And I thought we should have something like that for the rationalist community. Except of course much, much better.

Click to expand

Most things are links.

Links around the outer edge are places outside the rationalist community that have significant communication/cross-pollination with us.

City size is proportional to site Alexa rank (when available), number of followers (when available) or wild guess (otherwise).

If I left you out, it’s probably because I forgot about you and not because I don’t like you. Some communities like Twitter or Tumblr were so big I couldn’t include everyone, and my choices were mostly random and based on who I knew about.

Various icons taken from their rightful owners, mostly Civ2 modpacks. Sorry, rightful owners.

My attending tells a patient trying to quit that she must take a certain pill that will decrease her drug cravings. He says it is mostly covered by insurance, but that there will be a copay of about one hundred dollars a week.

The patient freaks out. “A hundred dollars a week? There’s no way I can get that much money!”

My attending asks the patient how much she spends on heroin.

The patient gives a number like thirty or forty dollars a day, every day.

My attending notes that this comes out to $210 to $280 dollars a week, and suggests that she quit heroin, take the anti-addiction pill, and make a “profit” of $110.

At this point the patient always shoots my attending an incredibly dirty look. Like he’s cheating somehow. Just because she has $210 a week to spend on heroin doesn’t mean that after getting rid of that she’d have $210 to spend on medication. Sure, these fancy doctors think they’re so smart, what with their “mathematics” and their “subtracting numbers from other numbers”, but they’re not going to fool her.

At this point I accept this as a fact of life. Whatever my patients do to get money for drugs – and I don’t want to know – it’s not something they can do to get money to pay for medication, or rehab programs, or whatever else. I don’t even think it’s consciously about them caring less about medication than about drugs, I think that they would be literally unable to summon the motivation necessary to get that kind of cash if it were for anything less desperate than feeding an addiction.

There’s a rationalist saying about making a desperate effort, as if the life of your child was at stake. Nowadays I tend to think of this in terms of “Make a desperate effort, as if you were a heroin addict and your next fix depended on it.”

Anyway, it might sound like I’m mocking my patients, but I’m not. I’m meandering my way into an apology.

I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”

And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”

And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.

Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free.

This is unfair to you guys, but I should be substantially freer in the next couple of weeks and we can see what happens.

2. Many people noticed Ozy deleted zir blog and are wondering if ze’s okay. The answer is yes. Ze had a brief panic attack of the “I never want to interact with anyone ever again” variety, as one does from time to time, but is mostly recovered now.

3. Please do not send me blog comments by email. When many people try this, I end up with lots of email. This creates guilt about not responding in a way that comments don’t, and makes it harder to find important emails among comment-related ones. If you want to comment without your opinion being public, you can comment anonymously. If you want to comment without your opinion being public but with me knowing it’s you, you can comment under a pseudonym and email me once to tell me what the pseudonym is.

4. If you need advice on a medical problem, I am a terrible terrible terrible person to ask. If you need advice on a psychiatric problem, I am a single-terrible person to ask. My advice will probably be “see a psychiatrist” – not because I don’t want to help you, but because I can’t prescribe drugs to you over the Internet and they can. I would like to write up some advice for people with psychiatric issues, but I guess not in the next two months.

5. I had a list of things to remember to include in this post. Number five was “Facebook”, but I can’t remember what it was supposed to mean. So please be aware that something has happened regarding Facebook, or you need to do something on Facebook, or that Facebook is important in some way. Thanks.

Along with the usual Michiganders we will have special guests Ozy Franz, Brienne Strohl from Entertaining Thoughts, Robby Bensinger from Nothing Is Mere, and probably Chana Messinger from The Merely Real

You can find more info and directions at this page. Email me if you’re still confused or have further questions.

Donations appreciated (but not required) to cover the cost of the workshop!

Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is is true? At the second gate ask, is it necessary? At the third gate ask, is it kind?

Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.

If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.

Recognizing that nobody can be totally sure what is or isn’t true, if you want to say something that might not be true – anything controversial, speculative, or highly opinionated – then you had better make sure it is both kind and necessary. Kind, in that you don’t rush to insult people who disagree with you. Necessary in that it’s on topic, and not only contributes something to the discussion but contributes more to the discussion than it’s likely to take away through starting a fight.

Nobody can be kind all the time, but if you are going to be angry or sarcastic, what you say had better be both true and necessary. You had better be delivering a very well-deserved smackdown against someone who is uncontroversially and obviously wrong, in a way you can back up with universally agreed-upon statistics. I feel like I tried this here and though a lot of people disagreed with my tone, not one person accused me of getting the math wrong. That’s the standard I’m holding commenters to as well. And it had better be necessary, in that you are quashing a false opinion which is doing real damage and which is so persistent that you don’t think any more measured refutation would be effective.

