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# Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try going to a meetup until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
**If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please [fill out the organizer form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc48qgxgm8lW42ZEe1HmoGP7PIo_jwWk7OBnB4anEjHSPoVsQ/viewform?usp=sf_link).**
The plan:
* Interested organizers fill out the form by August 22nd.
* The list of meetups gets posted on August 23rd.
* ACX Everywhere Meetups can take place anytime between September 1st and October 31st.
* People enjoy each other’s company and keep having meetups throughout the year.
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can email you if they have questions.
Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, markers, food, and drinks.
If you feel more ambitious, collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting, you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form.
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
**1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?**
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you sign up.
Don't worry, you signing up won't randomly take the job away from someone else. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever I think is best. (Or plausibly whoever Meetup Czar Skyler thinks is best.) But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. [This spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA/edit?gid=0#gid=0) shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after a basic check.
Lots of cities have existing meetup groups and we’ll probably prioritize them, but we always appreciate more options. Last time there were some people who didn’t volunteer because they just assumed their city was big enough that someone else would do it. Beware the Bystander Effect!
If you *are* the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so.
**2. How will people hear about the meetup?**
You give me the information, and on August 23 (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on [LessWrong’s Community](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) page.
**3. When should I plan the meetup for?**
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 23, please choose sometime after that. Any day September 1st through October 31st is okay. I recommend a weekend, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid September or early October would be best. Check your local calendar for holidays where people might be busy: If you're in the US, that probably means avoid Labor Day and Halloween.
**4. How many people should I expect?**
The last time we tried this, meetups ranged from one person to over a hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many people most of them got last time [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1awPp1g2YigcGXOqaLPb8ecED0kRra9Q_KRcG-uyHomA/edit?usp=sharing). Plan accordingly.
**5. Where should I hold the meetup?**
A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet.
**6. What should I do at the meetup?**
Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help:
* Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag
* Bring a list of icebreakers / conversation starters (e.g. “What have you been excited about recently?” or “How did you find the blog?” or “How many feet of giraffe neck do you think there are in the world?”)
In general I would warn against trying to impose mandatory activities (e.g. “now we're all going to sit down and watch a PowerPoint presentation”), but it’s fine to give people the *option* to do something other than freeform socializing (e.g. “go over to that table if you want to play a game”).
It’s also useful to have a signup sheet for a local mailing list or other way to announce meetups in the future, but this is optional both for the organizers and the attendees. Look at point 8 for more information about this. It can also be nice to include a checkbox on the signup sheet for adjacent local groups if your city happens to have those.
**7. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?**
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
**8. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?**
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but running more meetups seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A REGULAR MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own and wouldn’t have decided to run things without someone offering.
**9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?**
I have in the past and had a lot of fun, but also found it pretty tiring. Since I expect to have less time and energy for travel this fall, I’ll probably just attend the local one in the Bay. Meetups Czar Skyler likes travel and plans to attend more of the meetups.
Again,**[you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc48qgxgm8lW42ZEe1HmoGP7PIo_jwWk7OBnB4anEjHSPoVsQ/viewform?usp=sf_link)**. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA/edit?gid=0#gid=0). Everyone else, just wait until 8/23 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
**10. What if I have other questions?**
Skyler and I will read the comments here. | Skyler | 147175029 | Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers | acx |
# Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
**I. Bentham’s Bulldog**
Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote [Shut Up About Slave Morality](https://benthams.substack.com/p/shut-up-about-slave-morality).
Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty:
> When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.
>
> The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring.
Some right-wingers [have responded to the piece](https://newaltright.substack.com/p/i-shant-shut-up-about-slave-morality?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2), but their responses are mostly “but I *like* being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty. I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). So take all of this as a riff on the concept, rather than a guide to Nietzsche’s original intent.
**II. Friedrich Nietzsche**
In the beginning (says Nietzsche), the word “good” was synonymous with “noble” - ie the virtues that made the nobility better than the serfs they ruled. This was way back in the Bronze Age, so your model for a noble should be Achilles, Agamemnon, etc.
The excellent noble delights in being strong, healthy, and virile. He lives in a beautiful palace and wears shining golden armor. He may be cultured, sophisticated, or even brilliant. He’s great at everything he does, and harbors ambitions to become even greater, maybe conquer a kingdom or two. He’s powerful, skillful, and awe-inspiring. Life is good!
Value systems naturally flow from elite to commoners. But a commoner can’t do much with this kind of master morality besides conclude “yeah, I suck”. Commoners are poor, sickly, and live in mud huts. They’re unlikely to achieve many goals beyond “not die”, and they’ve probably had their spirits crushed. But “I suck” isn’t a psychologically stable proposition. So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own, one where they’re the good guys and the masters are the losers.
Slave morality says that the strong are tyrants, the rich are greedy, and the ambitious are puffed-up braggarts. The wisest man is he who admits he knows nothing; the strongest man is he who conquers his own desires; it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle and so on. God loves the humble, the salt of the earth. The worst thing you can do is try to pridefully rise above your fellows (cf. [Tall Poppy Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome)); the best thing you can do is to lessen yourself, through methods sacred (fasting, celibacy, self-flagellation) or mundane (giving to charity, serving your fellow man).
Nietzsche speculates that slave morality originated with the Jews (an especially downtrodden and persecuted race) but caught on after the rise of Christianity. Sometime around the fall of Rome it took the lead over master morality, and it’s been gaining ever since. As time goes on, slave morality will become more and more dominant, master morality will fade into a dimmer and dimmer memory, and at some point we’ll come to what he calls the Last Man - someone so completely poisoned by slave morality that he worships mediocrity, feels no emotion but envy, and refuses to ever do anything because doing things seems insufficiently humble.
As an alternative, Nietzsche proposed the Superman. This concept is confusing, everyone gets it wrong, and I will also get it wrong. Sometimes it sounds like the Superman is the guy who brings master morality back in style. Other times it sounds like he reconciles both systems, keeping the best parts of each. Still other times, it sounds like he transcends them entirely.
But (asks Bentham’s Bulldog) why do we need this guy? Isn’t slave morality, with its concern for charity, peace, and equality - simply correct? Isn’t master morality - with its barbarian warlords bragging about how their golden palaces make them better than peasants - just wrong?
I want to give two linked negative perspectives on slave morality before coming back to Nietzsche’s question of whether there’s something better than either option. First, slave morality as ensmallening. And second, slave morality as an attempt to avoid positive judgment.
**III. Ozy Brennan**
Master morality favors the big. People with more stuff - more virtues, skills, accomplishments, wealth and power - are better. In a master moralist society, each individual is challenged to embiggen herself. Those who fail are judged worse than those who succeed.
Slave morality favors the small. It doesn’t openly, in so many words, challenge the individual to ensmallen herself. It just arranges the incentives so that they have to.
Ozy Brennan has a self-help post, [The Life Goals Of Dead People](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people). It’s framed as mental health advice. Maybe you’re some sort of guilty/anxious doormat type person. Your goals are things like:
* I don’t want to make anyone mad.
* I don’t want to hurt anyone.
* I want to take up less space.
* I want to need fewer things.
* I don’t want to fail.
* I don’t want to break the rules.
* I don’t want to offend anybody
* I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.
* I want to stop having feelings.
Ozy points out that dead people achieve these goals better than the living ever could. If your life goal is to be more like a dead person, that’s a red flag for being a guilty/anxious doormat who needs to gain some self-confidence.
They suggest replacing some of these with the sorts of goals where living people outperform corpses. For example:
* I want to write a great novel.
* I want to be a good parent to my kids.
* I want to help people.
* I want to get a raise.
* I want to learn linear algebra.
* I want to watch every superhero movie ever filmed.
Ozy is very nice and basically never gets compared to barbarian warlords. Still, this essay is a master morality manifesto. Slave morality is goals for dead people. Corpses aren’t greedy. They don’t oppress anyone. They never hurt people. They don’t stand out, or try to be better than anyone else, or express pride. Slave morality is about compulsively making yourself smaller, weaker, less distinctive, and less disruptive to anyone else - which makes corpses the acknowledged experts.
Compare Achilles (master morality) to some of the early Christian saints (slave morality). Achilles wants personal glory. He seeks personal glory by being the best - the strongest, the most handsome, the most skilled in warfare - and by doing great deeds of renown. He had the most beautiful armor, the hottest women, and the best soldiers. When Agamemnon offended him, he was willing to let all of Greece perish to piss him off and restore his honor.
The early Christian saints definitely didn’t want personal glory - if anyone had tried to glorify them, they would have said something very pious like “I am only a humble servant of God, it is He who should be glorified”. They’re remembered primarily for their excellence in ensmallening themselves. They would fast until they became living skeletons, take vows of silence, or brick themselves in a tiny cell and spend the rest of their lives there. They would wash the feet of lepers out of humility, wear sackcloth to make sure they didn’t get overly proud about their clothing, and whip themselves bloody if they caught themselves having desires. Other religions’ saints are even worse - the Buddhists would try to meditate themselves into nonexistence!
At least the saints had the excuse that they were ensmallening themselves so God could fill them up with His own glory. But if *you* ensmallen yourself, you’ll just end up anxious, miserable, and devoid of accomplishments.
And at least the saints were doing this because they genuinely believed in it. For Nietzsche, the essence of slave morality is the herd instinct - ie a distributed mob of people saying “you had *better* ensmallen yourself if you know what’s good for you” as a sort of sinister [backscratcher club](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers). An individual might ensmallen themselves because of personal fealty to slave morality. But more often they’re doing it lest they look like Tall Poppies - people who defect from an unspoken social consensus that everyone ensmallen themselves, and so earn the envy and hatred of their peers.
**IV. Edward Teach[1](#footnote-1)**
The other useful way to think about slave morality is as a package of ideas that lets people avoid positive judgment.
(by “positive judgment”, I mean judgment based on whether someone has accomplishments - as opposed to “negative judgment”, judgment based on whether someone has avoided causing harm)
This comes from the same place as the embiggening critique. If people can be judged on their accomplishments, then it seems like you should go out and get some accomplishments, ie embiggen yourself. If people can only be judged on their harms, it seems like you should try to avoid causing harm, ie ensmallen yourself. So another way to think about slave vs. master morality is as coefficients on the normal utilitarian equation, *good = benefits - harms*. Master moralists overweight the benefits term; slave moralists focus on the harms.
In a second, I’ll list some strategies for avoiding positive judgment, but first, a warning. All good defense mechanisms contain an element of truth. People deploy these strategies because they’re often true. I’m not saying that these are all false things people only believe for psychological reasons - just that if you notice someone who seems obsessed with them, deploying them far more often than the truth seems to warrant, maybe there’s something psychological going on.
1. You obsess over the idea that the system is rigged. This is an obsession rather than a delusion - the system may very well be rigged, but you care about it way too much. The more rigged the system is, the less you can judge anyone positively for succeeding in it.
2. You believe that all virtues are subjective, meaningless, and kind of a grift. Intelligence” is just a measure of how you do on IQ tests; “health” is fatphobic and ableist; “hard work” is a scam by Puritan Boomers to stigmatize non-neurotypical learners. Again, these are obsessions and not delusions - it’s certainly reasonable to question traditional metrics of success - but at some point it becomes an attempt to avoid judgment because all potential judgment standards are corrupt.
3. You interpret any attempt to talk about good things, pursue good things, or (God forbid) achieve good things as a bid for status, and pre-emptively try to cut it down. You spread rumors about anyone who seems better then you. If they make too much money, they’re a shady profiteer; if they’re too smart, they’re an IQ-obsessed r/IAmVerySmart techbro; if they’re too pretty, they’re a slut. Your goal is to unite all the envious people into a Tall Poppy Police who agree that successful people suck, to prevent anyone from potentially judging you as worse than them.
4. You do everything ironically. If you did something non-ironically - wrote a deep poem that laid your entire being bare, committed whole-heartedly to a political position you truly believed in - you would be opening yourself up for judgment. Instead, you communicate only by tentatively putting out little feelers, and then, the moment someone starts to frown, retracting them with a “Haha, trolled, I was only joking”. If anyone else does things non-ironically, you deride them as “pretentious” and “cringe”.
5. You replace the normal cost-benefit calculus with your own version that [ignores benefits and obsesses over harms](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill). Scientific geniuses, lofty reformers, great altruists - all of their actions probably hurt a couple of people along the way to revolutionizing society, so only people who have never done anything at all are truly pure. If everybody who has accomplished things is a bad person, then you win by default.
6. You become collectivist. You demand that every action be done only after getting unanimous non-hierarchical [collective approval](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/24/book-review-just-giving/). If someone is allowed to act individually, their action might go well, and then they would seem better than you. Or someone might ask you why *you* weren’t doing any good individual actions. Therefore, anyone who acts individually should be tarred as an arrogant defector who refuses to cooperate and hates other people, and the collective should [pass laws](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and) banning whatever they did.
7. You believe that people should be judged not by their actions, but by the purity of their ideas. Actions are difficult and your actions might be bad, so you definitely don’t want to be judged on those. But ideas are easy, and you can always believe that your ideas are the most pure of all. Also, anyone who acts in the world or achieves something probably is less than 100% slave moralist, so if you judge people based on who has the purest slave moralist ideas, you will always be better than anyone with accomplishments.
When I first read Nietzsche, my question was: why worry about the master/slave dichotomy? Sure, maybe this was the way moral codes first formed during the Bronze Age; who cares? You can love excellence *and* be altruistic. It doesn’t take some Superman to combine them - you can just take the good parts of each. Right?
I think Nietzsche would have two answers:
First, you don’t pick your moral commitments like foods at a buffet. You deploy them as psychological defense mechanisms. You deploy slave morality when life has beaten you down and you want to maintain some of dignity. You don’t choose which subparts to swallow; you get whichever bits are load-bearing in your personal dignity-maintenance project.
And second, you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality *isn’t* interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too[2](#footnote-2). But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world.
**V. Jason Crawford**
Nietzsche’s original dichotomy was aimed at the individual level, where people with psychological drives compete with each other for status. It doesn’t naturally transfer to the idea of societies. There’s a sort of trivial transfer where you can imagine superpowers boasting of their prowess and tiny city-states claiming the geopolitical game is rigged, but that doesn’t seem interesting to me.
When I think of master/slave morality at the level of societies, I think of the slave moralist herd instinct to enforce their slave morality on everyone else. This will be a feature of all societies - you could argue it’s what society/civilization *is* - but some will have it more than others.
Jason Crawford, one of the pioneers of Progress Studies, [writes](https://rootsofprogress.org/essays/) about a sort of mid twentieth century vibe shift.
In the 19th and early 20th century, Western civilization was busy trying to embiggen itself. Some of this was literal. In America, we had Manifest Destiny, our God-given right to stretch from sea to sea (my sometimes-hometown of Berkeley was named after the guy who coined the slogan “westward the course of empire takes its way”). Europe had colonialism, the White Man’s Burden, and eventually *lebensraum.*
But some of the embiggening was metaphorical. We believed in the cult of progress. We would hold giant [World Fairs](https://bigthink.com/progress/a-new-philosophy-of-progress-jason-crawford/), where we tiled whole cities with beautiful monuments called things like The Temple Of Machinery or The Altar Of Reason. They would have elaborate friezes of classical goddesses blessing railroads or holding sheaves of mechanically-reaped wheat. Inside, tens of thousands of men would come from every corner of the Earth to behold the newest inventions making our lives richer, safer, and easier. It seemed like we were heading for a Utopia of limitless plenty, and our only responsibility was to bring that great day forward as fast as possible and spread our greatness to as-yet-unenlightened corners of the world like Africa and Tibet.
The San Francisco World’s Fair, built in three years (1912 - 1915). The only surviving remnant, the Palace Of Fine Arts (the dome on the lower right), remains one of SF’s most beloved monuments.
A picture from the St. Louis, MO World’s Fair of 1904.
We erected glorious Art Deco skyscrapers, and boasted of how quickly they went up. We built the Empire State Building in a year and the Golden Gate Bridge in four. The interiors were bursting with color, ornament, and more classical goddesses representing Industry and Ingenuity or whatever. We held ticker tape parades for the glorious aviators and astronauts bringing us to ever-further corners of the world.
Art Deco architecture, typical of the early 20th century.
After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?), something flipped. Instead of embiggening ourselves, we began to ensmallen. We replaced World’s Fairs with “World Expos”, which Wikipedia describes as “less focused on technology and aimed more at cultural themes and social progress”. Of the few inventions that did feature, more and more were “green tech” - machines aimed at reducing the damage we were doing to the world.
The classical goddesses got replaced by murals of ordinary workers, then abstractions, then nothing. The last ticker tape parade for an individual was 1998; [since then](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/where-has-the-ticker-tape-parade-gone.html) the (relatively few, comparatively small) parades have all been for classes of people (NYC’s most recent was for “COVID-19 Essential Workers”).
Our buildings became smaller and duller. [Last month’s](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-beauty-of-concrete/) *[Works In Progress](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-beauty-of-concrete/)* [magazine](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-beauty-of-concrete/) tried to investigate why. Some economists have blamed “Baumol’s cost disease” - as industrialization makes some things (like consumer goods) cheaper, other things (like skilled labor) become relatively more expensive. So maybe the rising cost of skilled labor put buildings like the one of the left out of reach. But *Works In Progress* found that wasn’t true; if anything, industrialization has made fancy buildings cheaper. They concluded that it was “a story of cultural choice, not of technological destiny” - in other words, people stopped wanting impressive buildings. The vibes were wrong, or something.
Intellectuals started feting ideas like [degrowth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth). Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?[3](#footnote-3)
The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity.
Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”.
If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to [this podcast](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Ff899tnvIX2bwqpH68uzC), which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t.
Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package.
**VI. Andrew Tate**
I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate.
In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial.
Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things.
Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this.
The obvious compromise goes something like:
* We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.
* But also, his impulsive temper and fragile ego are bad qualities even by the standards of master morality.
* And his violence, misogyny, and boastfulness are bad qualities by any morality with even the smallest consideration for altruism and common decency.
* Therefore, we can feel contempt for him.
I don’t have anything better than this obvious compromise, but I’m not satisfied by it.
I would like to end up with an overall negative view of Tate. And if I do a simple calculation, (virtues - vices), then it seems like if his nonmoral virtues were strong enough, they could overcome the moral vices. If Tate was a *really really* good kickboxer, he might still end up in the black. It seems much more intuitive to say that no amount of nonmoral virtues can make up for his moral vices. But now we’re back at the full slave moralist package again! Some “compromise”!
Also, suppose Tate wasn’t a rapist, he was just some kickboxing champion who was a jerk to people online and constantly posted about he was better than them because of his Bugatti. I *still* want to feel contempt for him! Now we have to rate the vice of “boastfulness” so negatively that it overwhelms all possible positive virtues, which sounds like some kind of ridiculous straw man of slave morality.
All these problems would go away if we gave up on unified assessments of people. Then we could classify Tate as a very good kickboxer who also happens to rape a lot of people. But if we give up on unified assessments, aren’t we giving up on the very possibility of heroes? Isn’t this just the slave moralist denial of judgment?
Also, I think Nietzsche would say something something vitalism. He seemed to think there was a coherent conceptual unity between being strong, being skilled, and being some sort of unconstrained wild person who didn’t care what lesser people thought. Is there some sense in which Andrew Tate loses some genuinely valuable virtue, however small, if he becomes a normal civilized person who says please and thank you and is really respectful to everyone? Does he become less powerful, in some sense where powerfulness is good? Is he less able to achieve his destiny of being glorious? I’m genuinely unsure what Nietzsche would have thought of Tate, but it probably isn’t something as simple as “he should be nicer”.[4](#footnote-4)
I’m worried this still isn’t coming off strongly enough. You can argue “master morality is about being strong and good; slave morality is just about preserving your pathetic little feelings”. But most of life is people’s pathetic little feelings. People have proven over and over again that their decisions - about what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, even what to die for - depend more on what lets them feel dignity and self-respect than on any purely material considerations.
Every so often, usually on 4chan, you see an actual bully really going at it, unrestrained. Some kind of shock jock, saying “Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.” Outside of 4chan, there’s a sort of universal alliance against these people, which the rest of us join immediately and unconsciously. Is this the dreaded “herd” of “slave morality”? If so, long live the herd.
**VII. Cotton Mather**
Fine. Maybe we *do* need a Superman to sort this out. What are our options?
