel

What’s the point of a bitcoin generating chip that doesn’t even earn back the electricity needed to power it? A micropayments revolution where you can pay $0.001 to watch a video without needing a linked bank account or anything.

US doctors have been busy this month switching over to the new ICD-10 diagnostic codes. These have been generally mocked as overly complicated, but the Internet has many helpful guides, including a primer on the OMG codes (OMG 000.30 – Injury to dominant hand from hitting computer screen due to ICD-10) and a refresher on Star Wars-related codes (U327.21A – Accident to, on or involving Alderaan when blown up by first Death Star, initial encounter). Once you’ve got them all down, commemorate your successful transition with the new coffee table book Struck by Orca: ICD-10 Illustrated

The mainstay of the Chabad Lubavitch armed forces is the Mitzvah tank.

A bunch of studies have come out in the past few years purporting to show that “poverty affects kids’ brains”, based on studies that show that poor kids have differently-structured brains than rich kids. These are always followed with calls to give better social/financial support to poor families with young children to help the kids develop better. I’ve always been really skeptical, on the grounds that it’s also possible poor families are poor because they have some characteristic that increases risk of poverty, which like many characteristics is expressed in the brain, which gets genetically transmitted to their kids, thus making their kids’ brains look different. So I wanted a randomized controlled trial giving poor families money and seeing if their kids’ brains develop differently. Well, now we are getting exactly that. I predict 66% chance it comes back positive (because things usually do) and 33% chance it comes back true positive and survives good replication attempts. Either way it is a win-win situation. If it’s negative, we have All Learned An Important Lesson. If it’s positive, then there’s a super-super easy way to improve kids’ long-term prospects and change the world. EDIT: Here’s a quasi-experimental look at some Cherokee Indians that does find an effect.

Nobels in Medicine go to two groups who came up with novel therapies for tropical parasitic diseases: one for the discoverers of avermectin, one for the discoverer of artemisin. Both are great drugs, both have saved tens of thousands, maybe millions of lives, and it’s good to see tropical medicine getting the recognition it deserves.

If you’re like me, you saw a couple years’ plateau in genome sequencing costs and started panicking that innovation had stopped and the Great Stagnation had taken over yet another domain. Well, good news: after a short hiatus, the cost of genome sequencing is falling faster than ever, and even the official statistics now correctly reflect that point.

No matter what their original views, Supreme Court justices get more liberal as they get older. 538 throws out hypotheses: they don’t want to get in trouble with the New York Times? They want to keep getting invited to the good cocktail parties? Really, these are some of 538’s hypotheses!

The island of Kiribati looks like what happens when a bored gamer has to come up with city names in their third Civilization IV game of the night.

Something I should have realized a long time ago: cells sometimes pick up a few extra mutations when they divide, but it doesn’t matter because throughout the zillions of cells in the body they all even out. Unless we’re talking about the first division of the fertilized zygote, or the first few divisions in the neural crest which is about to become the embryonic brain, or anything like that. Now scientists find these crucial developmental mutations lead to large populations of genetically different neurons in the adult brain. This ought to increase (by how much? I don’t know) our estimate of how much interpersonal variation is genetic. Even identical twins will have different post-fertilization mutations, so the old maxim that all differences between identical twins are non-genetic doesn’t really hold; since identical twins are the yardstick by which we judge everyone else, that means we have to revise those estimates as well. In other words, these sorts of mutations could make up part of what we previously called “non-shared environment”.

In the 1700s, the British famously discovered that citrus fruit cured scurvy, and the treatment became a well-known mainstay of the Royal Navy. So how come in the early 1900s, polar explorers kept dying of scurvy and none of them knew how to treat it? This is a really good article.

Mathematician James Stewart got rich writing a series of popular calculus textbooks. He used his fortune to create a calculus-related mansion called Integral House. When I get older I hope to be at least this eccentric.

Vox: India is as rich as the US was in 1881. I feel like this probably hides some important differences – if ‘access to cool modern technology’ wasn’t a factor, I would choose 1881-US or even 1731-US over modern India in a heartbeat – but still neat to think about.