Annnnnnd sometimes you might want to share something that’s not especially relevant, not the most important thing in the world – but if you do that it had better be both true and kind. No random interjection of toxic opinions that are going to cause World War III. No unprovoked attacks.

Threats, doxxing, most things people would call “slurs”, et cetera fail this test as neither kind nor necessary. You people are smart and don’t need me to explain this further.

I feel like these standards are pretty lax. In fact, they probably permit most spam – this spambot saying “this is a wonderful piece of writing” is both true and kind – so I will inelegantly add a kludge that spam is also unacceptable (I have it on good authority that this was in the original Sufi saying used by the Buddha as well). Remember that before you worry this is too unduly restrictive.

I don’t always read comment threads, and when I do my brain automatically screens out comments it expects to be low-quality, and even on the rare cases where I see them I usually figure that even if I don’t like them other people might. What I’m saying is I’m a terrible moderator and will never catch bad comments if left to my own devices. So I have added a REPORT button to comments. Right now it’s large and ugly and if somebody wants to play around with the theme so that it’s less obtrusive I’ll give them the access to do so. Please use the REPORT button if you think a comment violates the above policy, and please err on the side of using it too much rather than too little.

I will review reported comments. If a comment gets only one report, I will have a strong bias towards not reacting, unless it is so obviously bad that something must be done immediately. If a comment gets three or more reports, I will have a strong bias towards reacting, unless it’s obvious to me that the reports are malicious or the comment can’t possibly be construed as violating the policy.

If I need to react to a comment, I will delete it only if it is dangerous to leave it up (ie comment contains people’s personal information, comment contains strong basilisk, comment is so offensive that Internet mob would use my leaving it up as an excuse to attack me). Otherwise, I will leave it up but post in large red letters below it “COMMENT VIOLATED POLICY FOR [REASON]. POSTER BANNED FOR [TIME]”, for approximately the same reason all those people in Game of Thrones leave bloody heads on spikes in front of their castles. For first offenses, bans will be for about a day. For second offenses, bans will be for about a month. For third offenses, bans will be for about forever.

Many people have told me I have too many low-quality commenters, especially on the Reactionary side of the aisle (this is not persecution; even some Reactionaries have told me this). So I will be trying to cultivate a very itchy trigger finger for a while. If you want to help, please cultivate a very itchy REPORT-button-pressing finger. You can also volunteer to be a moderator, but only if I know you pretty well in real life and have some reason to trust you and I get some kind of moderator system up and running.

Thank you for your cooperation.

2. I will be in the Bay Area from March 1 to sometime between March 13 to March 16 – I don’t have my flight out day yet. Some of you I obviously want to see. Others of you I don’t know yet but probably would want to see if I knew you. If there are any rationalist community parties or meetups planned then, I will go to those and can meet people there – does anyone know the social schedule for that time period? Is anything sufficiently interesting going on March 14 or 15 that I should make sure to get the last possible flight home?

3. I asked for people to help Ozy with zir thesis on romance novels and got like a dozen volunteers including one professional romance novel writer. You are good people.

4. My ability to get journal articles is extremely limited. Somehow my friends who are freshmen in tiny liberal arts colleges have better access to major medical journals than I do working from the medical library of a large and well-funded hospital. Does anyone with good journal availability want to lend me some of their university library remote access information so I can continue to discuss interesting medical and psychological articles on here? You can email me at scott@shireroth.org [EDIT: Taken care of. Thanks, everyone!]

5. I’m done with the Less Wrong Survey for the year and have moved on to a survey for r/nootropics. If you are interested in and have tried nootropics (brain-enhancing drugs, eg gingko biloba, modafinil, piracetam, etc) please take the survey to help me gather information on what kind of effects people think they get from them.

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ is by far the most popular entry on this blog, with a total of 28,000 page views. Many of those views came from links by bloggers and news outlets, but others came from random netizens who stumbled across it during Google searches. WordPress records the terms they used to get there, which gives us a little insight into their minds.

Were these searchers liberals looking for help debating Reactionaries? Were they Reactionaries dutifully searching for counterarguments against their ideas? Curious political science students lured in by the wide-ranging discussion of social trends?

Actually, they were none of these things. They were porn viewers who wanted videos of people fucking aunts, who had misspelled “aunty” as “anti” and misspelled “fuck” as “faq”.