Preliminary question: where do the Puritans fall on this dichotomy?
On the one hand, they’re Christian, so they have a strong slave morality heritage. They talked a lot about humility, altruism, frugality, and self-discipline.
On the other, they sure did talk about them a lot. The Puritans were convinced that virtues were real and good. They were convinced that some people had more of them than others, and that made those people better.
The Puritans would have burnt you at the stake if you accused them of believing in the Promethean human spirit conquering the natural world. But they did sort of believe in it - at least enough to believe it was their moral mission to colonize a virgin continent.
My goal here isn’t to explore the weird Puritan theology around who was a good person (nobody, we are all incredibly sinful, but God chooses to redeem some people through no virtue of their own, and then those people are genuinely better off and do fewer sins). Rather, I want to examine two different forms (levels?) of slave morality.
In the first form, you replace the masters’ virtues with different virtues. But those virtues are still real. You can still embody them more or less well. This sort of creates a new hierarchy. The Puritans wouldn’t have respected a Bronze Age barbarian warlord. But they did respect the local minister. And the local minister was probably a smart, competent, disciplined, hard-working guy. From your respect for the local minister, you can rebuild civilization. Instead of obeying a warlord, you obey the minister, out of respect for the God and the values that he represents.
In the second form, you notice that the first form is just another hierarchy of masters. You (the wretched of the earth) used to be contemptible because you were weaker and poorer than the warlord. Now you’re contemptible because you’re less virtuous and disciplined than the minister. Even if there’s no local minister, everyone’s still keeping track of how you said the word “darn” once and are therefore unsuitable for God’s kingdom. So you decide to reject not just the masterly virtues (strength, wealth, etc), but also the slavish virtues (continence, dignity, altruism) in favor of . . . no virtues? The virtue of hating other virtues, which shows that you’re enlightened to the true nature of the world where all virtues are fake?
I used to have this map on my wall:
It’s Progressive-era propaganda about the superiority of the American North over the South, but I find it most interesting for its list of virtues. It starts with Liberty, then moves on to Free Speech, Intelligence, Obedience To Law, Knowledge, Equal Rights, Free Schools, Contentment, Love Of Country, Philanthropy, Benevolence, Happiness, Patience, Charity, Faith, Hope, Joy, Industry, Sobriety, Morality, Justice, Virtue, Truth, Honor, Peace, Light, and Immortality.
I appreciate the Progressive virtues because of how skew they are to most of the ethical systems I encounter. They’re not leftist (Love Of Country? Industry? Morality?) or rightist (Equal Rights? Free Schools?). They’re not Nietzschean master moralist (Philanthropy? Contentment? Benevolence?) or slave moralist (Industry? Knowledge? Honor?). They’re Christian-ish, but not hair-shirts-and-self-flagellation Christian or God-n-guns-megachurch Christian. They’re the kind of Christians who you can kind of tell are going to end up supporting eugenics in a few years.
I think I would classify them as a first-form-slave-morality liberalism, whereas most of the liberalism you encounter these days drifted at least a little into the second form.
I’m not 100% on Team Early 20th Century Progressive, but they give me hope that there are weird-yet-coherent groupings of virtues we haven’t even imagined.
I feel the same way about some old Soviet posters:
These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good.
I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go:
(Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists)
So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second.
**VIII. Ayn Rand**
“Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate.
There’s [a real answer here](https://lesterhunt.philosophy.wisc.edu/home/writings-on-ayn-rand/ayn-rands-evolving-view-of-friedrich-nietzsche). Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that:
> [Nietzsche’s] *Thus Spake Zarathustra* is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it.
…which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy.
Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions:
…whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law.
Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test.
Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively *the coolest thing of all*. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls\*\*t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions *are* doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one.
Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question.
The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it.
Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a *hint* of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. [Elsewhere](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12yn28h/ayn_rand_will_kill_us_all/jhosllr/), I wrote:
> Edward Teach ([Sadly, Porn](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn)) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy.
>
> The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion.
>
> If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass.
>
> If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for!
>
> You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on [/r/iamverysmart](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart). It's a screening test for the kind of people who would *comment on* [/r/iamverysmart](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart), ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else.
>
> These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground
>
> For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you).
>
> The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this.
>
> (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.")
>
> The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade.
>
> (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!)
Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular.
But also, don’t we *like* altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing?
I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness.
**IX. Matt Yglesias**
Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy.
Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle.
Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. *Our* weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents.
When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche.
The compromise goes something like:
1. Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.
2. That having been said, some people are obviously better at specific limited skills and virtues than others.
3. Most skills are partly genetic and partly environmental. We will grudgingly let scientists study this and publish their results, but everyone should play up the environmental component as much as the science allows, and awkwardly sidestep the genetic component, in order to defuse “innate superiority” claims.
4. If someone happens to end up unusually skilled or powerful, that’s fine, they deserve some limited respect, and they can keep their skills and power. In exchange, they should be humble, not claim any kind of fundamental superiority, and discourage hero worship. If they’re forced to draw attention to their advantages, they should talk about how they benefited from privilege, and how millions of people with the same skills are unfairly languishing in poverty.
5. The existence of rich people can be challenged, but can ultimately be defended on the grounds that they create jobs and valuable products for the masses. Rich people owe a debt to society for creating the conditions in which they can flourish; by coincidence, this debt exactly matches the current tax rate in their jurisdiction.
6. The value of technological progress, economic prosperity, and cultural sophistication can also be challenged, but can be similarly defended insofar as they improve the lot of the worst-off and improve equality. For example, GDP growth is good since it lifts people out of poverty; new discoveries about the nature of the brain are good since they might one day produce Alzheimers drugs; art is good since it can include underrepresented groups or teach some kind of lesson about social progress.
7. We should use checks, balances, vetocracy, and redistribution to limit the power of any individual to some ceiling, although people can disagree on how high the ceiling will be and right now it’s pretty high.
Slave morality hates power/excellence and refuses to justify it. Master morality says power/excellence is its own justification, and *the rest of us* have to justify ourselves to *it*. Liberalism says that sure, we can probably justify power/excellence, as long as it stays within reasonable bounds and doesn’t cause trouble.
Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity. Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms.
A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic[5](#footnote-5). Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever.
This isn’t a complete solution - sure, we’re a free country, but we’re also a democracy, and if people hate something *too* much they can ban it. But add in the utilitarian justifications above, and it sort of hangs together.
**X. Richard Hanania**
So liberal democracy is an uneasy compromise between slave and master morality. One natural interpretation is that the left is the party of slave morality, and the right of master morality. I appreciate how directly Richard Hanania proves that wrong.
Richard is an honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist, one of the last you’ll find. Like Rand, he tries to combine Nietzschean master morality with a civilized society and obedience to law. Unlike Rand, he’s not obsessed with presenting a bunch of multi-step proofs showing exactly how it works, and honestly I’m not sure of the exact details. I find him interesting insofar as it clearly works inside his own head and he’s clearly coming from a place of aesthetic coherence. He writes:
> We can call my philosophy Nietzschean Liberalism. The Nietzschean part consists of the following beliefs.
>
> 1. Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans.
> 2. Society disproportionately benefits from the scientific and artistic genius of a select few. An important goal of government and public policy is to channel their energies in productive directions and leave them free to pursue their missions.
> 3. As confirmed by modern behavioral genetics, heredity is the dominant force behind human variation.
> 4. Egalitarian ideology and concerns over what is called “social justice” are primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority.
> 5. While all rational beings must be utilitarians to some degree, everyone has non-utilitarian commitments. The best ones put an emphasis on beauty, freedom, and progress, rather than pleasing supernatural beings, fealty to some “natural” order, the glorification of imagined communities like nations, or equality of outcomes.
So far so predictable. He haltingly endorses the liberal compromise as the best way to make it work:
> 1. Markets and democracy are the best forces ever discovered for pushing ahead with the creative destruction necessary for human progress.
> 2. Even extremely flawed or limited human beings can still have much to contribute to society due to the miracle of the division of labor. There is thankfully no need therefore to turn towards ideas that involve incapacitating or repressing large numbers of people, with the relatively few criminals among us being the exception.
> 3. Human nature is not so bad that collectivist and egalitarian ideologies are always going to be prevalent among the masses. They simply need to be protected from cancerous ideas that make them a threat to progress, which come from both the right and left. Somewhat paradoxically, democracy does a pretty good job of this relative to other systems.
Okay, so right-wing guy claims to be Nietzschean, why am I saying this disproves something about partisan politics?
Hanania is *terrible* at being right-wing. He’s [pro-choice](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-women-rebel-against-pro-life), [pro-immigration](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength), [pro-euthanasia](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/canadian-euthanasia-as-moral-progress), [pro-vaccine](https://x.com/Spratlinger/status/1673431168434286594), [pro-globalism](https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1782429588355977234), [pro-Ukraine](https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1797978767262208433), [atheist](https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1753209668468674794), and [supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump](https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1796760815502229688). As with Donald Trump, he’s living proof that right-wingers will welcome anyone sufficiently offensive without caring about their policy positions.
My impression of Hanania is that his Nietzscheanism is incredibly deep, principled, and heartfelt, while his right-wing-ness is at best an alliance of convenience. This adequately explains most of his positions:
* He’s pro-immigration because he’s obsessed with excellent/talented people and wants them to come to the US and use their talents more effectively.
* He’s pro-vaccine because he appreciates the Promethean triumph of technology over the natural world.
* He’s pro-euthanasia because he’s disgusted by the idea of sickness and weakness. It feels intuitively obvious to him that once you’re sick and weak there’s no point in living and you’d rather die.
* He started out as pro-Russia because he thought Russia was stronger and more vigorous than the West. When Russia failed in its initial invasion, and Ukraine outperformed everyone’s expectations, Hanania flipped to Ukraine’s side, because he realized that Russia was incompetent, Ukraine was courageous, and the West’s cultural package made it more powerful and impressive than its autocratic competitors. Also, I’d expect he was disgusted by Putin’s policy of sidelining/arresting talented people in his government to prevent them from threatening his power, and was anxious to switch to the side that does less of that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, as Hanania has noticed, MAGA Republicans are slave moralists. They want the talented (high-skilled immigrants, economists, artists, intellectuals) to be permanently yoked to an underclass of obese conspiracy-theorist hillbillies. They’re raising tariffs to protect weak American companies from stronger foreign competitors, banning IVF and vat meat and any technology that makes them uncomfortable, and trying to retvrn to some kind of crunchy organic notion of life which probably doesn’t even have any skyscrapers. Even the right’s so-called Nietzschean vitalists are mostly LARPing steppe nomads instead of building rockets.
There is no Nietzschean political party. There isn’t even a properly Nietzschean subculture or coalition. It’s just Richard Hanania and a handful of his Substack followers.
**XI. Sid Meier**
I said above that the liberal compromise was utilitarian-flavored. Slave morality can grudgingly accommodate action, virtue, and exceptional behavior if these are justified as eventually being good for the weak. I *also* said that the liberal compromise involved a lot of saying stuff that nobody is expected to believe or follow.
I think effective altruism is what happens when you actually enthusiastically endorse this part of the compromise - the part you were supposed to grudgingly accept as an excuse for what you wanted to do anyway.
Certain flavors of the liberal compromise, accepted grudgingly and half-heartedly, are psychologically toxic. A common one says - go achieve whatever is considered normal for your class. Get a degree at Yale, go into finance, and get a brownstone in Brooklyn - as long as you very slightly hate yourself and think that in an ideal society you wouldn’t exist.
Effective altruists have all sorts of normal mental problems - depression, anxiety, what have you. But I’ve noticed they have much less of the sort of toxic self-hatred that comes from tying yourself in knots around this stuff.
I wouldn’t have noticed this if not for the movement’s enemies. Everyone naturally disagrees with their critics - but as someone who gets criticized from lots of different angles, the EA critics boggle me the most. Not the ones who think some other charity is more effective; those guys are fine. I mean the ones who totally ignore where the charity goes and vomit twenty pages of the words “arrogant”, “billionaire”, and “white”. The reasons these people hate effective altruism never seem to connect at all with the reasons I find it valuable.
Full story [here](https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-64490431), in case you’ve forgotten.
My working model of these people’s psychology is something like: if you admit that charity is good, or that some charities are better than others, that’s an objective value. Any objective value lets you smuggle in the claim that some people are better than others. These people’s psychopolitics focus almost entirely on cutting down Tall Poppies, and on pre-emptively salting any soil that might one day allow a Tall Poppy to grow. An optimist might say this is because their first commitment is to the ultimate equality of humankind, beyond any commitment to short-term material welfare. A cynic might say they’re fallen so deep into Avoidance Of Judgment Hell that it’s impossible for them to parse any action or belief except as a hostile status claim - and that it’s impossible for them to treat the external world, whether starving people live or die, etc, as anything other than a prop in their internal status obfuscation pantomime. While a normal person might hear “Bill Gates led an amazing anti-malaria campaign that saved ten million people’s lives” and have some sort of emotion about the ten million lives being saved, these people only hear the word “led” and become obsessed with the need to cut Gates down a notch so people don’t think he’s cooler than they are.
But if you do a good enough job translating from Narcissist to English, these people aren’t completely wrong. Effective altruism tries to double down on the liberal compromise: it’s permissible to embiggen yourself (or your civilization) if say you’re doing it for the general welfare. This lets you add the missing altruism back into Rand. You can be an glorious-destiny-having billionaire, and instead of using your skill to pursue a vision of building a giant gold mansion, you can use your skill to pursue a vision of making the world a better place. Or you can be a scientific genius, and instead of transcending your fellows with arcane visions of the gears of the universe, you can work on curing malaria or something. I don’t think any of this matters as much as the external-world perspective where real people are helped in the real world. But as long as you’re helping people, I think it’s also permissible to use it to resolve seemingly-unsolvable deep questions about the narrative of your life.
I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). And one of the parts I didn’t understand was the psychological appeal of all this. So you’re Caesar, you’re an amazing general, and you totally wipe the floor with the Gauls. You’re a glorious military genius and will be celebrated forever in song. So . . . what? Is beating other people an end in itself? I don’t know, I guess this is how it works in sports[6](#footnote-6). But I’ve never found sports too interesting either. Also, if you defeat the Gallic armies enough times, you might find yourself ruling Gaul and making decisions about its future. Don’t you need some kind of lodestar beyond “I really like beating people”? Doesn’t that have to be something about leaving the world a better place than you found it?
Admittedly altruism also has some of this same problem. Auden said that “God put us on Earth to help others; what the others are here for, I don’t know.” At some point altruism has to bottom out in something other than altruism. Otherwise it’s all a Ponzi scheme, just people saving meaningless lives for no reason until the last life is saved and it all collapses.
I have no real answer to this question - which, in case you missed it, is “what is the meaning of life?” But I do really enjoy playing *Civilization IV*. And the basic structure of *Civilization IV* is “you mine resources, so you can build units, so you can conquer territory, so you can mine more resources, so you can build more units, so you can conquer more territory”. There are sidequests that make it less obvious. And you can eventually win by completing the tech tree (he who has ears to hear, let him listen). But the basic structure is A → B → C → A → B → C. And it’s really fun! If there’s enough bright colors, shiny toys, razor-edge battles, and risk of failure, then the kind of ratchet-y-ness of it all, the spiral where you’re doing the same things but in a bigger way each time, turns into a virtuous repetition, repetitive only in the same sense as a poem, or a melody, or the cycle of generations.
The closest I can get to the meaning of life is one of these repetitive melodies. I want to be happy so I can be strong. I want to be strong so I can be helpful. I want to be helpful because it makes me happy.
I want to help other people in order to exalt and glorify civilization. I want to exalt and glorify civilization so it can make people happy. I want them to be happy so they can be strong. I want them to be strong so they can exalt and glorify civilization. I want to exalt and glorify civilization in order to help other people.
I want to create great art to make other people happy. I want them to be happy so they can be strong. I want them to be strong so they can exalt and glorify civilization. I want to exalt and glorify civilization so it can create more great art.
I want to have children so they can be happy. I want them to be happy so they can be strong. I want them to be strong so they can raise more children. I want them to raise more children so they can exalt and glorify civilization. I want to exalt and glorify civilization so it can help more people. I want to help people so they can have more children. I want them to have children so they can be happy.
Maybe at some point there’s a hidden offramp marked “TERMINAL VALUE”. But it will be many more cycles around the spiral before I find it, and the trip itself is pleasant enough.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’ve named this section after Edward Teach in honor of his book *Sadly, Porn* ([review here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn)), which helped me understand some of these dynamics. I’m no longer happy with my review - I focused too hard on the Lacan angle, but in retrospect the Nietzsche angle was stronger and more comprehensible. Somewhere or other, Teach explains that his pseudonym, “The Last Psychiatrist”, is a reference to Nietzsche’s “Last Man” - he imagines himself as the psychiatrist to the Last Man, trying to cure his Last-Man-ness.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
I think? But see the section on Ayn Rand for a possible counterexample.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
It’s hard to point to slave morality as the cause of any single ideology. Couldn’t degrowth just because of genuine concern about climate change? Couldn’t anti-nuclear sentiment be genuine (if misplaced) concern about meltdowns? In most cases, there are alternative explanations. But the case I keep coming back to is eugenics. The obvious argument against eugenics is that it led to murder and coercive sterilization. But modern genetic technology allows voluntary selection of genetically healthy embryos without any murder or coercive sterilization, and lots of people still freak out about it because “it’s eugenics”. When I try to dig deeper, they often say something about how any kind of genetic selection implies that some people are better than others - and in order to avoid the implication that having heart disease is bad, they’re apparently willing to let millions of people die of preventable heart disease. This isn’t to say that there aren’t other possible explanations (eg people being concerned that the technology has unknown side effects), just that when I talk to them they more often bring up arguments about inequality and inferiority, or weird platitudes about how we shouldn’t be trying to make humans better, we should be giving better care to the humans we have (why? isn’t that just a much less effective way of curing heart disease?).
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
Also, what about Donald Trump? It’s remarkable how closely he fits the master morality archetype - amoral, power-hungry, uniquely himself, unselfconsciously rich, fond of boasting about his own greatness. Nietzsche didn’t expect masters to be well-liked; the whole point of a master is not caring what other people think. But something about Trump’s style makes him wildly popular. I wonder if his masterliness comes off as leadership, in a way that earns the respect of people who distrust every other politician. Or whether conservatives, sick of weaponized altruism, are ready for someone who rewound two thousand years of pro-morality propaganda and ended up back at pagan warrior-kingship.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Cf. Freddie de Boer [here](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/alice-munro-is-dead): “To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented.”
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
This part probably deserves more prominence - sports are a notable holdout of master morality, and an easy way for most people to appreciate it. Some of the most popular criticisms of slave morality come from imagining it being overapplied to sports (eg everyone getting participation trophies). A full treatment of this topic could touch on Ada Palmer’s *Terra Ignota*, a sci-fi story where one of the remaining civilizations is descended from the International Olympic Committee and has managed to preserve humanist values in a sort of Olympics-centric way. | Scott Alexander | 145940385 | Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman | acx |
# Open Thread 340
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Open Philanthropy (a major AI safety funder) is [accepting grant applications](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/request-for-proposals-ai-governance/?utm_source=ACX&utm_medium=ML&utm_campaign=AIGPRFP724) relating to technical alignment, policy, law, et cetera.
**2:** I plan to write about GLP-1 receptor agonists for addiction pretty soon. Nicholas Reville’s Center for Addiction Science Policy & Research is one of the first organizations thinking about this from a public policy perspective, and they’re [looking for a COO / Strategy Director](https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/caspr-is-hiring-coo-strategy-director).
**3:** Good comments on last week’s Links post:
* Moral Particle on [why it’s easy to circumvent Ban The Box](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63204606).
* Additional reviews of Bad Therapy by [Wesley Fenza](https://livingwithinreason.com/p/book-review-bad-therapy) and [Leah Libresco](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-sad-do-you-feel-right-now).
* Linch with [a funny story](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63290705) on how the 1906 SF earthquake affected the Chinese-American community.
* Mike Hawke points out that despite the new legislation promoting nuclear power, [Metaculus’ forecast of US nuclear power in 2050 hasn’t budged](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9450/share-of-us-energy-from-nuclear-fission-2050/).
* Erusian [on the Argentine economy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63163098), plus some bonus linguistic detective work.