I am a sucker for faux actual maps of conceptual space. You probably remember my map of the rationalist community. And I might or might not have previously blogged about the map of humanity, which I used to have hanging in my kitchen. Well, now there’s a map of literature. I wonder if there’s a way to get a paper copy…

One thing I love about the very early US was their weirdly earnest intellectualism/utopianism/classicism, which gives you all of these random farmers naming stuff after the Iliad and trying to write Homeric epics. Definitely from that genre: 19th-century Wyomingian George W. Corey wrote a Paradise-Lost style epic poem detailing Satan’s role in founding the Democratic Party.

Repealing Section 230, the law protecting websites from being sued for their commenters’ comments, is a really bad idea.

Secret Service broke its privacy rules to embarrass a critic. The most Third World thing I’ve heard of happening in this country for a while. Luckily they seem to be in big trouble for it.

China opens a Communist Party theme park. Currently mostly just statues and exhibits, but Twitter offers ideas for exciting rides like Pile Of Forty-Five Million Dead Bodies Mountain. No word on whether or not the log ride will have a soft landing.

More news headlines (1, 2) from the Department Of Rocks Pelting People.

Starts off okay: “An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is not only a necessary law to protect animals and to show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself…. I have therefore announced the immediate prohibition of vivisection and have made the practice a punishable offense…” Then gets kind of, what’s the word – ironic: “Until such time as punishment is pronounced the culprit shall be lodged in a concentration camp.” Animal welfare in Nazi Germany.

This list of ten commonly bungled historical quotes is notably mainly for the story of “There’s a sucker born every minute”. It wasn’t said by PT Barnum, but by his competitor, circus owner David Hannum. Hannum had bought the fossilized remains of the Cardiff Giant, Barnum had tried to buy it off him, Hannum had refused, so Barnum had made a fake copy. When thousands flocked to see Barnum’s fake, Hannum explained it away by saying “There’s a sucker born every minute”. Twist: unbeknownst to Hannum, the original Cardiff giant was also fake. So Barnum’s customers were suckers, Hannum was a sucker, and everyone who attributes this quote to Barnum is a sucker too.

Thieves rarely stay thieves for very long.

An older school starting age dramatically decreases risk of inattention/hyperactivity at age 7 (effect size of -0.7!), and this persists at age 11. Possible cause of secular increase in ADHD? This is going with all of the other studies into the “100% of problems are caused by school” bin.

Say what you want about California’s government in general, but this month they’re the latest (and largest) state to pass right-to-die legislation.

The majority of the world’s children are now in school, but don’t seem to be learning anything there despite developing countries sinking billions of dollars into education. This is going with all the other studies into the…you know the drill.

Prospect gives the leftist perspective on the narrowing of civic life – ie the decline of fraternal organizations, grassroots associations, and benefit groups.

Experiment: making someone consume sauerkraut juice makes them more likely to support Nazis. Paper suggests it’s because drinking a healthy-but-disgusting beverage means they’ve “done their good deed for the day” and are now free of having to worry about moral concerns, but I’m surprised they didn’t take the social priming aspect and say that sauerkraut primes German-ness. Related: meta-analysis finds small but robust effect of social priming.

One constant in the back-and-forth debate over immigration is that Muslim immigration into Western Europe has gone exceptionally poorly. Or so I thought – Marginal Revolution reports that 40 – 60% of Middle Eastern/African/Muslim immigrants in France marry someone who is “neither an immigrant nor a descendent of immigrants”, suggesting an impressive level of assimilation. Still don’t know whether that means ethnically-French people or ethnically-Middle-Eastern people whose families immigrated more than one generation ago.

I asked some people who had read Albion’s Seed why we attribute a lot of American South/Appalachian culture to the Scots-Irish when neither the Scots nor the Irish display those cultural features. Their answer: Scots-Irish is a euphemism. American Southerners and Appalachianites are actually descended from the Border Reavers.

Julia writes about preventing child sexual abuse. It says about 10% of people are sexually abused as children, which is much higher than I would have expected before going into psychiatry, whereas now I constantly have to remind myself that occasionally some people aren’t.