I wish I was kidding, but read the search terms: “pak anti hot sex with monki and dog”, “dog indin boyfriend sax faq”, “arabis faking indian job antis porn”, “anti best figer sexi image”, “50 yars anti indyan faking fat anti”, “hot sexy bobz pakistani anti u tub”, “ancal anti bobs kising you teub”, “hot indan sexi anti romance in doods”, “ankal and anti se saleeping with baby full sexy viduos on youtube”, “sought indian sexy anti thims”, “pakistani hot and sexey figar yung anti pitcher”, “anty masive nippals”. And on and on it goes.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on until finally, like an old-timey archaeologist decoding Linear B inscriptions, I realized that the word “ankal” (or sometimes “ancal”) appeared beside “anti” in a disproportionate number of these phrases and so they were probably talking about aunts and uncles. Then I noticed a lot of them mentioned Indians or Pakistanis, and found from Urban Dictionary that in Indian culture, “aunty” is a general term for a middle-aged woman. So I think in Indian/Pakistani porn, “aunty” is their equivalent of “milf”.

I’d previously read several accusations that Pakistan, despite its austere women-in-burkas-at-all-times image, leads the world in most pornographic searches. While not actively disbelieving the data, I felt like a lot of this was media outlets being too quick to play up the man-bites-dog-esque “very Islamic purity culture is actually obsessed with porn!” angle. But after monitoring how many pornographic searches my blog gets from Pakistan, I no longer doubt.

(anyway, now the man-bites-dog segment of the media has moved on to the story that very Islamic purity culture Pakistan also leads the world in searches for gay porn)

A while back we conducted a little experiment to see if blog readers knew how the average person thought. Athrelon won and attributed his success to his work as a medical student, where he got to see a broad cross-section of the population instead of the People Like Us In Our Little Bubble whom the rest of us interact with.

If you can’t get into medical school, looking at Google search terms seems like your next-best option. It’s a good way of reminding yourself that most people in the world are neither liberals nor conservatives, but just people looking for some hot aunty porn. So without further ado, here is the second installment of Slate Star Codex’s quasi-annual feature, Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog.

Search Terms About Being In Love With Your Sister

I made one little post about the phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction, and now I am cursed with a never-ending stream of Google searchers who want my advice about incest.

I already mentioned last year how I got queries like: “siblings attracted to each other”, “my sis is so pretty”, “sweet sister so pretty”, “sister can you not so pretty”, and the scientifically intriguing “are attractive siblings more prone to incest”.

In the last eight months, I can add to that collection: “attract with sister”, “how to attract sister”, “how to attract my sister”, and “how to atract sisters”, which is my favorite both for the spelling error and for the implication that he just wants sisters in general, not necessarily his sister – any girl with a living sibling is good enough for him.

But there’s also “my sister is pretty”, “is my sister prettier”, and “my sister is so much prettier” (hey, man, it’s not a contest). Others are more interrogative, asking “why my sister pretty”, “why i am sexualy attrect our sister”, and the very philosophical “why is my sister”.

Also, one person who got here with “are people attracted to siblings”. I would say that the above answers the question pretty thoroughly, except for one thing – I haven’t gotten anyone claiming to be attracted to their brother. I don’t know if this is just because the original post used the example of sisters (the exact title was “If Opposites Attract, Why Is My Sister So Pretty?”) or because brothers find sisters attractive but not vice versa. So, for science, I’m going to type the following phrase and let Google crawl it and see what happens:

IF OPPOSITES ATTRACT, WHY IS MY BROTHER SO PRETTY?

There. Anyhow, not everybody was asking Google about how much they loved their sisters. I also got “why is my sister a bitch”

Search Terms About Not Being Entirely On Board With Polyamory

I wrote an essay about my experiences with polyamory, and in the comments Spandrell of Bloody Shovel responded with a theory that only ugly people were able to remain polyamorous successfully. In one of my most memorable experiences as a blogger, a commenter then responded with a picture of his fashion model girlfriend, leading Spandrell to admit that “That’s a big piece of……data.”

Anyway, Spandrell’s opinion seems pretty widely shared, since that post has then gone on to get search terms like: “polyamorists are ugly”, “polyamory people are ugly”, “why are polyamorists gross and nerdy”, “why are polyamorous people ugly”, “are all polyamorous people ugly”.

But other Google searchers have entirely different reasons for hating polyamory! Like “polyamory aspies” or “poly or just a whore”.

And finally, some people just keep it simple: “i hate poly people”.

Search Terms That Imply A Heartbreaking Story

“if a woman pleads insanity can she have her kids back”

“can i sue the hospital for oversedating my husband with pain medication and causing his death”

“my grandfather’s leg is starting to rot will he die?”