* Christophe Biocca [says](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63132165) that the graph of consumption is cherry-picked and not interesting.
* GJM [finds that](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63130350) Musk’s grandfather was a local leader of Technocracy Inc, not (as I wrote) a national leader.
* Mr. X [against Indo-European eschatology claims](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63126907). | Scott Alexander | 147117729 | Open Thread 340 | acx |
# Your Book Review: Real Raw News
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI,” “woke,” and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X.”
Visit a hundred different news sites, and you’ll get varying takes on these stories. Some will be liberal, some centrist, some conservative, some libertarian or neoreactionary or third-way or whatever. Most will attempt or feign objectivity (most badly). But all will largely be discussing the same stories.
And then there is one site where a *very different* narrative is unfolding:
> *The admiral and several other officers were already in position when guards delivered [Merrick] Garland to the gallows at 10:05 a.m. He was led to the platform where the hangman and a rabbi awaited his arrival, one lowering the circle of rope and the other asking whether Garland wanted prayers recited as he transitioned to the afterlife.*
>
> *“Go f\*\*\* yourself,” Garland told the rabbi.*
>
> *Admiral Crandall asked Garland if he had any last words—besides insulting the rabbi.*
>
> *“I do, Crandall,” Garland said.*
>
> *A lengthy silence followed.*
>
> *“We don’t have all day,” the admiral said.*
>
> *Garland sneered. “You’re so far up Trump’s ass I can see the soles of your shoes.”*
>
> *“Clever,” the admiral said.*
>
> *The hangman put the noose around Garland’s neck and a cloth sack over his head.*
>
> *“Let’s do it,” the admiral said.*
>
> *The floor beneath Garland’s feet fell away, and he dropped. His neck snapped, ending his miserable life.*
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to [Real Raw News.](https://realrawnews.com/)[1](#footnote-1)
#### The World According to Michael Baxter
Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the *real* story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the *fake news* of all the other media outlets.
The articles of RRN are all the work of one Michael Baxter, and after enough time spent reading the site, one realizes that Baxter is no crank – he is instead a creative genius, the Michelangelo of fake news. Just as Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Baxter has spent three and a half building his own elaborate world of plots, counterplots, and bloody, implacable justice.
At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.
In the world of Real Raw News, at least, it’s working. In this corner of the World Wide Web, America is going through a revolutionary purge rivaled only by the worst excesses of Joseph Stalin’s government – with the important difference that this time, the perpetrators thankfully all deserve it.
The basic summary of the past four years of world history, according to RRN, are as follows:
* Following widespread and blatant fraud in the 2020 election, endorsed as legitimate by the media, Donald Trump pretended to surrender power to Joe Biden. In reality, though, he [retained the support](https://realrawnews.com/2021/05/pentagon-coup-joint-chiefs-overthrown/) of the U.S. military, and continues to exercise presidential power from a secret bunker at Mar-a-Lago.
* Military forces loyal to Trump, empowered by the Insurrection Act and other executive orders secretly placing the country under martial law, have been conducting special forces operations to hunt down and secretly arrest various high-profile Americans on charges of treason.
* Joe Biden, who is not really president and perhaps not really Joe Biden either, is somehow still exerting dictatorial powers over much of America, assisted by Deep State-aligned government agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and of course, FEMA. Any time there is a natural disaster, Trump-loyal military forces [do battle](https://realrawnews.com/2022/09/special-forces-save-child-from-evil-fema-agents/) with FEMA operatives. These battles have killed hundreds.
* A chief goal of Biden’s not-really-in-power dictatorship is spreading Covid-19 vaccines, which are an evil plot to do…something. They contain ingredients like the [“zombie drug”](https://realrawnews.com/2022/07/scopolamine-found-in-child-covid-vaccines/) scopolamine, [pesticides](https://realrawnews.com/2022/05/military-finds-pesticides-in-moderna-covid-19-vaccines/), [HIV](https://realrawnews.com/2023/03/putin-exterminates-mad-covid-19-vaccine-scientist/), and [wasp venom](https://realrawnews.com/2022/07/wasp-venom-found-in-child-covid-shots/). Vaccines variously cause heart attacks, [mass sudden death](https://realrawnews.com/2022/11/uncounted-vaccine-deaths-on-our-highways-and-railways/), or [berserker rage](https://realrawnews.com/2023/08/heavily-vaxxed-pilot-goes-beserk-at-denver-international-airport/).
* Vladimir Putin launched the war in Ukraine to [hunt down](https://realrawnews.com/2024/04/putin-strikes-pedophile-compound-in-ukraine/) a network of child-trafficking pedophiles. The Deep State has some kind of weird plan to merge America with Ukraine.
* The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones.
The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo[2](#footnote-2). For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life.
Hillary Clinton? [Arrested](https://realrawnews.com/2021/03/navy-seals-arrest-hillary-clinton/), [tried](https://realrawnews.com/2021/04/clinton-military-tribunal-day-5-conviction/), [executed](https://realrawnews.com/2021/04/hillary-clinton-hanged-at-gitmo/).
Bill Gates? [Arrested](https://realrawnews.com/2021/08/military-arrests-bill-gates/), [tried](https://realrawnews.com/2021/09/military-convicts-bill-gates/), [executed](https://realrawnews.com/2021/10/bill-gates-hanged-at-gimo-ahead-of-schedule/).
Dick Cheney? Fled the country via a [secret underground tunnel](https://realrawnews.com/2021/12/dick-cheney-flees-u-s-for-new-zealand/) to a CIA airfield, but then returned to America on vacation [for some reason](https://realrawnews.com/2021/12/dick-cheney-arrested/)[3](#footnote-3), arrested, [tried](https://realrawnews.com/2022/01/dick-cheney-convicted-of-treason-homicide/), [executed](https://realrawnews.com/2022/01/dick-cheney-hanged-at-gitmo/).
[George W. Bush](https://realrawnews.com/2022/01/george-w-bush-hanged-at-gitmo/), [Hunter Biden](https://realrawnews.com/2021/10/hunter-biden-hanged-at-gitmo/), [Anthony Fauci](https://realrawnews.com/2022/04/gitmo-double-header-execution-anthony-fauci-loretta-lynch/), [Gavin Newsom](https://realrawnews.com/2022/01/gavin-newsom-gets-death-penalty/), [Mark Milley](https://realrawnews.com/2023/10/mark-milley-hanged-at-gitmo/), [Victoria Nuland](https://realrawnews.com/2024/04/nuland-hanged-at-gitmo-ahead-of-schedule/), [Tom Hanks](https://realrawnews.com/2021/07/military-executes-tom-hanks/) (?), [Brian Stelter](https://realrawnews.com/2022/09/brian-stelter-executed/) (???) – All arrested and executed, in turn[4](#footnote-4). Almost all defendants are hanged, which actually is not the method prescribed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but has the advantage of being far more cinematic.
It would be easy for all of this to get old, but like with [variations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_(music)) in classical music, subtle differences to each iteration enrich the whole. Some defendants desperately try to deny responsibility for their crimes. Some arrogantly taunt the tribunal, assuming until the very end that they are untouchable. Some literally scream as though demon-possessed. Some fake senility or amnesia. But crucially, all of them face justice, one way or another.
An [entry](https://realrawnews.com/2024/05/jag-sentences-deep-state-judge-to-hang/) published just before this contest’s deadline is a lovely example:
> *Representing himself, [Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott] McAfee in opening remarks talked himself into an early verdict. He said no one and nothing, not even imprisonment, would prevent him from destroying the Trump family. Handcuffed at the defense table, he glared at the panel and said he would topple the Trump empire, building by building, brick by brick, and wouldn’t rest until every Trump supporter was behind bars or dead.*
>
> *“Then I’ll take care of the people here and this place,” McAfee said.*
>
> *“Mr. McAfee, I’m told you are of sound mind and know where you are, right?” Admiral Stephens asked*[5](#footnote-5)*.*
>
> *“I’m in a Kangaroo court in the Banana Republic of Trump, staring at a guy who couldn’t hack it in the real world, couldn’t run a private practice, get a partnership, or sit on a real bench, so he went into the military,” McAfee said.*
>
> *“Have you ever heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Mr. McAfee?” the Admiral asked. “Because you have the worst case I’ve seen, and I’ve seen several.”*
>
> *“Trump is finished. He’ll be in jail soon, and when he is, your house of cards collapses,” McAfee said.*
>
> *“It might seem that way, but it only seems that way,” the Admiral said.*
>
> *“You might as well find me guilty. I’ll never stop hating Trump and I’ll never stop working to demolish everything he stole. He was born guilty, and he’ll be guilty until the day he dies. That’ll be the only word on his gravestone: GUILTY!” McAfee shouted.*
>
> *The lead panelist, a Marine Corps major, politely interrupted: “Admiral, sir, we don’t have to hear any more. McAfee mocks this court, and we find him guilty of the treason charge. Additionally, we are in agreement he should hang for his crimes.”*
>
> *Admiral Stephens nodded contemplatively. “I side with these fine officers. Mr. McAfee, you are hereby sentenced to hang for treason against the United States of America.”*
>
> *His execution is scheduled for May 15.*
Yes, this is the judge of Trump’s criminal case in Fulton County. In the Real Raw News world, Trump’s various legal adventures are both real and fake at the same time. Apparently, Trump could completely ignore these proceedings, and the military in fact begs him to do so, but he chooses to place himself in danger from some unseen, Christ-like self-sacrificial motive.
That motive, it appears, is getting evil judges to expose their bias by ruling against him, so that they can be arrested and executed for treason.
The site often offers an alternative narrative regarding events in the official, Deep State-backed news narrative. When Colin Powell died, RRN was there to explain that he actually [committed suicide](https://realrawnews.com/2021/10/colin-powell-committed-suicide/), fearing arrest by the military. When former Tom Hanks co-star Peter Scolari died of cancer, RRN swooped in to attribute his demise to an unexpected military tribunal[6](#footnote-6). This pattern is one of the chief reasons fans cite for believing the site: Isn’t it incredible, they say, how some of the *same people* RRN reports the executions of *just happen* to have recently died or been hospitalized in the mainstream press? What are the odds?
Perhaps surprisingly, the star figure in Real Raw News’s tapestry of blood is not Donald Trump; like Gandalf or Dumbledore, he is a heroic but distant and largely off-screen figure. Instead, the primary hero is Rear Admiral Darse Crandall, who dispenses lethal justice with shocking efficiency while always being ready with a good quip:
> *Admiral Crandall ordered [Arizona Governor Katie] Hobbs not to intimidate the witness. “You lack decorum, detainee Hobbs, and your insouciance ends here. We revoke your right to further question this witness and ask the panel to render a verdict on the charges against you.”*
>
> *The admiral dismissed Jane Doe, and the panel unanimously found Hobbs guilty, recommending she hang to death.*
>
> *“I won’t let you do this to me,” Hobbs screeched.*
>
> *“It’s already done,” said Admiral Crandall. “And have a Merry Christmas—in whatever afterlife you wind up in.”*
>
> *He scheduled her execution for December 22.*
Adm. Crandall is in fact a [real person](https://www.jag.navy.mil/about/leadership/darse-e-crandall/), currently serving as Judge Advocate General of the Navy. Admiral Crandall seems like a nice and professional fellow, and I badly want to know what he makes of his alternate persona. I like to hope that he enjoys it; maybe he jokingly warns his subordinates to do their jobs right or else they’ll be arrested and executed. If anybody knows otherwise, please do not disabuse me of this fantasy.
Lesser fake news auteurs will puke out lame one-and-done articles about the moon landing or JFK or whatever, with zero internal consistency. Baxter is better. His military tribunals are reported out in detail. Even the most minor figures receive dedicated articles for their arrest, their trial, and their demise, but the biggest names receive genuine weeks-long productions. Hillary Clinton’s tribunal spans five days, until [damning testimony](https://realrawnews.com/2021/04/clinton-military-tribunal-day-5-conviction/) from her former aide (and lover) Huma Abedin sends her to the gallows. Former president Bush’s arrest and tribunal is a ten-part epic lasting nearly two months, and includes details that are eccentric even by 9/11 truther standards: [Supposedly](https://realrawnews.com/2021/12/george-w-bush-military-tribunal-day-4-part-i/), the real death toll of 9/11 (which Bush orchestrated) was 7,000, but Bush deemed this number too high to win reelection, so the real number was suppressed and 4,000 families were silenced with enormous bribes that also served to stimulate the economy. Good thing all the plotting was caught on tape, or he might have gotten away with it.
Baxter never rushes things. Remember how the Colorado Supreme Court tried to kick Trump off the primary ballot in late 2023? Lesser fake newsers might have had the entire 4-vote anti-Trump majority arrested at once, but Baxter is cannier. In his reporting, one justice was [arrested immediately](https://realrawnews.com/2023/12/marines-arrest-colorodo-scj-who-voted-to-remove-president-trump-from-state-ballot/), but the other three went on the run , and took [months](https://realrawnews.com/2024/04/jag-arrests-4th-treasonous-colorado-scj-melissa-hart/) to capture. As of this writing we’re *still* waiting for their tribunal. I hope it’s a barn-burner!
Baxter knows that while crass wish fulfillment is easy, truly great stories need formidable villains. Amidst the many arrests and hangings of Baxter’s saga are cinematic setbacks. [Sometimes](https://realrawnews.com/2023/03/two-marines-die-in-failed-deep-state-arrest/), the Marines don’t get their man:
> *[Biden White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish] Jha was five feet away from his vehicle when two Marines with an arrest warrant approached him, informing him that he was being placed under arrest on charges of mass murder.*
>
> *Jha erupted in laughter, saying, “You don’t even know who we are.” He exploded in a crimson fireball that blew his and the Marines’ bodies to bits throughout the parking lot. […] The Marines brought what remains they could to Fort Bragg, where medical examiners deduced that Jha was not Jha, but a clone in which someone had planted a subdermal detonator connected to HMX explosives.*
And then, there is the looming presence of RRN’s chief villain: Former U.S. President Barack Obama. Members of the deep state make a [warped pledge](https://realrawnews.com/2024/04/state-department-officials-pledge-allegiance-to-ukraine-and-obama/) of allegiance to “The United States of Ukraine” and to “one world under Obama.” Other arms of the deep state might be taken down, but Obama himself always lurks in the shadows, controlling and commanding. The occasional attempt to take him down runs into the [kind of problems](https://realrawnews.com/2023/10/special-forces-unalive-obama-clone/) you’d expect:
> *“Why?” Obama gurgled and died.*
>
> *Inexplicably, the body spontaneously combusted, starting at both hands and spreading to the arms and chest. Special Forces tried extinguishing the flames with sand and water, but their efforts were in vain—the flames were rapidly charring burnt flesh.*
>
> *“Check his feet,” the Special Forces lead, who had been trained to spot body doubles and clones, called out.*
>
> *They swiftly yanked off Obama’s socks and sneakers and saw he had flat feet, and that his sneakers had been augmented to fit people with fallen arches. They pulled down his pants; Obama had no genitals, a telltale indicator of cloning.*
>
> *The body became too hot to touch and was soon consumed by fire.*
Like Bob Ross, Michael Baxter has no mistakes, only happy little accidents. In late 2021, RRN reported on the [conviction](https://realrawnews.com/2021/11/military-convicts-marc-mezvinsky/) of the late Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky. Being only a lackey in the Clintons’ plot to abduct children and sell them on the black market, Mezvinsky received a comparatively lenient life sentence. But wait! Two months later, Gitmo’s chaplain mentioned in passing that he had attended Mezvinsky’s execution. Eagle-eyed readers saw the discrepancy and cried foul. But Baxter didn’t miss a beat.
When Baxter reported on the [arrest](https://realrawnews.com/2022/04/military-arrests-david-axelrod/) of former Obama adviser David Axelrod, only to publish no follow-up, he had a ready explanation a year later: Axelrod had been executed without trial by being [thrown out of an airplane](https://realrawnews.com/2023/07/the-untried-and-the-dead-david-axelrod/), and it took months for Baxter to learn the truth.
I’ll admit, I find Baxter’s efforts to maintain narrative integrity incredibly charming, given how they clash with the latent absurdity of the whole endeavor. Like most fictional universes, the Real Raw Newsiverse crumbles if you think about it too hard. If there are White Hat and Black Hat partitions of the military, how does military procurement work? How do newly-enlisted personnel know which faction they are joining? Do the two factions have separate recruiters? And when literally everyone carries a basic video camera in their pocket, and social media access is universal, how are major battles being fought on American soil with zero video evidence anywhere?
At the meta level, the entire construct gets even sillier. The conceit of the site is that Trump has *secretly* left power to entrap his foes…yet then his allies go and blab the entire “real” story to an online blog. The cover for this is that the masses simply don’t believe it, but you know who would *definitely* know whether the blog is accurate? The Deep State! Yet despite this, in RRN lore sinister actors from Andrew Cuomo to Oprah are always caught off guard when Delta Force[7](#footnote-7) smashes down their door and zip-ties their hands for a one-way trip to Cuba.
#### Okay, But So What?
You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. *Really* popular. It got [more than 2 million page visits](https://www.similarweb.com/website/realrawnews.com/#traffic) in January. It’s a lot more popular than [this blog](https://www.similarweb.com/website/astralcodexten.substack.com/#traffic) and even outdraws some established publications like [The Nation.](https://www.similarweb.com/website/thenation.com/#traffic)
*“Okay, views are views, but does anyone really* believe *this?”* you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do.
The typical RRN article gets hundreds upon hundreds of comments. And sure, a lot of them are “My mother is being paid $2,000/day working from home” spam, but most of them are not. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments are from readers grateful to Baxter for sharing the “truth.” Even more unsettling are comments from people who spot a problem with the occasional story, but still trust Baxter overall.
Baxter has a [donation page](https://www.givesendgo.com/realrawnews2) on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. It has raised more than $210,000 and donations continue to pour in on a daily basis. Sure, some donation messages clearly indicate people who are in on the joke…but many more do not.
But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers *constantly.* We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on.
Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found.
#### Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore
In his [review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-alexander-romance) of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them.
The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point.
Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls [“comic book time.”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ComicBookTime) Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo.
In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating [in 1974](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Was), in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to [listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=437396369959970) Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was [in a Nineties grunge band](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x35ETy2sbg) just before marrying Marge[8](#footnote-8). The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.)
But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon.
When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would [take place by July 4, 2021](https://realrawnews.com/2021/04/trump-inauguration-july-4-2021/). The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the *real* ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully [house-sitting the White House](https://realrawnews.com/2021/07/u-s-military-holding-white-house-for-trumps-return/) and not letting Biden use it.
> *Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate.*
>
> *[…] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule.*
>
> *Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation.*
Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be [“swift.”](https://realrawnews.com/2021/09/trump-vows-swift-return-as-military-completes-election-fraud-investigation/) But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it.
As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared.
In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret [civil war](https://realrawnews.com/2023/10/marines-push-fema-out-of-maui/), specifically one with frequent war crimes:
> *White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News.*
>
> *Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime.*
>
> *[…] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.”*
I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on.
Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were *very* hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by [snake venom in the water supply](https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/radio-host-stew-peters-watch-the-water-film-ridiculously-claims-covid-19-is-snake-venom/), and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal).
What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the *same people.*
Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and *every* conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile.
Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero.
I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy.
#### People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions.
At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the [Law of 22 Prairial](https://revolution.chnm.org/d/439/). The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by:
* Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
* Capping trials at three days in length.
* Abolishing defense counsel.
* Abolishing all witnesses, if “moral proofs” against the accused make such witnesses unnecessary.
* Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty[9](#footnote-9).
As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted!
No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General [Jeff Sessions](https://realrawnews.com/2023/06/jag-frees-jeff-sessions-drops-all-charges/), freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton [received a life sentence](https://realrawnews.com/2021/06/military-tribunal-convicts-bill-clinton/), only to mysteriously [die in prison](https://realrawnews.com/2021/09/bill-clinton-dead-at-gitmo/), perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up [executed herself](https://realrawnews.com/2021/11/chelsea-clinton-hanged-at-gitmo/).
Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have *no* rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for [telling troops not to attend Trump rallies](https://realrawnews.com/2023/11/marines-arrest-treasonous-air-force-colonel-in-north-dakota/) and for [ruling against Donald Trump in court](https://realrawnews.com/2024/04/jag-arrests-deep-state-georgia-judge/).
Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel[10](#footnote-10) can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened [within five minutes.](https://realrawnews.com/2021/10/hanks-former-co-star-peter-scolari-executed-by-military/) Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve [tormenting](https://realrawnews.com/2023/06/gretchen-whitmer-hanged-at-gitmo/) the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons:
> *The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.”*
>
> *Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall.*
>
> *And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows.*
>
> *“You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed.*
>
> *“Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied.*
>
> *[…] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips.*
>
> *She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later.*
>
> *“Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said.*
During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it.
> *“Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]*[11](#footnote-11)*. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said.*
>
> *But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said.*
As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by [firing squad](https://realrawnews.com/2021/06/john-podesta-executed-at-gitmo/).
But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or [thrown overboard](https://realrawnews.com/2023/05/deep-staters-headed-to-guam-thrown-overboard-for-inciting-insurrection/)*.*
The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes.
> *The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence.*
>
> *The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance*[12](#footnote-12)*.*
What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, [Nothing Ever Happens](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens). But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice.
Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope.
#### The World’s Laziest Conspiracy
One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are *un-*conspiracies.
Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events.
But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for *total inaction.* RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even *vote.* The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen.
It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should *want* to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately *invent.*
Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee.
#### Trump Will Never Die
But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory?
That’s right, this review is actually about AI[13](#footnote-13).
The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation?
Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s [experience machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine) – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives?
But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible.
Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this.
But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the *real* body camera footage, and it *does* show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together.
In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with *no evidence at all*.
Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously.
But in a sense, *all* of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the *same event* caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise.
So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for *any* story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads.
Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you.
Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe.
So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same?
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
“Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?”
Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers:
1. A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
2. Scott told us to be less conventional in our choices.
3. I am a liberal arts graduate and I’m definitely not going to make the finals reviewing some nerdy non-fiction book.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Baxter also places a few tribunals in Guam.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Yes, the stock photo on this article is Christian Bale playing Dick Cheney from the *Vice* movie.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
On the other hand, Jeffrey Epstein is [actually alive](https://realrawnews.com/2021/01/epstein-the-kraken-escaped-federal-custody-during-6-jan-riots/) – and at large, having escaped custody during the January 6 riot.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
[A real person!](https://www.jag.navy.mil/about/leadership/jonathan-t-stephens/)
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
That [article](https://realrawnews.com/2021/10/hanks-former-co-star-peter-scolari-executed-by-military/) might be unpleasant to some (it describes child torture), but it does give Tom Hanks the best villain line in any artistic medium of the past half-decade: “Life ain’t like a box of chocolates, it’s like a bag of shit!”
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
It is *always* Delta Force, SEALs, or Marines who undertake military operations in Real Raw News land. No exceptions.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
The episode was titled “That 90s Show,” a joking reference to That 70s Show…except that, 15 years later, there now actually is a That 90s Show, and The Simpsons is still going.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
And I mean the actual cut-your-head-off death penalty, none of that “outlawry” silliness from Njal’s Saga.
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
A real-life capital court martial requires at least 12 jury members, but in RRN it is only three.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
This [sic] is from Baxter’s original article, describing a fictional quote about a fictional military tribunal. Like I said, the man’s a genius.
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
Another charming part of Baxter’s style is his love of a good thesaurus.com search.
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
Ironically, AI barely figures at all into Real Raw News’s reporting. Cloning, body doubles, and energy weapons pop up all the time. There’s plenty of footage that is faked the old-fashioned way, with studio sets and actors. Yet Real Raw News has never even used the *word* “deepfake,” and AI has only appeared a handful of times as an easily-foiled tactic by the bad guys. | [unknown] | 146072744 | Your Book Review: Real Raw News | acx |
# Links for July 2024
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** The data show teenage depression rates going way up around 2012, lending credibility to stories about social media harming mental health. But [Alex Stapp](https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1794482774985805845) (readable) and [David Wallace-Wells](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html) (paywalled) argue it’s an artifact of Obamacare-related changes to hospitals’ depression reporting practices. Now I feel silly - for anything that sudden, reporting changes should *always* be your first guess!
**2:** Congress [passes a “monumental” act](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/congress-advance-act-nuclear-power_n_6670a926e4b08889dbe5e626?ivrf) to promote nuclear power and “launch a reactor-building spree”.
**3:** Claims:
[EtymologyOnline supports](https://www.etymonline.com/word/gun) Gunnhilda → gun, though it seems less certain of the role of that specific crossbow.
**4:** [William “Wild Bill” Langer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Langer) was governor of North Dakota in the 1930s. He’s best known for his corruption trial; after receiving a guilty verdict, he “signed a Declaration of Independence of North Dakota, declared martial law in Bismarck, and barricaded himself in the governor's mansion”. The North Dakotans didn’t go along with it, but they didn’t hold a grudge either - they re-elected him two years later.
**5:** When I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the textbook cases would involve people with ridiculously distorted thoughts, like a billionaire who worried he wasn’t successful enough. I always wondered if any real people were that messed-up; as always, Twitter delivers:
**6:** Mind and Mythos essay club looks at [GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry](https://mindandmythos.substack.com/p/essay-club-a-defence-of-heraldry). Key quotes:
> When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry … Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula, 'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'
**7:** Alex Tabarrok: three years after the government [set aside $42 billion for rural broadband](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/why-we-cant-have-nice-things-part-xxiv.html), nobody has been connected, partly because the government added too many "progressive wish list" items to the contract (must hire union workers, must hire ex-cons, etc). The $42 billion would have been enough to give every American without broadband access to a 4-year Starlink subscription. [update from comments: [maybe this still counts as on track?](https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/)]
**8:** Leopold Aschenbrenner [makes the case for a near-term singularity](https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf) and what to do about it. Aschenbrenner was at the center of yet another recent OpenAI scandal when [leadership apparently fired him](https://x.com/steph_palazzolo/status/1798043094149103837) for telling the company’s board about a security incident they were trying to cover up; he also reports that HR accused him of racism when he warned about being hacked by China.
**9:** [Did you know:](https://x.com/pitdesi/status/1803534656668840109) a century ago, insurances didn’t cover earthquake damage. After the 1906 San Francisco quake, “Word spread throughout the city that fires were covered by insurance and people started burning down their properties. Fires raged on for 3 days.”
**10:** Claims:
The Google comparison briefly confused me - “queries” here means “messages to the AI”, so a conversation with a hundred back-and-forth questions counts as 100 queries (whereas most people only query Google a few times daily). In terms of total visitors, c.ai is still only at about 0.02% of Google’s. Still, this is way more than I expected, given that even trying to follow AI trends I’d never really heard anything about this. “People getting addicted to AI girlfriends *en masse*” should be considered a present-day problem rather than a future one.
**11:** The founders of Iowa divided it into 100 equally-sized square-ish counties, giving it a pleasing and orderly geometry. Then [Kossuth County](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kossuth_County,_Iowa) annexed its northern neighbor, Bancroft County. Now there are 99 counties, and they look like this (Kossuth in red):
Iowans keep trying to split Kossuth County to make their state pleasing and orderly again, and the Kossuthians [keep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocker_County,_Iowa) [refusing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_County,_Iowa).
**12:** Did you know: Emory Tate, the father of martial arts influencer Andrew Tate, [was a history-making black chessmaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emory_Tate). See also the discussion in Part III [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families) about why members of the same family might become famous in very different fields.
**13:** Related: [Technocracy, Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement) was a 1920s US/Canadian movement to replace democratic government with technocrats, ie brilliant engineers and scientists who would make rational decisions. They claimed a membership of 100,000s of people, easily distinguishable by their identical gray suits and gray cars (it might have been kind of a cult). The American leader was a man named Howard Scott; the Canadian leader was [Joshua Haldeman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman), now most notable as Elon Musk’s grandfather.
**14:** Arc Institute (Patrick Collison et al’s biotech research lab) claims to have discovered a gene editing method which is safer and more precise than CRISPR (*[Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07552-4)* [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07552-4), [Twitter discussion](https://x.com/patrickc/status/1805996143228375263?s=61)).
**15:** [Adragon De Mello](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adragon_De_Mello) was an apparent child prodigy who became famous for graduating college at age 11. After his parents divorced, it came out that his father was an abusive jerk obsessed with raising a child prodigy, that De Mello was only moderately smart, and that his accomplishments probably owed more to fear and driven-ness than actual intelligence. He is now “an estimator for a commercial painting company”. (h/t [TracingWoodgrains](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains))
**16:** Harvard [claims to be adopting](https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1795512441356652910) Chicago principles of “institutional neutrality”, ie swearing off cancel culture and promising to be fair to all opinions. Real-world enforcement remains to be seen.
**17:** William Robinson was a traveling stage magician in 1890s America. He was less successful than newcomer Ching Ling Foo, a competing magician who benefited from his exotic Chinese origins. So Robinson painted his face yellow, rebranded as [Chung Ling Soo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo), and moved to London, where he passed himself off as a genuine Chinese man. The real Ching Ling Foo went to London, discovered the imposter, and called him out - but the fake Chung Ling Soo won the ensuing fight, and the real Ching Ling Foo left in disgust. Still, he got his comeuppance shortly thereafter: while he was performing a bullet-catching trick, his assistant accidentally fired a real bullet instead of a blank, killing him.
**18:** Related: the obsolete anti-malaria drug mepacrine has an odd side effect: it turns your skin yellow. During World War II, some American spies in China [would take mepacrine to blend in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mepacrine#Skin_dye). And more interesting facts about WWII US spies in China [here](https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/12/30/how-naked-world-war-ii-sailors-ended-up-riding-mongolian-ponies-in-the-gobi-desert-to-shoot-bazookas-at-the-japanese/):
> [The Sino-American Cooperative Organization’s] official insignia, after all, was a string of punctuation marks on a pennant, like cuss words in a comic strip, symbolizing [their] unofficial slogan, “What the Hell?”
**19:** Claim: [the Indo-European eschatology myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology#Eschatology) has left traces throughout its daughter civilizations, including the stories of Loki in Scandinavia, Tarquinius Superbus in Rome, and Bres in Ireland (Lucius Brutus = Lugh??)
**20:** Guardian “reporter” who wrote hit piece on the rationalist community [gets called on multiple severe errors](https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280), here’s his response:
Have I mentioned I’m still annoyed about Elizabeth Spiers [lecturing](https://mynewbandis.substack.com/p/slate-star-clusterfuck) me on how silly I was to believe journalists have “personal investment” or “malice” when they’re covering topics like these?
**21:** Followup to discussion on how dictatorial Modi is vs. isn’t: famous Indian author and Modi critic Arundhati Roy is [now being prosecuted under anti-terror laws](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ggyz13m2po) for a fourteen-year-old remark that Kashmir wasn’t really part of India.
**22:** Slightly related: history of [Danish India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_India).
**23:** [Powering Planes With Microwaves Is Not The Craziest Idea.](https://spectrum.ieee.org/electromagnetic-waves)
**24:** In the early 20th century, it was understood that the world of engineering and technology was a particular hotbed of socialist activity. Now the opposite is true. [Why did that change?](https://homosum.substack.com/p/socialism-and-the-shape-rotators) Proposed explanations: decreased leftist “Prometheanism” and leftist norms becoming more challenging for nerds with no social skills (but aren’t there a lot of nerdy socially-unskilled leftists? Probably we need to be more granular here, but how?)
**25:** Emil Kierkegaard: [It Doesn’t Matter Whether Refugees Are In The Same Classroom](https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/it-doesnt-matter-whether-refugees). Large, precise study finds that even though refugees themselves do poorly in school, there is no negative effect on native children from having lots of refugees in their class. This probably implies minimal effects from classmates even within native-born children (ie you shouldn’t worry that sending your kid to a school with bad students will make them do worse), although I guess you could argue that maybe refugees are so culturally distinct that they don’t transmit social influence the same way co-ethnic kids would. I’m usually down for “lol, everything is genetic” style findings, but I’m confused because I thought I remembered pretty convincing evidence that having disruptive kids in a class is very harmful for everyone else’s learning. Maybe the refugees do poorly but are no more likely to be disruptive, so classmate effects from disruptive kids are still on the table?
**26:** It’s conventional wisdom in these parts that “Ban The Box” (the campaign to make it illegal to ask employees about their criminal records) backfired - unable to tell which minorities were vs. weren’t criminals, employers discriminated against all of them. But a new paper finds [that’s not true and it had no effect](https://annemburton.com/pages/working_papers/Burton_Wasser_BTB.pdf).
**27:** [Another lab leak debate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj1awTgb1s), this one between author Matt Ridley and virologist Steven Goldstein. Ridley (lab leak) won by 65% to 12% of the audience (I don’t know what the audience believed beforehand). The debate seems strictly worse than the one I covered, so I’m not updating. *[Update: it started ~51%-15%, thanks [Complaint](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2024/comment/63112270)]*
**28:** When Warren Buffet was just a young early-career businessman, he wanted to join a country club. Although he wasn’t Jewish, he was so angry that his local country club banned Jews that [he applied to join the Jewish country club](https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/13198/) instead. The Jewish country club wasn’t sure they accepted *non-*Jews, but local rabbi [Myer Kripke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myer_S._Kripke) spoke in Buffett’s favor and he was eventually accepted. Buffett repaid the rabbi’s kindness by helping him invest his money. He turned Rabbi Kripke’s life savings of $70,000, into $25 million, helping the rabbi and his wife become two of America’s leading Jewish philanthropists. Extra bonus facts: Rabbi Kripke was the father of [Saul Kripke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke), sometimes considered the greatest modern philosopher, and the second cousin of [Eric Kripke](https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1dg2k5w/saul_kripke_in_the_boys/), showrunner for *The Boys*.
**29:** [Harvard Medical School poll on Americans’ support for polygenic embryo selection](https://hms.harvard.edu/news/study-reveals-public-opinion-polygenic-embryo-screening-ivf). Overwhelming support for selection for serious disease, but 35% support vs. 45% oppose selecting for IQ. The ordering isn’t what I would have guessed either; people are more opposed to selecting for life satisfaction (and baldness!) than for intelligence.
**30:** Related: geneticist Sasha Gusev has [a critique of (existing) polygenic embryo selection](https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/science-fictions-are-outpacing-science). He thinks it has medium ability to select against “threshold” traits like disease (10% reduction by avoiding high-risk embryos, ~50% by choosing the lowest-risk) and (what he describes as) relatively low ability to select along “continuous” traits like IQ (+4 points if you’re lucky, though I know other people working on this who say +6). I think these are the right numbers, but he’s underestimating how much you should want an extra 4-6 IQ points - something I would gladly take over a 50% absolute reduction in hypertension risk or whatever. And I would *very* gladly take it over the alternative of not doing polygenic screening at all and getting nothing.
**31:** Well, Harris has finally replaced Biden. Let this be a lesson to all the commenters who told me that the Democratic Party was rudderless and didn’t have enough shadowy elites to enforce obviously-correct actions. What bothers me most about this whole thing was how *good* [some of the reporting](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/conspiracy-of-silence-to-protect-joe-biden.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1) right after the debate was - suddenly we had detailed profiles of how many times Biden had slipped up when, who was hiding it from us, which aides were more interested in continuing to deny it vs. coming clean, what their motives were, et cetera. So why didn’t we have it a few months earlier, when it could have done more good? Either the sources refused to talk until it was officially popular to talk about, or the reporters refused to listen until same. Either way, it’s a good reminder that although [the media very rarely lies](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about), the impression it gives about any topic [depends at least as much on](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seems-like-targeting) its current popularity as on the ground-level facts.
**32:** An r/slatestarcodex poster from Argentina [describes a ground-level picture](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1dy7slo/what_are_your_thoughts_on_argentinas_current/lc6xuwl/) of Milei’s reforms:
> To answer your question plainly, the living conditions are bad. Everything is expensive and the wages are not keeping up. I run out of money on the 21th day of each month or so, and have to use my credit card for the remaining 9. I haven't eaten cow meat in a while because it's too expensive.. etc. […] Now, according to the people that defend Milei, the growth WILL come. The people that are skeptical about Milei think otherwise. Perhaps an adjustment was needed. But how much activity are you willing to sacrifice for it?
**33:** [List of some top psychiatry Substacks.](https://substack.com/@rationalpsychiatry/note/c-61629871)
**34:** [YouCongress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4KjiZeAWc7Yv9oyCb/tackling-moloch-how-youcongress-offers-a-novel-coordination) is a platform for liquid democracy polls.
**35:** Metaculus is running an AI bot forecasting tournament. You write the bot, they provide the questions, best bot wins $30,000 prize. Learn more [here](https://www.metaculus.com/aib/).
**36:** [AI-powered browser extension](https://x.com/JeffLadish/status/1811547635234537771) that can flip the political leaning of any site for you.
**37:** Charles Lehman responds to my posts on mentally ill homeless people: [Serious Mental Illness Is An Optimization Problem](https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/serious-mental-illness-is-an-optimization).
**38:** Claims:
**39:** WeAreNotSaved [reviews Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy](https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/bad-therapy-vs-resilience), which reminded me to also check out [Ozy Brennan’s excellent review of same](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/bad-therapy-review-fifties-dad-mental). This is interesting enough that I might write a post on it. I think both ignoring/repressing trauma and exaggerating/spotlighting trauma are potentially dangerous, and that someone needs to invent the art of successfully navigating the space between them (I don’t think mainstream psychiatry has this art, though it does have pieces of it).
**40: “**Z-poetry” is the new genre of poetry supporting the Russian side in the Ukraine war. Konstantin Asimonov [tells the story of](https://tapwatersommelier.substack.com/p/the-poet-who-never-was) a group of pro-Ukrainian dissidents who create and boost a fake Z-poet to make a point.
**41:** The [Prophetic Standards Statement](https://propheticstandards.com/) is an effort by a group of Christian prophets to ensure that people prophesy responsibly. Signatories “recognize that prophets do not serve as spiritual fortune tellers or prognosticators, nor is their role to satisfy our curiosity about the future or reveal abstract information”. Boring and lame! | Scott Alexander | 146432911 | Links for July 2024 | acx |
# Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot [and got the employee fired](https://reason.com/2024/07/17/getting-a-home-depot-employee-fired-for-calling-for-trumps-assassination-is-still-cancel-culture/).
Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
I appreciate the few voices speaking out in favor of principle (eg [Librarian of Celaeno](https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/to-cancel-the-cancellers)), but most favored the vengeance. A sample from my Substack Notes feed:
Sorry, I don’t know how this one got in there.
The most complete response was by [Postcards From Barsoom](https://barsoom.substack.com/), which recommended [Right Wing Cancel Squads](https://barsoom.substack.com/p/right-wing-cancel-squads).
> That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now.
>
> In an ideal world, we would all give one another vastly greater latitude. No one would get mobbed, fired, forced to resign, kicked out of school, or ostracized from their professional networks for the non-crime of an unpopular opinion. No one would have to worry about people combing through decade-old social media posts looking for gotcha words that weren’t gotchas when they were written, but became crimespeak ex post facto.
>
> In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse. This is a simple matter of technological context. Social media means that there is a more or less indelible record of your every public utterance; sure, you can try to scrub it, but that won’t stop screenshots; sure, you can try to cloak yourself behind a pseudonymous identity, but that just means you need to worry about doxxing. Cell phones mean that your private conversations can be recorded. We live in an electronic surveillance society now. We’re all watching one another, all the time, and short of a Carrington Event knocking us back into the iron age, there’s no realistic possibility of that changing. If we keep holding one another to impossible standards of public discourse, we will live in a totalitarian hell; that is, indeed, precisely the world that we have all lived in, for the last decade. The only way we avoid this is by adopting a public ethos that is exceptionally forgiving.
>
> But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault.
>
> [...]
>
> If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
>
> To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.
Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.
I won’t be able to convince anyone of the ethics of seeking vengeance vs. turning the other cheek. But a few thoughts on the specific practical arguments being deployed:
## 1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted
Going back to that excerpt from the Postcards From Barsoom blog:
> If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
>
> To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.
You mean like you’re doing now?
The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.
And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?
If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught *you* that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.
## 2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic
“Given that liberals invented cancel culture ten years ago, shouldn’t we get ten years of conservative cancel culture, just to be fair?” asks someone totally divorced from historical reality.
Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin [calls](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/) cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture?