Fiesta Cookware was a 1950s fad. Like all 1950s fads, it played into nuclear mania; in this case, by including uranium-based paints to give it its cool radioactive-looking color. Since having uranium in the things you eat off of is clearly the best idea, you may be regretting you were not around in the 1950s to enjoy it. Regret no longer – it’s back on sale for $25 a plate from United Nuclear, which advertises that they are “great for radiation demonstrations, classroom/educational use, as a geiger counter test source, and certainly an item for collectors”.

The easternmost point in the United States is in the Virgin Islands and is named Point Udall. The westernmost point in the United States is in Guam, and is named Point Udall. Truly did Bill Clinton say “The Sun will never set on the legacy of Mo Udall.”

A lot of news sources recently reported that Tsinghua University has topped MIT for best engineering school. QZ does some decent investigative reporting and finds that this is only true if you measure by sheer quantity of papers. Apparently Tsinghua produces lots and lots of papers but they aren’t very good.

One of the lynchpins of the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter argument is that if advanced alien civilizations existed elsewhere in the Universe, we would have detected them by observing the megastructures they would build around their star(s) – but we haven’t, so they don’t. Now, for the first time, Kepler has detected a star that looks like it has a megastructure around it. But before you get too excited, it could also be some kind of exotic planetary collision or weird cometary cloud or something. Scientists have already applied to SETI to get radio telescopes pointed that direction to see if they pick anything up.

We’re always told that we need seven to eight hours’ sleep, but hunter-gatherers seem to make do with six and a half.

Via a Marginal Revolution article on a philosophy paper about how there shouldn’t be philosophy papers, I found Nathan Robinson’s blog Navel Observatory. It’s kind of one-third Freddie deBoer, one-third Brian Tomasik, and one-third weird humor. This article reminded me of my “Niceness, Community, and Civilization”: Is There A Principled Distinction Between Refusing To Watch American Sniper And Refusing To Read Fun Home?. And this one reminded me of my “Toxoplasma of Rage”: Keeping The Content Machine Whirring. Mr. Robinson also has a bunch of weird leftist childrens’ books on Amazon with titles like The Day the Crayons Organized an Autonomous Workers’ Collective and The Mayor of New Orleans Gets Her Way: A Child’s Urban Planning Toolkit.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged links | 681 Comments

OT 30: Comment Knowledge

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Scott Alexander

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

1. These threads tend to fill up pretty quickly. Should I start doing them weekly instead of biweekly?

2. John Sidles is hereby forbidden to use bold text or to speak in a topic-comment sentence structure. He may continue to comment as long as he follows these two rules.

3. Comment thread on autism had a lot of unfortunate definitional issues (are we talking about turning everyone into Perfectly Conformist Jocks/Cheerleaders or about preventing people from being institutionalized/suicidal while leaving everything else intact?) but the stories from autistic people / caretakers were pretty interesting, especially Mai, Helldalgo, Alicorn, Ilzolende, Peter, Murphy, and seebs.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged open | 1,149 Comments

Slate Star Codex

What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?

OT32: When Hell Is Full The Thread Will Walk The Earth

Links 10/15: Bride of Linkenstein

Meat Your Doom

Contra Huemer On Morals

OT31: Open Water

A Whiter Shade of Candidate

Contra Simler on Prestige

Links 10/15: Take Back Your Link

OT 30: Comment Knowledge

Celestial Blogroll Of Benevolent Knowledge

Embalmed Ones

Fabulous Ones

Innumerable Ones

Mermaids

Stray Dogs

Suckling Pigs

Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush

Those That Are Included In This Classification

Those That Are Trained

Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies

Those That Belong To The Emperor

Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase

Those That Tremble As Though They Are Mad

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Celestial Blogroll Of Benevolent Knowledge

Embalmed Ones

Fabulous Ones

Innumerable Ones

Mermaids

Stray Dogs

Suckling Pigs

Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush

Those That Are Included In This Classification

Those That Are Trained

Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies

Those That Belong To The Emperor

Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase

Those That Tremble As Though They Are Mad

Various Others

Archives

Recent Posts

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