“is it possible for someone with vascular dementia to be upset with you, yell at you, and then start to be distant?”

“my hearts aches when i think of my mistakes”

“can you condition yourseld to like sex”

“id didn’t match for residency but it turned out good”

“wat can i do to die slowly”

“what happenes to those whoreare addicted to sucking things”

Search Terms By Time Travelers

You may have heard about Nemiroff and Wilson (2013), the study where scientists at Michigan Tech did an automated examination of all search queries looking for things that were searched or discussed before people could possibly have known about them (ie Comet ISON before it was discovered; Pope Francis before he was elected) in order to catch time travelers. Alas, they didn’t find anything suspicious.

On the other hand, someone got to my blog by the search term “survive march 4 2014″, which until I read that query was not something I was worrying about.

Less scary but still time-bending: “scott alexander gets married”. I can just see someone getting increasingly exasperated that my wedding photos aren’t online yet and then slapping their forehead when they remember they have to wait until August 2017.

Time travelers from the past would theoretically be harder to detect, but some of them aren’t even trying: “trial of king leopold ii of belgium next week”.

People Who Typed A Political Manifesto Into Google For Some Reason

“pity the people who idealize the dictators in pakistan”

“sexuality is learned and reinforced like all behaviour. eg. baby rapist are born raping babies, they learn their sexual orientation from by being raped or abused as infants”

“hire a competent white person to do the work of a few minorities that cannot do the job”

“isn’t using birth control better than having unwanted teen pregnancies and abortion?”

“the rothchilds are not good enough to feed to swine may thay fester burn rot and stnk of decay in a sewer in hell full of excreament”

I think we all have our days when we enter long screeds against the Rothschilds into Google search boxes, but some of us are definitely more creative than others.

Search Terms Obviously By Students Trying To Cheat On Their Homework

“some people were trapped during world war ii. one man used elephants to get them to safety. many people feel that the true heroes of a war are those fighting. what do you think?”

“write a story how you and your friend fell out. alternatively you can write about someone else’s quarrel. which of the friends was right / wrong?”

“demonstrate how federal laws are impacted by the times, political influences and even changes in social norms?”

“evaluate shelley’s philosoophy in adonais”

“explain using your own words forms of government under adolf hitler of germany and louis xiv in france” (I like the thought process here: “Hm, it says explain using my own words. Better include that in the search query to make sure I only get pages that are written in my own words.”)

“if you have something white point 075 pounds how many pounds is that be” (I don’t understand this question at all)

“imagine yourself as an aztec nobleman, describe to me your way of life and that of your family,court,slaves,finances,etc?”

“what are the status of feudal monarchies, specifically the actions of king henry iv and the intended and unintended consequences of those actions”

But as always, the granddaddy of the Students Trying To Cheat On Homework Questions is the alien question. I have spun that off into its own post to avoid attracting seventh-graders here and making them read about antis with masive nippals.

People Interested In Albino Black People

This is second only to the alien question people in terms of “I mention how weird it is that something gets so many search hits, and now all those search hits come to me”. On a post about using Google Correlate to play with data, I checked to see what search term was most disproportionately entered by white people – that is, what search term was most likely to be entered by a white person as opposed to a person of color – and the answer was “black albino”.

Well, after that, the readership of Slate Star Codex got just a little bit more white.

“black people turned white”

“albino people”

“albino black people”

“black and white albinos”

And, of course, since this is the Internet: “albino booty”

People With Unexpectedly Detailed Questions About Reptilians

My post on Noisy Poll Results And Reptilian Muslim Climatologists From Mars was meant to use an error in a poll asking about belief in “reptilian aliens” to make a general statistical point. Instead, it made me people’s go-to source for statistics about reptilians. For example:

“percent reptilians on earth”

“are all reptilians muslim”

People Looking For My Commenters

“ozy slate star codex”

“eliezer yudkowsky polyamory”

“leah libresco slatestarcodex”

“scott alexander leah libresco”

“unequally yokes neo reactionaries”

“”multiheaded” marxist”

“madeleine ball fda”

“finnish surname sotala”

“gwern abstract reasoning”

“andrew rettek of metamed”

But the number one most popular commenter? “deiseach”, with 19 searches.

People Searching For Information About Rape Culture

As you may remember, I wrote a post detailing my problems with this term. And surprise surprise, even though I can’t get people to learn about statistics or medicine or transhumanism or anything interesting even if I drag them kicking and screaming, the level of fascination with rape culture remains at an all time high. We have “rape culture”, “is there really rape culture”, “what would women do different rape culture”, “rape culture philosophy”, and “bloody rape culture”, which I like to think of as being entered by an exasperated British feminist.