People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten):
> [In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies.
When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road:
> This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs.
And since righteous vengeance had been attained and both sides now had experience with cancel culture being morally wrong, everyone agreed the ledger was balanced, and nobody ever tried cancelling anyone else ever again.
No, seriously, we got the entire rest of history. Aldous Huxley famously described the state of things c. 1944 as:
> Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are—there we are in the Golden Future.
Just one more indispensable cancellation, and there we are!
Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past.
## 3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People
An old psychoanalyst’s trick: if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice.
The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals.
One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment. *White people* caused slavery, therefore *white people* stood condemned. No matter that the actual white person involved was 150 years removed from slavery, or was a Polish immigrant whose family hadn’t even been in the country at the time, or whatever. They have some excuse like “well all white people benefit from white supremacy in tangible ways, or at least didn’t speak out against it”.
I hate to say it, but “some left-wing journalist got people cancelled, therefore I should be able to cancel a left-wing Home Depot employee because The Left endorsed cancel culture” is the same kind of argument.
“But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” You can [find some data here](https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-and-devitoverdi-2022-national-free-speech-and-cancel-culture-survey). I’m presenting a representative sample of questions, but check the rest to keep me honest:
Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!
(the above poll probably *overestimates* support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time)
Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.
Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet.
## 4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough
I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound *exactly the same*.
> “If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How *dare* you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!”
This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But:
* The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
* Any rule of the form “Don’t do X, *unless* you can think up a big pile of negative adjectives to describe why the people you’re doing X to deserve it” will simply never prevent anyone from doing X, not even once.
## 5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire
[Postcards From Barsoom](https://barsoom.substack.com/p/right-wing-cancel-squads) helpfully includes a list of the cancellations he finds most enraging. I agree most of them are enraging.
But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.
(I would add [David Shor](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/) to the list as an especially revealing case, and [Al Franken](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49074194) as an especially clear own-goal)
This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists.
There’s a deeper problem here where pre-emptive fear of cancellation blocked rightists from joining these institutions in the first place. But in terms of actual cancellations, they’re usually some poor shmuck who put too few exclamation points after “BLM!!!!”
Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”
## 6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence
Cancellation isn’t just morally bad. It also screws over society. And it screws over your own institutions worst of all.
By society I mean: you want scientists to be producing good science, not producing the science least likely to get them cancelled. You want the Federal Reserve filled with the best economists, not the most politically pure economists. No matter how righteous your cause, if you cancel people who don’t agree with it, you end up with the kind of low-quality science and corrupt institutions we’ve grown used to recently. This is bad insofar as you care about things like truth, trust, or national flourishing.
But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire. Cancellers can’t 100% control broader society, but they do control their own party and its organs. I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice. Why didn’t they? Well, would you, as a Democratic Party insider, want to speak out against Kamala Harris, in f\*\*king *2020* of all years? Obviously anyone who tried that would have been cancelled. So nobody spoke out against the decision, they went ahead with it, and now they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.
You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections! All you need to do is adopt cancel culture!
(“But we would only apply it to actually bad things, not to people on our own side just trying to warn us”. I’m pretty sure the Democrats didn’t go into this expecting to punish people on their own side trying to warn them, yet here we are.)
## 7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision
I think the Democrats as a political party are massively underperforming their fundamentals.
They have most of the elites (elites, by definition, are powerful), most of the donor money, and their two main bases (college graduates and minorities) have both ballooned as a share of the population, while the Republicans’ (white people, rural people) are in decline. They control all the prestige media. Trump has no self-control and dozens of skeletons in his closet. How could they lose?
There are many factors - inflation, Afghanistan, the Electoral College - but part of the story has to be that wokeness and cancel culture are historically unpopular. They produced short-term gains (as people became afraid to speak out against them) but long-term disaster (as their extremism alienated friends and fired up enemies). This is still just my optimistic prediction. But if conservatives ever in fact take enough power that they can wield cancellation more effectively than the Democrats, then it will have been borne out.
In which case, you, too, will have the opportunity for short-term gains at the expense of alienating everybody with a backbone and/or conscience. What could possibly go wrong?
## 8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power
I can’t remember if this is on the [Evil Overlord List](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList), but it should be.
The right is still out of power. For one thing, Biden is still President. There’s even (according to betting markets) a 40% chance that the Dems win the next election.
(The argument in this paragraph isn’t original, but I lost the link to it): Consider an undecided voter in a swing state. As an independent, they’re probably on the right on some issues and on the left on others. Many of them are probably former liberals who left the fold because of wokeness and cancel culture. Now they check out what right-wingers have to offer, and it’s “We also love cancel culture, we plan to drop all of our principles as soon as we win, anyone with lefty opinions should be terrified.” Doesn’t sound like a great advertisement.
But also: even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives *still* won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government. Even if Trump wins, the median outcome of conservatives endorsing cancellation is that the few liberals in these institutions trying to restrain their worst tendencies get dismissed as useful idiots for conservatives who wouldn’t hesitate to cancel them if they were on the other side.
Why mention this? Because the people talking about cancellation insist they’re “just being strategic” and “just laser-focused on winning” when in fact *writing the blog posts at all* reveals they couldn’t care less about any of these considerations. It’s [psychological re-enactment](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma), plain and simple.
## 9. There’s Probably Other Options
“But we can’t just do nothing!”
Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked. Here are some possible subtasks:
1. Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the [Twitter Files](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files) count here, but so do some of the civil rights stuff Richard Hanania talks about in *[Origins of Woke](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke).*
2. Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the [Chicago Principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_principles), and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become [mission-focused in the style of Coinbase.](https://qz.com/work/1910563/coinbase-is-taking-a-hard-line-on-employee-activism) Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.
3. Tech companies should come up with better technologies for Internet moderation that help people avoid unproductive comments without letting moderators transition into ideological censors. I’ve written more about this [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship).
4. The most important job for bloggers and other public intellectuals in particular is *figuring out what the heck we mean by cancel culture*. The “bad” kinds of cancellation shade imperceptibly into things like social norms, petitions, and boycotts. Where do we draw the line? If there had never been cancel culture on the left, would it be acceptable for a Home Depot worker to tweet support for a would-be Presidential assassin? What if a comedian makes a joke that normalizes pedophilia? Part of the reason it’s so hard to get a strong anti-cancel-culture coalition is that most people want some things to be socially unacceptable and aren’t sure how to draw a bright line. I’m not saying you can’t be against cancel culture if you can’t define it - [if you can be bad, you can also be good](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be). I’m saying that defining it a little better is one of the intermediate steps in fighting it. I’ve tried to start this project [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have-coherent-principles-around-free-speech-norms/).
As an example of (4) - maybe we should respect in a firewall between people’s work identity and their political identity, *unless* the person deliberately lowers the firewall by using their work to promote their politics. So if a Home Depot worker says they hate Trump, they’re talking in their capacity as a normal human citizen and not a Home Depot worker, so it’s wrong to cancel them. If a journalist tweets from their official journalism account that they hate Trump, then it doesn’t really seem like there’s a firewall between their work and their politics anymore, and then maybe they’re fair game. I’m not personally suggesting this - I think [even cancelling journalists isn’t great](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-resigns-cotton-op-ed-306317) - but it’s one of the many principled things you could do if you felt like you really needed to revenge-cancel certain people but also wanted to have some principles and not become *exactly* what you hated.
The priests of Amun probably felt pretty great revenge-cancelling the priests of Aten after they regained power. But nobody remembers them today and they’re not part of the story of human progress. Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and *everybody* remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference. | Scott Alexander | 146838743 | Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance | acx |
# Open Thread 339
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** I'm interested in expanding my [biennial local ballot post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022) into a community-wide effort to get an ACX slate for major US cities. Current plan is to ask the 5-10 biggest meetup groups to research for their city sometime in the autumn, then post a week or two before the election. This would probably be SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA, NYC, Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago. The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet? Do other states have enough things on the ballot to keep this interesting, or is California unique there? Do these meetup groups feel up to working on this? Does anyone have any other suggestions or advice? | Scott Alexander | 146872428 | Open Thread 339 | acx |
# Your Book Review: How Language Began
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
## I. THE GOD
You may have heard of a field known as "linguistics". Linguistics is supposedly the ["scientific study of language"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics), but this is completely wrong. To borrow a phrase from [elsewhere](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Linguistics is what linguists study.
I'm only half-joking, because Chomsky’s impact on the study of language is hard to overstate. Consider the number of times his books and papers have been cited, a crude measure of influence that we can use to get a sense of this. At the current time, his [Google Scholar page](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rbgNVw0AAAAJ&hl=en) says he's been cited over 500,000 times. That’s a lot.
It isn’t atypical for a hard-working professor at a top-ranked institution to, after a career’s worth of work and many people helping them do research and write papers, have maybe 20,000 citations (= 0.04 Chomskys). Generational talents do better, but usually not by more than a factor of 5 or so. Consider a few more citation counts:
* Computer scientist [Alan Turing](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=VWCHlwkAAAAJ) (65,000 = 0.13 Chomskys)
* Neuro / cogsci / AI researcher [Matthew Botvinick](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eM916YMAAAAJ&hl=en) (83,000 = 0.17 Chomskys)
* Mathematician [Terence Tao](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=TFx_gLQAAAAJ) (96,000 = 0.19 Chomskys)
* Cognitive scientist [Joshua Tenenbaum](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rRJ9wTJMUB8C&hl=en&oi=ao) (107,000 = 0.21 Chomskys)
* Nobel-Prize-winning physicist [Richard Feynman](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=B7vSqZsAAAAJ) (120,000 = 0.24 Chomskys)
* Psychologist and linguist [Steven Pinker](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=bUhVerAAAAAJ) (123,000 = 0.25 Chomskys)
* Two-time Nobel Prize winner [Linus Pauling](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=b0B12YAAAAAJ) (128,000 = 0.26 Chomskys)
* Neuroscientist [Karl Deisseroth](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=WhhC4LwAAAAJ) (143,000 = 0.29 Chomskys)
* Biologist [Charles Darwin](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=D847cGsAAAAJ) (182,000 = 0.36 Chomskys)
* Theoretical physicist [Ed Witten](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Z-EXYCkAAAAJ) (250,000 = 0.50 Chomskys)
* AI researcher [Yann LeCun](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=WLN3QrAAAAAJ) (352,000 = 0.70 Chomskys)
* Historian and philosopher [Hannah Arendt](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=CNsGZOYAAAAJ) (359,000 = 0.72 Chomskys)
* [Karl Marx](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=4VSRHmIAAAAJ) (458,000 = 0.92 Chomskys)
Yes, fields vary in ways that make these comparisons not necessarily fair: fields have different numbers of people, citation practices vary, and so on. There is also probably a considerable recency bias; for example, most biologists don’t cite Darwin every time they write a paper whose content relates to evolution. But 500,000 is still a mind-bogglingly huge number.
Not many academics do better than Chomsky citation-wise. But there are a few, and you can probably guess why:
* Human-Genome-Project-associated scientist [Eric Lander](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LXVfPc8AAAAJ) (685,000 = 1.37 Chomskys)
* AI researcher [Yoshua Bengio](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=kukA0LcAAAAJ) (780,000 = 1.56 Chomskys)
* AI researcher [Geoff Hinton](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=JicYPdAAAAAJ) (800,000 = 1.60 Chomskys)
* Philosopher and historian [Michel Foucault](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=AKqYlxMAAAAJ) (1,361,000 = 2.72 Chomskys)
…well, okay, maybe I don’t entirely get Foucault’s number. Every humanities person must have an altar of him by their bedside or something.
Chomsky has been called “arguably the most important intellectual alive today” in a New York Times review of one of his books, and was voted the world’s top public intellectual in a [2005](https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/prospectfp-top-100-public-intellectuals) [poll](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/18/books.highereducation). He’s the kind of guy that gets long and gushing introductions before his talks ([this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTuawY8Qnz8) is nearly twenty minutes long). All of this is just to say: he’s kind of a big deal.
This is what he looks like. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#/media/File:Noam_Chomsky_portrait_2017_retouched.jpg), the context for this picture is:
“Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival”
Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas.
Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (*What Kind of Creatures Are We?* Ch. 1, pg. 15-16)
> It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ... there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt in identifying the two.
Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No, that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (*Language and Responsibility*, Ch. 2, pg. 56-57)
> Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations, intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable, no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so.
Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (*Language and Mind*, third edition, pg, 183-184)
> An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions.
>
> The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form.
I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the [hard takeoff](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-takeoff) theory of human intelligence.)
Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it.
Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they *do* study all of these, Chomsky and his followers view *[grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar)* as by far the most important component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed. It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in order to modify or extend a given sentence.
Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in *Aspects of the Theory of Syntax* (pg. 22), his most cited work:
(1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist.
(2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist.
The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’. One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a different meaning in the second (2a != 2b):
(1b) I expected a specialist to examine John.
(2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John.
In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of deep structure.
You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book *Syntactic Structures*, and the point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most important facts to be explained about language.
A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in two important ways.
First, he famously distinguishes *competence* from *performance*, and identifies the former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (*Aspects of the Theory of Syntax*, Ch. 1, pg. 4)
> The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline.
Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (*Aspects of the Theory of Syntax*, Ch. 1,pg. 24)
> A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is *descriptively adequate* to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker.
Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing *E-languages*, like English and Spanish and Japanese, from *I-languages*, which only exist inside human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language, Cook and Newson write: (*Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction*, pg. 13)
> E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external …
Not only should linguistics *primarily* be interested in studying I-languages, but to try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (*Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction*, pg. 13)
> Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10).[1](#footnote-1)
I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually used *really* of no particular empirical significance?
And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim. Cook and Newson continue: (*Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction*, pg. 14)
> The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible evidence as it is of long-term goals.
So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it?
The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC), linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view, people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned early in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU).) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human languages, like the fact that some languages [don’t appear to have words for relative directions](https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jlin.1997.7.1.98), or [“thank you”](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180391), or [“yes” and “no”](https://academic.oup.com/book/9258).
After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists. While you *could* study language by going out into the field and collecting data, this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork.
In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real linguistic data only indirectly reflects it.
All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has [long been an opponent](https://norvig.com/chomsky.html) of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas” of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later.
How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work[2](#footnote-2). The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other things, was substantially more rudimentary.
Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: [Daniel Everett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett). *How Language Began* is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky.
## II. THE MISSIONARY
We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe.
Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the Amazon jungle among the [Sateré-Mawé people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maw%C3%A9_people). At seventeen, Everett became a born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few years, they started a family and [prepared](https://blog.emergingscholars.org/2009/02/linguistics-and-faith/) to become full-fledged missionaries like Keren’s parents.
First, Everett studied “[Bible and Foreign Missions](https://ffrf.org/fttoday/april-2010/articles-april-2010/the-pirahae-people-who-define-happiness-without-god/)” at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After finishing his degree in [1975](https://daneverettbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Daniel-Everett-CV-2.12.16.pdf), the natural next step was to train more specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics ([SIL](https://www.sil.org/)) to learn translation techniques and more [viscerally prepare](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2) for life in the jungle:
> They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight.
Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett and his wife to work with the [Pirahã people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people) (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity.
But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons: (*Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes*, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14)
> In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would.
Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In 1980, he completed *Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã*, his master’s thesis. He continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished *The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax*, his dissertation. He continued studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some thirty-odd years. As he notes in *Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*: (Prologue, pg. xvii-xviii)
> I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs. And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me.
Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. ([source](https://www.52-insights.com/daniel-everett-battle-for-the-origin-of-language-language-interview-amazon/))
Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how *hard* that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—*just* Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is [monolingual fieldwork](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU). But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For *years*.
It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds[3](#footnote-3). Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188)
> My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. …
>
> As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices.
Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*, Ch. 7, pg. 132)
> *Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker.*
One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,* Ch. 12, pg. 196)
> Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction.
>
> To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix.
Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã [number words](https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.007) and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,* Ch. 7, pg. 134)
> I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.”
And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while *also* learning one of the most unusual languages in the world.
People on the bank of the Maici river. ([source](https://daneverettbooks.com/photos/))
By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268)
> When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!”
One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*, Ch. 17, pg. 269)
> "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him."
>
> "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration.
>
> "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them."
>
> Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet.
But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (*Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes*, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266)
> Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them.
>
> "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?"
>
> They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.
In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward.
But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he *also* lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky.
## III. THE WAR
In 2005, Everett’s paper “[Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/431525)” was published in the journal *Cultural Anthropology*. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things.
But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã:
> He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him.
* Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist
> You, too, can enjoy the spotlight of mass media and closet exoticists! Just find a remote tribe and exploit them for your own fame by making claims nobody will bother to check!
* Andrew Nevins, UCL professor and linguist (Harvard professor at quote time)
> I think he knows he’s wrong, that’s what I really think. I think it’s a move that many, many intellectuals make to get a little bit of attention.
* Tom Roeper, U. Mass. Amherst professor and linguist
> Everett is a racist. He puts the Pirahã on a level with primates.
* Cilene Rodrigues, PUC-Rio professor and linguist
> Is Daniel Everett the village idiot of linguistics?
* [bedobi](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/vme0o6/is_daniel_everett_the_village_idiot_of_linguistics/), Redditor
Apparently he struck a nerve. And there is much more vitriol like this; see [Pullum](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/Pullum_NAAHoLS_2024.pdf) for the best (short) account of the beef I’ve found, along with sources for each quote except the last. On the whole affair, he writes:
> Calling it a controversy or debate would be an understatement; it was a campaign of vengeance and career sabotage.
I’m not going to rehash all of the details, but the conduct of many in the pro-Chomsky faction is pretty shocking. Highly recommended reading. Substantial portions of the books *[The Kingdom of Speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Speech)* and *[Decoding Chomsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoding_Chomsky)* are also dedicated to covering the beef and related issues, although I haven’t read them.
What’s going on? Assuming Everett is indeed acting in good faith, why did he get this reaction? As I said in the beginning, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Central to Chomsky’s conception of language is the idea that grammar reigns supreme, and that human brains have some specialized structure for learning and processing grammar. In the writing of Chomsky and others, this hypothetical component of our biological endowment is sometimes called the narrow faculty of language (FLN); this is to distinguish it from other (e.g., sensorimotor) capabilities relevant for practical language use.
A paper by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch titled “[The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.298.5598.1569)” was published in the prestigious journal *Science* in 2002, just a few years earlier. The abstract contains the sentence:
> We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.
Some additional context is that Chomsky had spent the past few decades simplifying his theory of language. A good account of this is provided in the first chapter of *Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction*. By 2002, arguably not much was left: the core claims were that (i) grammar is supreme, (ii) all grammar is recursive and hierarchical. More elaborate aspects of previous versions of Chomsky’s theory, like the idea that each language might be identified with different parameter settings of some ‘global’ model constrained by the human brain (the core idea of the so-called ‘[principles and parameters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_parameters)’ formulation of universal grammar), were by now viewed as helpful and interesting but not necessarily fundamental.
Hence, it stands to reason that evidence suggesting *not all* grammar is recursive could be perceived as a significant threat to the Chomskyan research program. If not all languages had recursion, then what would be left of Chomsky’s once-formidable theoretical apparatus?
Everett’s paper inspired a lively debate, with many arguing that he is lying, or misunderstands his own data, or misunderstands Chomsky, or some combination of all of those things. The most famous anti-Everett response is “[Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40492871)” by Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (NPR), which was published in the prestigious journal *Language* in 2009. This paper got a [response from Everett](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40492872), which led to an NPR [response-to-the-response](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40492902).
To understand how contentious even the *published* form of this debate became, I reproduce in full the final two paragraphs of NPR’s response-response:
> We began this commentary with a brief remark about the publicity that has been generated on behalf of Everett's claims about Pirahã. Although reporters and other nonlinguists may be aware of some ‘big ideas’ prominent in the field, the outside world is largely unaware of one of the most fundamental achievements of modern linguistics: the three-fold discovery that (i) there is such a thing as a FACT about language; (ii) the facts of language pose PUZZLES, which can be stated clearly and precisely; and (iii) we can propose and evaluate SOLUTIONS to these puzzles, using the same intellectual skills that we bring to bear in any other domain of inquiry. This three-fold discovery is the common heritage of all subdisciplines of linguistics and all schools of thought, the thread that unites the work of all serious modern linguists of the last few centuries, and a common denominator for the field.