Others seem to lack a certain understanding that rape culture is a problem, like “why is rape culture bad” and “arguments for rape culture”.

Others are less scrutable, like “stars rape culture”. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone noticed that that astronomical bodies are totally failing to speak out against the patriarchy and so are clearly misogynist. There’s also “modalrape dot com”, which is either a misspelling of “model rape” or else is referring to rape which necessarily occurs in all possible worlds. I hope some of the feminists in philosophy are doing something about this.

People Asking About Qwubbles

“qwubble”

“what is a qwubble”

People Searching For A Number of Stalins > 1

“two stalins”

“fifty stalins”

Miscellaneous Yet Delightful

“complications caused by eating slate sticks”

“genetics test 31 and me” (finally, genetic testing for donkeys)

“how much is 50 dollars worth of weed in central va” (this is, alas, not the kind of marijuana statistic this blog specializes in)

“sex russia ass big 2013″ (I feel sorry for the people who are still stuck on last year’s sex Russia big ass)

“mentally and magically reasoning with star systems of other galaxies and treat them as friends” (is this about acausal trade?)

“i can’t take anyone who uses the term ‘dudebro’ seriously” (My new friend! You are not alone!)

“transhuman pig”

“daniel boon whos making this shit up” (haven’t you heard? It’s all the fault of the Cathedral!)

“inefficient person” (darnit Google, just because I keep writing blog posts instead of doing work doesn’t mean you have to direct this search to me!)

“who is the best pun star in the world” (this, on the other hand, you can direct to my blog any time)

“dyspeptic ploughman” (I like picturing the Google ads for this query: “Top site on dyspeptic ploughman!” “Your source for dyspeptic ploughman!” “Buy dyspeptic ploughman now!” Actually, that works for all of these.)

“can beating yourself up help with conditioning” (Eliezer, someone has just proven you right)

“impregnate me sexual roulette” (Please don’t do this)

“mencius moldbug n*gger” (Whatever my case was, I hereby rest it)

“how to make a star very slowly” (First, get hydrogen. Then, wait.)

“doctor killed patient with fake euthansia” (…then it wasn’t fake, was it?)

And My Personal Favorite

“how to seem virtuous without actually being macintyre”

2. By an unexpected positive conjunction of my work schedule and financial situation, contrary to my previous claims I will being going to Raemon’s solstice celebration in New York City this year. I look forward to meeting a lot of new people and catching up with the old ones. I’ll be arriving in NYC on the 13th and staying until the 16th. Does anyone have a quiet space in town I could stay in for that time? You can email me at scott [at] shireroth [dot] org. Also, grumble grumble what’s the point of having three girlfriends if none of them can make it to the biggest rationalist social event of the year grumble anyone want to be my date to the party?

3. There will be a second Detroit/Ann Arbor Less Wrong/Slate Star Codex meetup at my house. Tentative date is January 3rd or 4th. Special guests Alicorn, Mike Blume, and Ozymandias will probably be attending. I will post more about this closer to the date and once everything has been confirmed, but if you live in the area please save the date (well, combination of dates).

4. Since this is titled “housekeeping post”, maybe I can ask about actual housekeeping! Large patches of my lawn are turning brown. I figured this was because of Winter and It Being Below Freezing, but this doesn’t seem to be happening to other patches or to my neighbors’ lawns. I mow my lawn irregularly and don’t water it because it rains a lot. Is there anything I’m doing wrong, or should I just wait for the snow to bury my problem?

Tomorrow I start Real Work. It’s just training for the first couple of weeks and I may have a bit of time, but after that I have been told it is not the sort of thing that leaves much time for thinking and writing (or eating, or sleeping). I am not going to keep up blogging once per day. Maybe I will be able to blog once a week? A couple of times a month?

Because I will be working on medicine and psychiatry full time, I expect this to turn into more of a Medicine And Psychiatry Blog than it is right now. I might change the About page and the tagline and some other stuff in order to reflect that.

Since I won’t have time to write complicated logorrheic essays anymore, I’ve gotten a Twitter account for my less verbose thoughts. If the past few days are any indication, it will be made entirely of corny puns and have no redeeming intellectual value. And another warning: if you follow me I probably won’t follow you back for a while – yesterday Twitter accused me of following too many new people and said it would delete my account unless I stopped.

Finally, I need to make a transaction in bitcoins soon but don’t want to expend the time/effort to become a part of the bitcoin economy right now. If anyone has bitcoins and wants to buy me something in exchange for the equivalent amount of fiat currency over PayPal, give me your email in the comments and we’ll make a deal (I’m happy to pay you slightly extra for your time).