>
> In our opinion, to the extent that CA and related work constitute a ‘volley fired straight at the heart’ of anything, its actual target is no particular school or subdiscipline of linguistics, but rather ANY kind of linguistics that shares the common denominator of fact, puzzle, and solution. That is why we have focused so consistently on basic, common-denominator questions: whether CA’s and E09’s conclusions follow from their premises, whether contradictory published data has been properly taken into account, and whether relevant previous research has been represented and evaluated consistently and accurately. To the extent that outside eyes may be focused on the Pirahã discussion for a while longer, we would like to hope that NP&R (and the present response) have helped reinforce the message that linguistics is a field in which robustness of evidence and soundness of argumentation matter.
Two observations here. First, another statement about “serious” linguistics; why does that keep popping up? Second, *wow*. That’s the closest you can come to cursing someone out in a prestigious journal.
Polemics aside, what’s the technical content of each side’s argument? Is Pirahã recursive or not? Much of the debate appears to hinge on two things:
* what one means by *recursion*
* what one means by the statement “All natural human languages have recursion.”
Everett generally takes recursion to refer to the following property of many natural languages: one can construct sentences or phrases from other sentences and phrases. For example:
“The cat died.” -> “Alice said that [the cat died].” -> “Bob said that [Alice said that [the cat died.]]”
In the above example, we can in principle generate infinitely many new sentences by writing “Z said X,” where X is the previous sentence and Z is some name. For clarity’s sake, one should probably distinguish between different ways to generate new sentences or phrases from old ones; [Pullum](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EverettOnPiraha_prelim.pdf) mentions a few in the context of assessing Everett’s Pirahã recursion claims:
> Everett reports that there are no signs of no multiple coordination (*It takes [skill, nerve, initiative, and courage]*), complex determiners (*[[[my] son’s] wife’s] family*), stacked modifiers (*a [nice, [cosy, [inexpensive [little cottage]]]]*), or—most significant of all—reiterable clause embedding (*I thought [ you already knew [that she was here ] ]*). These are the primary constructions that in English permit sentences of any arbitrary finite length to be constructed, yielding the familiar argument that the set of all definable grammatical sentences in English is infinite.
Regardless of the details, a generic prediction should be that there is no longest sentence in a language whose grammar is recursive. This doesn’t mean that one can say an arbitrarily long sentence in real life[4](#footnote-4). Rather, one can say that, given a member of some large set of sentences, one can always extend it.
Everett takes the claim “All natural human languages have recursion.” to mean that, if there exists a natural human language without recursion, the claim is false. Or, slightly more subtly, if there exists a language which uses recursion so minimally that linguists have a hard time determining whether a corpus of linguistic data falsifies it or not, sentence-level recursion is probably not a bedrock principle of human languages.
I found the following anecdote from a [2012 paper](https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1195) of Everett’s enlightening:
> Pirahã speakers reject constructed examples with recursion, as I discovered in my translation of the gospel of Mark into the language (during my days as a missionary). The Bible is full of recursive examples, such as the following, from Mark 1:3:
>
> ‘(John the Baptist) was a voice of one calling in the desert…’
>
> I initially translated this as:
>
> ‘John, the man that put people in the water in order to clean them for God, that lived in a place like a beach with no trees and that yelled for people to obey God’.
>
> The Pirahãs rejected every attempt until I translated this as:
>
> ‘John cleaned people in the river. He lived in another jungle. The jungle was like a beach. It had no trees. He yelled to people. You want God!’
>
> The non-recursive structure was accepted readily and elicited all sorts of questions. I subsequently realized looking through Pirahã texts that there were no clear examples involving either recursion or even embedding. Attempts to construct recursive sentences or phrases, such as ‘several big round barrels', were ultimately rejected by the Pirahãs (although initially they accepted them to be polite to me, a standard fieldwork problem that Jeanette Sakel and I discuss).
He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion statement one can make.
Chomsky and linguists working in his tradition sometimes write in a way consistent with Everett’s conception of recursion, but sometimes don’t. For example, consider this random 2016 [blogpost](https://medium.com/@dan.milway/dont-believe-the-rumours-universal-grammar-is-alive-and-well-58c1fbc5608b) I found by a linguist in training:
> For generative linguistics the recursive function is Merge, which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure which can then be the input for further iterations of Merge. Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that expression. For instance the noun phrase “My favourite book” requires two iterations of Merge, (Merge(favourite, book)= [Favourite book], Merge(my, [favourite book])= [my [favourite book]]) and therefore is an instance of recursion without embedding.
To be clear, this usage of ‘recursion’ seems consistent with how many other Chomskyan linguists have used the term. And with all due respect to these researchers, I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would imply (i) any language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion, and that (ii) all sentences are necessarily constructed recursively.
The first implication means that “All natural human languages have recursion.” reduces to the vacuously true claim that “All languages allow more than one word in their sentences.”[5](#footnote-5) The second idea is more interesting, because it relates to how the brain constructs sentences, but as far as I can tell this claim cannot be tested using purely observational linguistic data. One would have to do some kind of experiment to check the order in which subjects mentally construct sentences, and ideally make brain activity measurements of some sort.
Aside from sometimes involving a strange notion of recursion, another feature of the Chomskyan response to Everett relates to the distinction we discussed earlier between so-called E-languages and I-languages. Consider the following exchange from a [2012 interview](https://libcom.org/article/chomsky-new-scientist) with Chomsky:
> **NS:** But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar.
>
> **Chomsky:** It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.
>
> That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition.
Chomsky makes claims like this elsewhere too. The argument is that, even if there *were* a language without a recursive grammar, this is not inconsistent with his theory, since his theory is not about E-languages like English or Spanish or Pirahã. His theory *only* makes claims about I-languages, or equivalently about our innate language capabilities.
But this is kind of a dumb rhetorical move. Either the theory makes predictions about real languages or it doesn’t. The statement that *some* languages in the world are arguably recursive is not a prediction; it’s an observation, and we didn’t need the theory to make it. What does it *mean* for the grammar of thought languages to be recursive? How do we test this? Can we test it by doing experiments involving real linguistic data, or not? If not, are we even still talking about language?
To this day, as one might expect, not everyone agrees with Everett that (i) Pirahã lacks a recursive hierarchical grammar, and that (ii) such a discovery would have any bearing at all on the truth or falsity of Chomskyan universal grammar. Given that languages can be pretty weird, among other reasons, I am inclined to side with Everett here. But where does that leave us? We do not *just* want to throw bombs and tell everyone their theories are wrong.
Does Everett have an alternative to the Chomskyan account of what language is and where it came from? Yes, and it turns out he’s been thinking about this for a long time. *How Language Began* is his 2017 offering in this direction.
## IV. THE BOOK
So what *is* language, anyway?
Everett writes: (*How Language Began*, Ch. 1, pg. 15)
> Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage (pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organizational principles, information, and gestures. Language is a gestalt—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining individual components.
Okay, so far, so good. To the uninitiated, it looks like Everett is just listing all of the different things that are involved in language; so what? The point is that language is more than just grammar. He goes on to say this explicitly: (*How Language Began*, Ch. 1, pg. 16)
> Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex.
His paradigmatic examples here are Pirahã and [Riau Indonesian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riau#Language), which appears to [lack a hierarchical grammar](https://indoling.com/ismil/19/abstracts/Gil.pdf), and which moreover apparently [lacks a clear noun/verb distinction](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668441.003.0004). You might ask: *what does that even mean*? I’m not 100% sure, since the linked Gil chapter appears formidable, but Wikipedia gives a pretty good example in the right direction:
> For example, the phrase *Ayam makan* (lit. 'chicken eat') can mean, in context, anything from 'the chicken is eating', to 'I ate some chicken', 'the chicken that is eating' and 'when we were eating chicken'
Is “chicken” the subject of the sentence, the object of the sentence, or something else? Well, it depends on the context.
What’s the purpose of language? Communication: (*How Language Began*, Introduction, pg. 5)
> Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.
Did language emerge suddenly, as it does in Chomsky’s proposal, or gradually? Very gradually: (*How Language Began*, Introduction, pg. 7-8)
> There is a wide and deep linguistic chasm between humans and all other species. … More likely, the gap was formed by baby steps, by homeopathic changes spurred by culture. Yes, human languages are dramatically different from the communication systems of other animals, but the cognitive and cultural steps to get beyond the ‘language threshold’ were smaller than many seem to think. The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the genus *Homo* and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but surely progressed until humans achieved language. This slow march taken by early hominins resulted eventually in a yawning evolutionary chasm between human language and other animal communication.
So far, we have a bit of a nothingburger. Language is for communication, and probably—like everything else!—emerged gradually over a long period of time. While these points are interesting as a contrast to Chomsky, they are not that surprising in and of themselves.
But Everett’s work goes beyond taking the time to bolster common sense ideas on language origins. Two points he discusses at length are worth briefly exploring here. First, he offers a much more specific account of the emergence of language than Chomsky does, and draws on a mix of evidence from paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and more. Second, he pretty firmly takes the Anti-Chomsky view on whether language is innate: (Preface, pg. xv)
> … I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.
These two points are not unrelated. Everett’s core idea is that language should properly be thought of as an *invention* rather than an *innate human capability*. You might ask: who invented it? Who shaped it? Lots of people, collaboratively, over a long time. In a word, *culture*. As Everett notes in the preface, “*Language is the handmaiden of culture.*”
In any case, let’s discuss these points one at a time. First: the origins of language. There are a number of questions one might want to answer about how language began:
* In what order did different language-related concepts and components emerge?
* When did language proper first arise?
* What aspects of human biology best explain why and how language emerged?
To Everett, the most important feature of language is not grammar or any particular properties of grammar, but the fact that it involves communication using *symbols*. What are symbols? (Ch. 1, pg. 17)
> Symbols are conventional links to what they refer to. They … need not bear any resemblance to nor any physical connection to what they refer to. They are agreed upon by society.
There are often rules for arranging symbols, but given how widely they can vary in practice, Everett views such rules as interesting but not fundamental. One can have languages with few rules (e.g., Riau) or complex rules (e.g., German); the key requirement for a language is that symbols are used to convey meaning.
Where did symbols come from? To address this question, Everett adapts a theory due to the (in his view underappreciated) American polymath [Charles Sanders Peirce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce): *semiotics*, the theory of signs. What are signs? (Ch. 1, pg. 16)
> A sign is any pairing of a form (such as a word, smell, sound, street sign, or Morse code) with a meaning (what the sign refers to).
Everett, in the tradition of Peirce, distinguishes between various different types of signs. The distinction is based on (i) whether the pairing is intentional, and (ii) whether the form of the sign is arbitrary. *Indexes* are non-intentional, non-arbitrary pairings of form and meaning (think: dog paw print). *Icons* are intentional, non-arbitrary pairings of form and meaning (think: a drawing of a dog paw print). *Symbols* are intentional, arbitrary pairings (think: the word “d o g” refers to a particular kind of real animal, but does not resemble anything about it).
Everett argues that symbols did not appear out of nowhere, but rather arose from a natural series of abstractions of concepts relevant to early humans. The so-called ‘semiotic progression’ that ultimately leads to symbols looks something like this:
indexes (dog paw print) -> icons (drawing of dog paw print) -> symbols (“d o g”)
This reminds me of what little I know about how written languages changed over time. For example, many Chinese characters used to look a lot more like the things they represented (icon-like), but became substantially more abstract (symbol-like) over time:
Eight examples of how Chinese characters have changed over time. ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script))
For a given culture and concept, the icon-to-symbol transition could’ve happened any number of ways. For example, early humans could’ve mimicked an animal’s cry to refer to it (icon-like, since this evokes a well-known physical consequence of some animal’s presence), but then gradually shifted to making a more abstract sound (symbol-like) over time.
The index (non-intentional, non-arbitrary) to icon transition must happen even earlier. This refers to whatever process led early humans to, for example, mimic a given animal’s cry in the first place, or to draw people on cave walls, or to [collect rocks that resemble human faces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makapansgat_pebble).
Is there a clear boundary between indexes, icons, and symbols? It doesn’t *seem* like it, since things like Chinese characters changed gradually over time. But Everett doesn’t discuss this point explicitly.
Why did we end up with certain symbols and not others? Well, there’s no good *a priori* reason to prefer “dog” over “perro” or “adsnofnowefn”, so Everett attributes the selection mostly to cultural forces. Everett suggests these forces shape language in addition to practical considerations, like the fact that, all else being equal, we prefer words that are not hundreds of characters long, because they would be too annoying to write or speak.
When did language—in the sense of communication using symbols—begin? Everett makes two kinds of arguments here. One kind of argument is that certain feats are hard enough that they probably required language in this sense. Another kind of argument relates to how we know human anatomy has physically changed on evolutionary time scales.
The feats Everett talks about are things like traveling long distances across continents, possibly even in a directed rather than random fashion; manufacturing nontrivial hand tools (e.g., [Oldowan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and [Mousterian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian)); building complex settlements (e.g., the one found at [Gesher Benot Ya'aqov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesher_Benot_Ya%27aqov)); controlling fire; and using boats to successfully navigate treacherous waters. Long before *sapiens* arose, paleoanthropological evidence suggests that our predecessors *[Homo erectus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus)* did all of these things. Everett argues that they might have had language over one million years ago[6](#footnote-6).
This differs from Chomsky’s proposal by around an order of magnitude, time-wise, and portrays language as something not necessarily unique to modern humans. In Everett’s view, *Homo sapiens* probably *improved* on the language technology bestowed upon them by their *erectus* ancestors, but did not invent it.
Everett’s anatomy arguments relate mainly to the structure of the head and [larynx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larynx) (our ‘voice box’, an organ that helps us flexibly modulate the sounds we produce). Over the past two million years, our brains got bigger, our face and mouth became more articulate, our larynx changed in ways that gave us a clearer and more elaborate inventory of sounds, and our ears became better tuned to hearing those sounds. Here’s the kind of thing Everett writes on this topic: (Ch. 5, pg. 117)
> *Erectus* speech perhaps sounded more garbled relative to that of *sapiens*, making it harder to hear the differences between words. … Part of the reason for *erectus*’s probably mushy speech is that they lacked a modern hyoid (Greek for ‘U-shaped’) bone, the small bone in the pharynx that anchors the larynx. The muscles that connect the hyoid to the larynx use their hyoid anchor to raise and lower the larynx and produce a wider variety of speech sounds. The hyoid bone of *erectus* was shaped more like the hyoid bones of the other great apes and had not yet taken on the shape of *sapiens*’ and *neanderthalensis*’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).
Pretty neat and not something I would’ve thought about.
What aspects of biology best explain all of this? Interestingly, at no point does Everett require anything like Chomsky’s faculty of language; his view is that language was primarily enabled by early humans being smart enough to make a large number of useful symbol-meaning associations, and social enough to perpetuate a nontrivial culture. Everett thinks cultural pressures forced humans to evolve bigger brains and better communications apparatuses (e.g., eventually giving us modern hyenoid bones to support clearer speech), which drove culture to become richer, which drove yet more evolution, and so on.
Phew. Let’s go back to the question of innateness before we wrap up.
Everett’s answer to the innateness question is complicated and in some ways subtle. He agrees that certain features of the human anatomy evolved to support language (e.g., the pharynx and ears). He also agrees that modern humans are probably much better than *Homo erectus* at working with language, if indeed *Homo erectus* did have language.
He mostly seems to take issue with the idea that some region of our brain is specialized for language. Instead, he thinks that our ability to produce and comprehend language is due to a mosaic of generally-useful cognitive capabilities, like our ability to remember things for relatively long times, our ability to form and modify habits, and our ability to reason under uncertainty. This last capability seems particularly important since, as Everett points out repeatedly, most language-based communication is ambiguous, and it is important for participants to exploit cultural and contextual information to more reliably infer the intended messages of their conversation partners. Incidentally, this is a feature of language Chomskyan theory tends to neglect[7](#footnote-7).
Can’t lots of animals do all those things? Yes. Everett views the difference as one of degree, not necessarily of quality.
What about language genes like [FOXP2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2) and putative language areas like [Broca’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area) and [Wernicke’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area) areas? What about [specific language impairments](https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/Documents/health/voice/specific-language-impairment.pdf)? Aren’t they clear evidence of language-specific human biology? Well, FOXP2 appears to be more related to speech *control*—a motor task. Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are both involved in coordinating motor activity unrelated to speech. Specific language impairments, contrary to their name, also involve some other kind of deficit in the cases known to Everett.
I have to say, I am not *100%* convinced by the brain arguments. I mean, *come on*, look at the videos of people with [Broca’s aphasia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWC-cVQmEmY) or [Wernicke’s aphasia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oef68YabD0). Also, I buy that Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (or whatever other putative language areas are out there) are active during non-language-related behavior, or that they represent non-language-related variables. But this is also true of *literally every other* area we know of in the brain, including well-studied sensory areas like the [primary visual cortex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex). It’s no longer news when people find variable X encoded in region Y-not-typically-associated-with-X.
Still, I can’t dismiss Everett’s claim that there is no language-specific brain area. At this point, it’s hard to tell. The human brain is complicated, and there remains much that we don’t understand.
Overall, Everett tells a fascinatingly wide-ranging and often persuasive story. If you’re interested in what language is and how it works, you should read *How Language Began*. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there I haven’t talked about, especially for someone unfamiliar with at least one of the areas Everett covers (evolution, paleoanthropology, theoretical linguistics, neuroanatomy, …). Especially fun are the chapters on aspects of language I don’t hear people talk about as much, like gestures and intonation.
As I’ve tried to convey, Everett is well-qualified to write something like this, and has been thinking about these topics for a long time. He’s the kind of linguist most linguists wish they could be, and he’s worth taking seriously, even if you don’t agree with everything he says.
## V. THE REVELATIONS
I want to talk about large language models now. Sorry. But you know I had to do this.
Less than two years ago at the time of writing, the shocking successes of ChatGPT put many commentators in an awkward position. Beyond all the quibbling about details (Does ChatGPT [really understand](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094#comment-1947189)? Doesn’t it [fail at many tasks trivial for humans](https://chatgpt.com/g/g-qXbCBoMXg-gary-marcus-ai-critic-simulator)? Could ChatGPT or something like it be [conscious](https://philpapers.org/archive/CHACAL-3.pdf)?), the brute empirical fact remains that it can handle language comprehension and generation pretty well. And this is despite the conception of language underlying it—language use as a statistical learning problem, with no sentence diagrams or grammatical transformations in sight—being somewhat antithetical to the Chomskyan worldview.
Chomsky has [frequently](https://norvig.com/chomsky.html) [criticized](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094) the statistical learning tradition, with his main criticisms seeming to be that (i) statistical learning produces systems with serious defects, and (ii) succeeding at engineering problems does not tell us anything interesting about how the human brain handles language. These are reasonable criticisms, but I think they are essentially wrong.
Statistical approaches succeeded where more directly-Chomsky-inspired approaches failed, and it was never close. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not perfect, but they’re getting better all the time, and the onus is on the critics to explain where they think the wall is. It’s *conceivable* that a completely orthogonal system designed according to the principles of universal grammar could outperform LLMs built according to the current paradigm—but this possibility is becoming vanishingly unlikely.
Why do statistical learning systems handle language so well? If Everett is right, the answer is in part because (i) training models on a large corpus of text and (ii) providing human feedback both give models a rich collection of what is essentially *cultural* information to draw upon. People like talking with ChatGPT not just because it knows things, but because it can talk like them. And that is only possible because, like humans, it has witnessed and learned from many, many, many conversations between humans.
Statistical learning also allows these systems to appreciate context and reason under uncertainty, at least to some extent, since both of these are crucial factors in many of the conversations that appear in training data. These capabilities would be extremely difficult to implement by hand, and it’s not clear how a more Chomskyan approach would handle them, even if some kind of universal-grammar-based latent model otherwise worked fairly well.
Chomsky’s claim that engineering success does not necessarily produce scientific insight is not uncommon, but a large literature speaks against it. And funnily enough, given that he is ultimately interested in the mind, engineering successes have provided some of our *most powerful tools* for interrogating what the mind might look like.
The rub is that artificial systems engineered to perform some particular task well are not black boxes; we can look inside them and tinker as we please. Studying the internal representations and computations of such networks has provided neuroscience with crucial insights in recent years, and such approaches are particularly helpful given how costly neuroscience experiments (which might involve, e.g., training animals and expensive recording equipment) can be. Lots of recent computational neuroscience follows this blueprint: build a recurrent neural network to solve a task neuroscientists study, train it somehow, then study its internal representations to generate hypotheses about what the brain might be doing.
In principle, (open-source) LLMs and their internal representations can be interrogated in precisely the same way. I’m not sure what’s been done already, but I’m confident that work along these lines will become more common in the near future. Given that high-quality recordings of neural dynamics during natural language use are hard to come by, studying LLMs might be essential for understanding human-language-related neural computations.
When we peer inside language-competent LLMs, what will we find? This is a topic Everett doesn’t have much to say about, and on which Chomsky might actually be right. Whether we’re dealing with the brain or artificial networks, we can talk about the same thing at many different levels of description. In the case of the brain, we might talk in terms of interacting molecules, networks of electrically active neurons, or very many other effective descriptions. In the case of artificial networks, we can either talk about individual ‘neurons’, or some higher-level description that better captures the essential character of the underlying [algorithm](https://www.albany.edu/~ron/papers/marrlevl.html).
Maybe LLMs, at least when trained on data from languages whose underlying rules can be parsimoniously described using universal grammar, effectively exploit sentence diagrams or construct recursive hierarchical representations of sentences using an operation like Merge. It’s still possible that formalisms like Chomsky’s provide a useful way of *talking about* what LLMs do, if anything like that is true. Such descriptions might be said to capture the ‘mind’ of an LLM, since from a [physicalist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism) perspective the ‘mind’ is just a useful way of talking about a complex system of interacting neurons.
Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, the study language is certainly interesting and we have a lot more to learn. Something Chomsky wrote in 1968 seems like an appropriate summary of the way forward: (*Language and Mind*, pg. 1)
> I think there is more of a healthy ferment in cognitive psychology—and in the particular branch of cognitive psychology known as linguistics—than there has been for many years. And one of the most encouraging signs is that skepticism with regard to the orthodoxies of the recent past is coupled with an awareness of the temptations and dangers of premature orthodoxy, an awareness that, if it can persist, may prevent the rise of new and stultifying dogma.
>
> It is easy to be misled in an assessment of the current scene; nevertheless, it seems to me that the decline of dogmatism and the accompanying search for new approaches to old and often still intractable problems are quite unmistakable, not only in linguistics but in all of the disciplines concerned with the study of mind.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Chomsky 1991b refers to “Linguistics and adjacent fields: a personal view”, a chapter of *The Chomskyan Turn*. I couldn’t access the original text, so this quote-of-a-quote will have to do.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Chomsky’s domination of linguistics is probably due to a combination of factors. First, he is indeed brilliant and prolific. Second, Chomsky’s theories promised to ‘unify’ linguistics and make it more like physics and other ‘serious’ sciences; for messy fields like linguistics, I assume this promise is extremely appealing. Third, he helped create and successfully exploited the [cognitive zeitgeist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_revolution) that for the first time portrayed the mind as something that can be scientifically studied in the same way that atoms and cells can. Moreover, he was one of the first to make interesting connections between our burgeoning understanding of fields like molecular biology and neuroscience on the one hand, and language on the other. Fourth, Chomsky was not afraid to get into [fights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars), which can be beneficial if you usually win.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
One such sound is the [bilabial trill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_bilabial_trill), which kind of sounds like blowing a raspberry.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
This reminds me of a math [joke](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=103).
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Why is this vacuously true? If, given some particular notion of ‘sentence’, the sentences of any language could only have one word at most, we would just define some other notion of ‘word collections’.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
He and archaeologist Lawrence Barham provide a more self-contained argument in [this 2020 paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-020-09480-9).
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
A famous line at the beginning of Chomsky’s *Aspects of the Theory of Syntax* goes: “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.” | [unknown] | 146070825 | Your Book Review: How Language Began | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
[*[Original post here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in)*]
**Table Of Contents**
**1:** Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections
**2:** Responses To Specific Comments
**3:** Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences
**4:** Closing Thoughts
## 1. My Replies To Broad Categories Of Objections
Many of you had strong feelings on this one. As usual, you were wrong.
**The first** broad category of response was people who got angry at me because they thought I was saying homelessness was unsolveable and we shouldn’t try and you’re a bad person if you’re trying.
That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying that there are some options, and we should debate them, but people have to specify them first. “Be tough” is a vibe, not a plan.
Plans will have to navigate tradeoffs around potentially not working, potentially being too weak, potentially costing too much money, and potentially being too draconian. I would like to see what tradeoff people choose. I don’t think a proper response to being asked to show your work is “YOU SAID IT’S POSSIBLE TO BE TOO DRACONIAN, THAT MEANS YOU LOVE CRIME AND ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE CONVERSATION!”
At the end of this post, I’ll list some possible plans commenters mentioned. Some of them are decent. I’m happy to debate those plans, but so far the debate hasn’t risen beyond the level of “Well, I would BE REALLY TOUGH!”
**The second** broad category of response was people who have grand plans for how many new institutions to build and how big those institutions would be. This could be part of a solution, but not all of it.
Why hasn’t the legal system already sent disruptive homeless people to prison? Will those same reasons ensure that if you built bigger, shinier institutions, the legal system wouldn’t trivially send people to those ones either?
I think the main problem is that homeless people mostly commit frequent low-level crimes that police mostly don’t see and victims mostly don’t report. When victims do report them, prosecutors don’t want to spend $50,000 to have a big trial to put a homeless person in jail for 90 days for disturbing the peace or whatever.
People think that “asylums” solve this because you just have to prove that someone is mentally ill. But this is also hard (will police be walking around administering the PANSS to everyone they see in a tent?) and under the existing systems you have to prove some additional point about danger. Even with the recent Supreme Court *Grant’s Pass* decision, there are a hundred finicky laws and precedents determining who you can and can’t arrest and for how long. I would like to see whether your plan involves pretending these don’t exist, or a concerted campaign to bring each one to the Supreme Court and overturn them, or what.
Again, this isn’t an unsolveable problem, but the solutions involve more thought than just repeating “BUT I WOULD BE TOUGH AND NOT SOFT” one thousand times and talking about how many stories high your new institutions would be. I would like to know what people’s proposed solutions are so I can assess them.
**The third** broad category of response was people who objected that surely this problem is solvable, because other countries solve it. The past solved it! California c. 2020 is the only society that has this level of problem with homelessness. We need to be ambitious and believe in ourselves!
Okay, but other countries solve crime without mass incarceration. France/Germany/Britain have 20% the incarceration rate that we do. So why don’t we eliminate 80% of prisons and use handwave handwave welfare social services to handle the former inmates? *Now* conservatives will start mumbling about American exceptionalism blah blah blah.
Or consider high-speed rail. A decade or two ago, California voted to construct a world-class high-speed rail system linking the whole state. Conservatives warned this would be a horrible boondoggle. But cheap, high-quality high-speed rail is definitely doable. Japan does it! France does it! America created a 3000 mile Rockies-crossing Transcontinental Railroad in f\*\*king 1869, don’t tell me we can’t do rail! You’re just a defeatist who thinks we can’t do things other countries do easily.
Still, the conservatives were right. California’s high-speed rail is absolutely a horrible boondoggle: the state put tens of billions of dollars into the project and still hasn’t even connected the first two cities in the completely-flat-and-empty Central Valley. It’s unclear if they ever will. The last company they hired to run the project gave up in disgust and moved to Africa because it was “less politically dysfunctional” ([this is true!](https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed-rail-north-africa-biden-trump-2022-10))
Is it possible to become the sort of state/country that can build world-class high speed rail networks, close 80% of prisons, and end visible street homelessness? Yes, obviously, other countries do this, you could become like them somehow. But you don’t do it through ground-level rail policy, prison policy, or homelessness policy directly. You start by becoming a totally different sort of country. I would like for us to be the sort of country that does all of these things, and I hope that my blog posts/donations/votes make this more likely. But I don’t think you can start by planning the gleaming high-tech rail system, *before* you’ve solved the fundamental problems that make it impossible.
I also don’t think we should wait until we’re a more functional state to solve this problem. But the fact that we have to solve it in spite of dysfunction means we might need to be creative rather than steal the solution Switzerland or somewhere uses.
(I once asked a Swiss person how their streets were so clean, and he answered “everyone here is rich”).
Also, other US cities don’t have long-term mental asylums ~~or anti-camping laws~~, so how can you use “other US cities manage to do this” as support for those programs?
**The fourth** broad category of responses was people who thought that, if they just said BE TOUGH many times, God would appreciate their toughness enough to additionally solve all of their totally-non-toughness-related problems.
This is kind of a mean way of putting it. But I’m thinking of people who say things like “We’ll create great wraparound social services with enough beds for everyone…and if people don’t accept them, we’ll send them to prison for a thousand years! I am so tough!”
I admit the prison for a thousand years part is tough, but I’m confused how your toughness is supposed to get you the great social services, when even the non-tough people who focus entirely on social services can’t do this. In general, many of the “BE TOUGH” plans assume so much state capacity, that the state capacity alone would be enough to solve the problem even without the toughness. This is another reason I want to hear people’s plans! When they say “BE TOUGH” they often mean “Assume a magical solution, and have a little bit of toughness on the side”. Then the debate centers so completely on the toughness and whether it’s morally justified that the magic part gets left alone.
“My solution to climate change is to switch all power plants to fusion, make all industries carbon neutral, and replace all cars with superconducting levitating pods - and if anyone complains, I’ll hit them with a lead pipe!”
“Oh no, not the lead pipe, that’s too cruel!”
“Wrong, you’re just a big softie, lead pipes are completely justified in an emergency such as this one!”
**The fifth** broad category of responses was people who admitted that they didn’t have a plan, but thought they shouldn’t have to - that wasn’t their job. These people are certainly in good company:
See [my review of Revolt Of The Public](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public).
As I tried to say in the first part of the post, this is reasonable and sympathetic. But if people keep not listening to your demands, then learning more about the specifics might help you understand why.
There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”
I don’t know if the anti-gun people are doing anything *wrong* here exactly, I just know they’re going to be constantly confused and disappointed, and that anyone else who tries the same strategy will get the same results.
Realistically, my excuse for writing the post was that I read [this](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/well-i-dont-know-about-this-involuntary) and [this](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-case-for-forcing-the-mentally-ill-into-treatment.html) article by Freddie deBoer which assume that there is some clearly-defined thing called “involuntary treatment” and that the kindest option for the mentally ill and everyone else is to lift some kind of law preventing us from delivering it. Even if it’s permissible for the average person to just say “less homeless crime, please”, I feel like at the point where you’re a public intellectual leading the public discussion, you have some responsibility to start talking specifics.
## 2. Specific Comments And Responses
**Shako ([blog](https://shakoist.substack.com/)) writes:**
> I agree with your point in the post. I’ll add though that a policy that is adjacent to this is be “cruel and draconian” to the subset of homeless who commit anti-social crimes. If we removed the subset of criminals from west coast homelessness the problem would be still visible but far far less concerning to those of us who live among it.
This is where I land too, but I think it’s very hard.
If a homeless person stabs someone, then I think most places (I don’t know if this includes SF), they get prosecuted under general anti-stabbing laws, which the police mostly have enough resources to investigate.
If someone just gets in people’s face a lot and screams and litters, then what? Most of the time, police won’t be around to see this. Most of the time, the victim won’t go through the trouble of pressing charges. If they did, it would be he said, she said. Even if the government puts in the effort to actually try the case, screaming at people and littering is probably a couple-month sentence at most.
Eledex tells a related story in Part 3 [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san). A group of homeless people took up residence in an empty lot next to his house, harassed him, set things on fire, etc. This is much worse than the average homeless person just bothering tourists, but when he called the police, they never followed up.
I assume if they had tried, the homeless people’s public defender could have said something like “are you sure these homeless people are the same ones who set fire to your stuff?”, Eledex would have said “they’re the homeless people camping on the lot where it happened, but I don’t, like, recognize them or anything”, the public defender would have said “well how do you know those people didn’t leave and some new homeless people came on to the lot?” and everyone would admit they couldn’t prove that.
So the normal criminal system might not be set up to deal with these kinds of issues, which I think is why there’s so much demand for some extreme law that criminalizes the entire concept of being this sort of person. But I do worry that if police don’t have the resources to deal with normal crimes, then whoever is charged with enforcing the new extreme law won’t have enough resources to do it well either - and that any society capable of enforcing the new extreme law would also be capable of solving this through normal policing.
**Humphrey Appleby writes:**
> Can we look at what other places do? What is eg Salt Lake City’s solution? (Possibly, export the homeless to SF). What about Zurich? Singapore? Edinburgh?
>
> The US in general and SF in particular seems to have this problem unusually bad, so one could reasonably look elsewhere for ideas.
I talk a little more about this at <https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko>, but I think most places' solutions are a combination of:
1. Cheaper housing so that more people can afford homes
2. Cheaper housing so that the government has an easier time giving free homes to people who can't afford their own
3. Homeless shelters
4. Frequent bad weather, forcing the homeless to use the homeless shelters at least sometime, which gets their foot in the door
5. Laws requiring the homeless to use the homeless shelters, which I am much less against when the homeless shelters exist.
**Doktor Zum writes:**
> At one point, there were something like 600,000 Americans in long-term psychiatric institutions, and that was in a less populous America. Start by locking up 600K and then lock up more. Ah, but where do you put them? The 50 states are dotted with the creepy and picturesque ruins of all the old mental asylums--you can't put them there!
>
> It's true that the current government (states, local and federal) are totally incapable of building and running a vast network of psychiatric hospitals, but don't we want government to do things like build nuclear power plants and also lots of housing? If I'm making an argument for cheaper housing and you say "government can't/won't ever allow more building," am I supposed to say that you have won the argument?
>
> Unless we want to embrace full anarcho-capitalism, we have to believe that it is possible to have a government that can do things that it did in the 1950s like (a) apprehend and detain the severely mentally ill, (b) back and create lots of nuclear power plants, and (c) build abundant housing and infrastructure.
People say “we had giant institutions once, so we can do it again”. This is basically true, but with some missed subtlety. The 600,000 people in the old institutions included:
* Demented old people (eg Alzheimers)
* People with neurosyphilis (eg you had syphilis for thirty years and it reached your brain). There was a lot of this; I can’t find good numbers, but maybe hundreds of thousands.
* Down’s syndrome, autism, and other “special needs” adults
* Inconvenient eccentric relatives who other family members bribed to get classified as psych cases
* Actual schizophrenics
Around the 1950s, lifespans increased enough that it was worth coming up with separate institutions (eg nursing homes) for demented people. Penicillin cured neurosyphilis. Better prenatal testing decreased Down’s syndrome rates, and better social services let Down’s syndrome patients be treated in the community. It became harder to bribe people to imprison your eccentric relatives. And pharma companies invented antipsychotics to treat schizophrenics. So the effective population for these institutions decreased by an order of magnitude. At the same time, rising health care costs were making them unmaintainably expensive. And yes, civil rights advocates were arguing that they were violations of human rights. So between 1950 and 1980, they were almost all closed down.
Recreating this system would be tough, both for practical and political reasons. The practical reason is that the cost of everything has increased by at least an order of magnitude since 1950. Partly this is increasing social and governmental dysfunction. Partly it’s because in 1950, it was considered reasonable to build institutions that looked like this:
Cozy!
Even at costs likely 10% of ours, the 1950s couldn’t really afford to keep these institutions around; states were spending about 10% of their total budget just to maintain buildings that looked like the picture above. That segues into the political problem - once there were other options (penicillin, antipsychotics, nursing homes), the public willingness to pay to maintain the institutions collapsed.
On the other hand, when I calculate this out, it doesn’t seem so bad? The average cost of a psychiatric hospital bed is [about $300K per year](https://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3578) (sanity check: a California prison bed is $130K per year, and the psych hospital needs more medical personnel, so this seems plausible). There are about 8,000 homeless in San Francisco, but assume that most are ordinary people down on their luck, and we only need to institutionalize 2,000. That suggests a cost of $600 million/year using state-of-California numbers, but everything (eg real estate) is more expensive in SF, so round up to $1 billion/year. I don’t know if this counts the amortized cost of building the institution, but let’s assume it does.
San Francisco currently spends about $1 billion/year on homelessness. These institutions would only cover the worst 25% of homeless people, so you’d need maybe another $500 million for the rest, but whatever, same order of magnitude. I think this is more affordable than I expected.
The remaining problems are:
1. Where is this? I don’t think there’s anywhere in SF city limits to put it. I suggest putting it in Marin, to piss off George Lucas’ neighbors. But I don’t know about the legalities of a city using an extraterritorial detention institution.
2. Probably many patients will start doing better once they’re on antipsychotics. Do you release them (at which point they will probably get off antipsychotics?) Or do you awkwardly keep sane people around in your mental institution because you don’t trust them?
3. What are the criteria for committing people to this institution? If it’s “convicted of crime”, we get the problem discussed above: police won’t catch most people. If it’s more like current mental hospital involuntary commitment, remember that this is mostly done on vibes. It’s one thing to use vibes for weeklong commitments, but I definitely saw a lot of basically sane people get committed for stupid reasons. If you’re going to be locking people up for multiple years, civil liberties groups will start looking into it and suing you if you’re wrong, so you’ll want a better system.
4. If you let people out, what kind of good social services do you have waiting for them? Is this wishful thinking, such that if we were capable of creating social services that good, we would have done it already?
5. $1 billion/year in projected costs, translated into Californian, means $100 trillion quadrillion/year in actual costs.
Of these, I think 3 is the biggest deal. If it’s as hard to commit someone to these institutions as it is to convict them of a crime, then these institutions don’t help much above how much the existence of prison also helps (eg not much). If you invent a new legal maneuver where it’s easier to commit someone than to convict them of a crime, then why do you even need the step where you build the institution? Just invent the legal maneuver and send more people to prison!
I think that maybe the thought is that the institution seems more “humane” than prison, and so people will be more willing to allow low-friction legal maneuvers for confining people there. I think this is cope; not only won’t the institutions be more humane than prisons, but people won’t believe they are and won’t allow the low-friction legal maneuvers.
**Drethelin writes:**
> What if we abolish the DEA and just let anyone buy anti-psychotics over the counter?
This would be the FDA we’re abolishing, but otherwise yes, this is the sort of clever outside-the-box thinking that I appreciate from my commenters.
Antipsychotics are very cheap (some well-regarded drugs like Abilify and Seroquel cost about ~$10 per month of pills). On the other hand, homeless people have very little money. So if you were going to do this, it would make sense for the government to give them away for free.
These drugs have many potentially serious side effects. But it’s not clear how much homeless people’s 5-minute monthly visits with a bored Medicaid doctor does to avert these side effects, over having some kind of pharmacist or advocate or social worker in the free distribution center giving helpful advice.
Like everything, I think this would only help around the edges - the fraction of homeless mentally ill people who drugs can help, who are willing to take the drugs, and who are prevented only by cost and bureaucracy. What percent is that? Low confidence guess 25%.
**DZ writes:**
> I think you’re missing the goal of a short arrest (few days). Part of the problem is the homeless are in areas where society doesn’t want them to be. They’re near city downtowns where tourists spend time or near commercial districts or in otherwise nice parks. If you can arrest them for a few days and keep arresting them until they move somewhere else … the goal is to eventually force them to move to the more acceptable areas vs. least acceptable areas. This is obviously not ideal but in the mean time the city gets more tourism, more office rentals, etc. Europeans ruthlessly arrest homeless people who hang out in the touristy areas. SF doesn’t, yet.
I commented that I was worried that “out of touristy areas” means “into residential areas”. And I feel worse making residents deal with this than tourists, and am less confident that the city cares enough about them to fight back. DZ responded:
> Agreed. People don’t want them in the residential areas or suburbs either and for good reason. But my guess is cities can identify certain areas where they would prefer the tents to set up. Something like industrial areas or run down parks. The key is that city officials should be able to use arrests as a strategy to move the tents/homeless concentrations without having to face a million lawsuits.
I don’t know if there are really areas like this, but I welcome learning more from people who know cities better.
**SMK writes:**
> This probably sounds draconian and cruel, too, but in fairness, all these discussions seem to assume that this person is in San Francisco and can *never ever leave for some other, more affordable place.* I get it -- it's tough leaving home, and maybe they'd be leaving friends. But they wouldn't be the only people leaving SF over rent prices, and they'd pretty clearly be among the most rational.
>
> So I dislike articles like this when they say things like "the average wait time for a homeless shelter bed is 826 days" or "cheap apartments in SF are $1000 / month."
>
> I have a friend who was homeless for around a year in another major American city, and he said it was always 100% feasible to get a shelter bed if he wanted one. Indeed, there were several options.
>
> On a different note, I also think that if one were going to go a "cruel and draconian" route, homeless shelters might be able to change policies to better support that and prevent some of the issues you highlight. If it takes 826 days to get a shelter bed, then zero of the typical people you mention who are briefly homeless are getting shelter beds. If all of the people who were homeless for longer were either leaving or in jail, then more of those people probably would get beds. Am I saying this is the policy I favor? No, I agree it's a hard problem and I'm not sure what the right answer is. But things like this need to be kept in mind, too.
Again, I think it’s helpful to go to the specific policy level. What’s the policy here?
Give homeless people brochures reminding them that other cities exist? I’m sure they know this.
Give homeless cities free mandatory bus trips to those other cities? What prevents the other cities from giving them free mandatory bus trips back? Even if they don’t, what if the homeless prefer being homeless in San Francisco to having a better situation in a cheaper city? A bus from Phoenix to SF is only $60; even a homeless beggar might be able to scrounge up that much money if they’re motivated.
Maybe some plan like making a deal with a big cheap city in Texas to take SF homeless in exchange for money, and as soon as the homeless get off the bus, they’re met by a Texan social worker who gives them a shelter bed and social services? Might help along the edges, but remember that only about half of homeless people want/will accept shelter beds (depending on how good the shelter beds are).
**Sergei [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61382013):**
> After checking a bit, let me point out the obvious. What works elsewhere is PATERNALISM.
>
> Once you are in the "clutches of psychiatry", they don't let you go. Upon release you are placed into some sort of housing, your appointments are monitored and a social worker will find you and drive you there. You will be given multiple chances to get a job and/or rehab. Your meds will be delivered to you if you cannot pick them up. They remind you to take them. There will be a social safety net so you are never in a situation where you end up on the street unless you really really try to.
>
> In retrospect, it makes sense: people who are not able to take care of themselves for a time because of a fixable mental infirmity are taken care of by the state, until they can. That's what we do with children already.
I continue to want people to provide details.
“They don't let you go" - okay, so the person is in a locked facility? Placed in "some kind of housing"? Does the housing have locks on the door, or can they leave? What if they do leave? "Multiple chances to get a job", oh, great, with whom? How are you enforcing that they take mentally ill people? What happens when the mentally ill people are less good workers than other people they could hire, or have some kind of crisis on the job, as even the best-treated person might once in a while?
Maybe we can charitably fill in the details. Something like:
* Ban some combination of camping outside and being visibly mentally ill.
* If arrested, someone will get three months either in a psych facility or a prison with good psychiatric services.
* When they get out, they’ll be sent to a halfway house with a staff doctor who makes sure they get all of their medications easily and on time (maybe including GLP-1s for opioid addiction?)
* They’re under an Outpatient Commitment Order not to leave the halfway house for a year. During that year, they have to check in every evening, unless they’ve worked something else out.
* They also need to pass random drug tests once a month.
* After a year, if things seem to be going well, they’re provided normal subsidized housing.
* If they can’t stick with this (fail drug tests, leave halfway houses, commit crimes), then they’re considered to have violated probation, and they get a longer jail sentence of several years.
This is an actual plan, of the sort that I wish people would provide but most people never do. It’s not a bad plan. I only see three major concerns.
First, if we could do social services this well, we would have already done it, and we would have much less of a problem. Part of my objection is that people are using “we should be willing to be tough!” as a panacea to cover up the fact that we’re failing even at the non-tough part, as if gaining in toughness would suddenly make us generally more competent.
(for example, right now we don’t even have enough beds for everyone at our crappy homeless shelters. But the halfway houses in this example are much higher-effort than crappy homeless shelters. So after failing to do a cheap easy thing, we would have to succeed at a much harder, more expensive thing).
Second, halfway houses let people leave during the day. Because they’re unpleasant places, most people *do* leave during the day. That means they’ll be hanging out around parks and public libraries, same as now. Will they be less mentally ill? Maybe, if they stay off drugs and the meds work well. But those are big ifs, and you might find that somewhat-less-mentally-ill dysfunctional-poor-people hanging around parks and libraries is less of an improvement than you thought.
Third, realistically everyone will fail their drug tests and go back to prison, so be ready for that.
Still, if someone credibly promised to make this work, I would probably support it over status quo.
**Harry Deuchar [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61382107):**
> From the your comments, it seems like more shelters solves so much of the problem that it becomes a qualitatively different problem. Why not put that front and center in the main article?
My impression is that in SF:
* 25% of the homeless are in shelters.
* 25% want to be in shelters, but there aren’t enough beds available.
* 25% don’t want to be in shelters, because they’re psychotic and making irrational decisions.
* 25% don’t want to be in shelters, because the shelters have terrible conditions, and they’re so repulsed by them that they would rather take their chances on the street.
I agree that the easiest thing SF could do is make shelters for the 25% who want to be in them but can’t. My understanding is that this is limited by a combination of 1) real estate costs, 2) nobody wants a homeless shelter in their backyard but it has to be somewhere, 3) homeless activists correctly think this would lead to people forcing the homeless into extremely low-quality repulsive shelters, and preempt this by fighting against their very existence.
**HemiDemiSemiName [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61406422):**
> How about:
>
> 1. single-payer healthcare system
>
> 2. free public transport system, patrolled by competent cops so it continues to function and doesn't become an ersatz homeless shelter, who are themselves overseen by a well functioning internal affairs department
>
> 3. voluntary state or national register for "clinically essential drugs administered to at-risk individuals", which uses fingerprints or iris scanning for identification, has a database which legally cannot be subpoenaed for anything short of child sex crimes or homicide, and which you are placed onto after getting a single prescription for antipsychotics while committed unless you opt out; anyone on the register can get certain meds from a pharmacist without a second prescription unless they've been inactive for five years or more
>
> I live in Australia. We have 1., we effectively have 2. for mentally ill homeless people (I think public transport staff are told to let anyone who's visibly mentally ill but not too distressed through the gates), and I have no idea if 3. already exists or not.
There’s already more or less a single-payer healthcare system for homeless schizophrenics. Poor people get Medicaid, and I am not a legal expert but I think schizophrenia is enough of a disability to qualify people for Medicare too. None of these people pay for their medical care and this isn’t an issue.
In San Francisco, homeless people already get [an Access Pass](https://www.sfmta.com/fares/access-pass), ie free public transportation on the municipal rail system. I don’t think there’s a similar program for the BART (intercity rail system), probably because other cities don’t want homeless people traveling there. There are definitely lots of homeless people on the BART; I don’t know how this works, but I think they make more begging than they lose from the fares.
The third one is reasonable. My guess is that someone would die from taking the drugs wrong, everyone involved would get sued, and the doctors’ guilds would use that as an excuse to claw back their prescribing power. But if you have enough political capital to fight it off, sure.
## 3. Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences
**Daniel Bottger [on](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61387082) helping homeless people get jobs in his native Germany:**
> I believe you're looking for this:
>
> <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheltered_workshop>
>
> Germany has a lot of these. A typical example of such work would be disassembling broken appliances for recycling, or simple crafts like basket weaving. The work isn't valuable, so these places pay less than minimum wage. In Germany and many countries there are special exceptions to minimum wage laws for such workshops. They have trained staff and good connections to the local health care providers landscape, especially Assisted Housing facilities. I believe these would surely be able to employ psychotic people, at least as long as they take their meds.
>
> And that Wikipedia article says: "In 2021, California banned organizations from paying disabled people less than minimum wage, giving the agencies who employ disabled workers until 2025 to either pay their workers the statewide minimum of $15.50 per hour or shut down."
>
> Seems to me like that's a promising point to address, where a specific policy change could help? If these workshops also give work and inclusion and a little money to psychotic people, as long as they do take their meds?
**Chris KN on the Norwegian system:**
> I think California is in a particularly difficult situation, for reasons I outlined in another reply, but I can answer some of your questions for my paternalistic society, Norway, where there are significantly fewer mentally ill homeless people (and not just because they’re doing such a good job).
>
> I don’t want to suggest that Norway has everything figured out. They haven’t. There’s a shortage of resources, and many suboptimal outcomes. But the system does suggest some answers to your questions.
>
> *“the person is in a locked facility? Placed in ‘some kind of housing’?”*
>
> Yes and yes. Depending on diagnosis. Often both, in turn. You graduate from locked facility to housing. I assume this is common even in California, though, but that it’s a matter of resources?
>
> *“can they leave? What if they do leave?”*
>
> Yes. As soon as possible (often not soon enough) you get your own apartment, and you’re free to come and go as you wish. Though you don’t get housing unless you’re reasonably safe to allow out into society as an outpatient, and likely to stay. If you leave, with no place to go, and it’s a problem, you’ll probably be identified and helped soon enough, as there’s no big haystack of homeless people for a needle to hide in. Bad things happen, but it’s unusual enough that it seems to spark debate every time.
>
> “Get a job … With whom?” There are protected businesses that exist for this purpose. Bicycle repair shops, fulfillment, simple food prep, light manual labor, etc. Often (not always) businesses that wouldn’t otherwise make sense in a high-cost country like Norway if they were purely profit-driven (e.g. gift-wrapping services) and typically offering jobs that don’t require a lot of customer interaction. Wages and/or other aspects of the business are subsidized, prices are competitive, and customers understand that they may sacrifice some efficiency and sophistication for price and social benefit. These businesses take crises and low productivity in stride (and are rigged to handle it), and no enforcement is necessary.
>
> Because of the scale and nature of the issue in California, the way the culture and economy and politics work, the role of drugs and the criminal justice system, etc, etc, I don’t think California could or should copy that system if they wanted to. And even if they did, it would take a long time, a lot of money, and they’d find it wasn’t perfect.
>
> However, I’m not fond of “it can’t be done” rhetoric, which is very common among experts who know how it’s always been done. (For the same reason, I wanted to ask your clinic director if it wouldn’t be possible to overbook, taking no-shows into account when scheduling, and use good communication and positive incentives, rather than blaming and punishing the patients for the bad finances?)
>
> The older I get, the more often I think “there are no solutions, just tradeoffs”. However, there are usually tradeoffs to be made – especially if you’re willing and able to fiddle with many variables at once, to break out of some local optimum.
**HemiDemiSemiName on the Australian system:**
> I think Sergei was trying to point to a set of better-functioning systems elsewhere, rather than outlining a complete system in itself.
>
> "Some kind of housing" in my local context would mean [Community Care Units](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/serviceprofiles/clinical-residential-rehabilitation-services-community-care-units-service) or [Supported Residential Accommodation](https://www.housing.vic.gov.au/supported-accommodation#what-is-specialist-disability-accommodation), thought it might also mean long-term hospitalisation in a [Secure Extended Care Unit](https://www.health.vic.gov.au/mental-health-services/secure-extended-care-units) or getting locked up in [I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Prison](https://www.forensicare.vic.gov.au/).
>
> I think the general pathway for psychotic homeless people is to get sent to an inpatient ward (which is reasonably secure) a few times, then end up in a CCU (which is probably vaguely secure in that you have to ask the nurses to let you out) and enter SRA (which is not at all secure but someone will notice if you disappear) if they seem stable. If they leave, someone will put a small amount of effort into finding them, and then they'll stay in secure accommodation longer next time. My brother worked night shifts in a SRA house as a disability carer while he was in university and the most traumatic thing that happened was a morbidly obese resident rolling onto and bursting a colostomy bag, so I don't think they're terrible places. I am not sure whether they're cost effective.
>
> California must have inpatient care and forensic mental health. Perhaps it's missing long-stay residential services and supported accommodation in the middle, or missing the ability to send people to those services, or missing government funding for enough beds? Or more probably I'm misunderstanding the system and patients just aren't getting sent to those services for legal or procedural reasons.
**Merlot (apparently a Canadian psychiatrist?) on [long-acting injectable antipsychotics](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61438834):**
> Long acting injectable anti-psychotics are really effective and a huge breakthrough, though not a complete panacea. You need a patient to actually respond to them and tolerate them (not all do), and then there's some degree of experimenting to figure out how long you can go between doses without losing effectiveness, and there's variation for different drugs. "Every few months" is something I've basically never seen, but all the points above still stand for a once a month injection which is more realistic (at least with the commonly used injectables in Canada). They're also more expensive than pills which is not the biggest deal, but my understanding is the insurance bureaucracy the US deals with is a pretty big barrier. Missing a dose by a few days is generally fine, but if someone misses for an extended period of time you also have to re-titrate them up to a treatment dose again. There are some additional risks and challenges that come from them being an injectable but they're relatively minor. It can also be challenging to inject them into the muscle properly on a very fat individual, and they have a side effect of weight gain, but I'd say that becomes an issue in less than 5% of cases. But again, overall they are great, and they increase adherence and decrease rehospitalization.
>
> The thing is you can't just handwave away how you get the person in the room for the injection every month. Even in jurisdictions like Canada where you don't have the legal barriers to bringing someone in to get their injection, you need to have available police resources and be able to find and ID the person, which is hit or miss. Using recreational drugs also lowers the effectiveness of the LAIAs (though potentially less than oral meds?), and of course there's lots of drug induced psychosis in non-schizophrenic homeless people, homeless people with brain injuries, etc. And then you still have a homeless person at the end that requires a bunch of supports, just a less psychotic one that's potentially easier to house. But they're a very useful tool, and I'd guess there's a lot of room to expand their use in the US, even if the impact the public notices is likely to be marginal.
I’ll just add a couple of things. First, I’m not surprised that Merlot hasn’t seen “every few months” because that’s still kind of cutting-edge and might not have made it to Canada, but technically Invega Trinza promises every three months. It’s still very expensive (something like $10,000 per dose), so any health system with resource constraints is probably using older monthly ones that cost a few hundred per dose.
Second, Merlot brings up the issue of titration. Antipsychotics have many side effects, some of which are potentially deadly. Usually if you start experiencing a potentially deadly side effect, you stop the drug. But if you give three months of the drug at once, you are stuck having the side effects for three months, at which point they might kill you. So it’s very important to start by giving the drug as a normal daily pill, then give the injection only after spending a while establishing it has no severe side effects.
There are rules about what to do if people go off the injection and whether you need to use the pills again before re-starting the injection. I haven’t used these injections in a while so I’m not familiar with the details, but I bet they’re annoying.
**Theodidactus (lawyer, see [blog](https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata) here) on prosecuting low level offenses:**
> I think one thing I'd like to expand on is the criminal component.
>
> A lot of "draconian" solutions necessarily require the criminal law (because you get minimal returns out of suing homeless or very poor people). In the United States, this means you're activating a *ludicrously* inefficient system to deal with low-level problems. It might be satisfying to a person of a deontological bent that no theft go unpunished, but it's hardly optimal. A lot of "soft on crime" policies in my jurisdiction come from a place of simply not wanting to bother with the time and expense of punishing an instance of shoplifting.
>
> See, prosecutors make "good deals" that include no jail time as a way to get people to admit their guilt and move the case along. If you don't make "good deals" and decide to be draconian, people will fight back: they'll insist on trials for stealing a bag of chips...and nobody actually wants that, because trials have a ton of process. When I get a shoplifting case, I demand security footage (if available). Just getting that to me from the store is often more costly for the store than the stolen bag of chips. If I went to \*trial\* on a shoplifting case, I'd probably win unless two witnesses appeared for a whole afternoon: the employee who caught the lifter and the cop who showed up when/if they were called. Losing an employee for an afternoon is already a decent amount of time and expense for a victim, to say nothing of the police/jury/judge/clerk resources that get spent. If the plan is to put someone in jail for 60-120 days for stealing a bag of chips, you've turned a case people would normally shrug and admit to into something that is as worth fighting about as a white collar credit card theft. If the plan is to put someone away for 5-10 years for their next instance of loitering because they haven't learned their lesson the previous 128 times, we've turned a low-level misdemeanor into the trial of the century.
>
> Finally and probably most important to your point: the Supreme Court did recently rule that you can technically criminalize homelessness, but actually prosecuting the "crime" of homelessness might be onerous in the future, since there would be numerous active defenses, everything from "there were no shelters available" to the truly preposterous "oh gosh, this was a big misunderstanding, I was walking back to my house and then a dude came out of nowhere and beat me and threw me in a ditch and that's why i'm in this ditch at 3AM". Trouble is that even if your defense is truly preposterous, you get a trial...
>
> […]
>
> I think strictly enforcing the penalties of anti-homelessness laws might be even more difficult than strictly enforcing the penalties of anti-shoplifting laws, simply because the defendants have even less to lose by fighting it out, and might even be more sympathetic to jurors and judges.
>
> In short, my point was that irrespective even of the cost of jail and prison, it's really expensive and onerous to prosecute people, and if you increase the stakes of prosecution, it gets even more expensive and onerous.
**SubstackCommenter2048 (used to work with public defenders), [on commitment hearings](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61423663):**
> *> an overworked public defender who has devoted 0.01 minutes of thought to this case*
>
> Hey, something I know a little bit about! I worked briefly with some of these overworked public defenders, doing the legwork of interviewing newly committed psych ward patients to assess their desire for legal representation. Here is what I learned:
>
> 1. A lot of these people are pretty shaken up by whatever episode landed them in the hospital and are okay to stick around for a while until they're back on their psych meds, back on their non-psych meds (a LOT of HIV, hepatitis, diabetes, etc. in this population), and any wounds are stitched up and starting to heal.
>
> 2. That's good, because that's exactly the same thing most of the doctors want, and they're willing to release the patients once they're stabilized.
>
> 3. In the minority of cases where a patient wants to leave earlier than that, many are patients whose reasons are not going to go over well at a hearing (e.g., "I need to get out of here before President Terminator Robot finds me", "I am the Red Dragon of Revelation that is called Satan"). You generally try to talk these people down, but sometimes it goes to a hearing.
>
> 4. Many of the rest actually just desperately want to get back on the street, usually because they really love specific drugs that they can't score on a psych ward, but sometimes, seemingly, because they just love being free from any restrictions on where they can sleep, shit, or fuck, even if it means endangering their health, their sanity, and their lives.
>
> 5. For the 3s and 4s, you either go in front of a judge or negotiate with the doctors to get the person released. You do your best to argue that either: a. Even if they're crazy (that's the technical term in common use), they do not present a risk to themselves or others, and/or b. Even if they DO present a danger to themselves or others, that's because they are drunk/high/just an asshole, not because of their mental illness. Sometimes you even believe that the argument is legally sound. On rare occasions, like if you have a really power-hungry or stupid psychiatrist on the ward, you may even find it morally sound. Almost always, the doctors really do have the patients' best interests as their primary goal, and they have dealt with the legal system long enough to know which battles aren't worth fighting.
>
> 6. This system means that very sick people are in and out of involuntary commitment every few months or even more often. In between, they wreak all sorts of havoc, on their own bodies and minds and on the world and people around them.
>
> 7. It's expensive to house someone on a psych ward; it's even more expensive to house a seriously mentally ill person in prison; but it's probably even more expensive than that in terms of social costs to let them wander around for months until the cops pick them up again for assaulting someone, taking a shit in the middle of the floor at a homeless shelter, walking in traffic, etc. Accordingly, I'm very much in favor of re-institutionalization for chronic cases, for some definition of chronic. I recognize that this would have lots of unfortunate consequences. I am convinced that it could be implemented such that it has many fewer unfortunate consequences than our current system.
**CJW (also public defender) [also on commitment hearings](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61447548):**
> I worked as a public defender for a few years after law school. In my state we did not represent people at 96 hour commitment hearings. But I can assure you that in the analogous situations where commitment for months was a possible outcome, we would have met with the defendant for at least an hour about just the hearing itself, and likely another hour or two about whatever inciting incident had made them a client before that point. It was not uncommon to have hours worth of conversations with clients who had fixed delusionary beliefs, sphexishly returning to non sequiturs, and/or severe problems with logic and memory.
>
> In the event that a client was absolutely incoherent and unable to communicate about his case or our representation of him, we would review medical report summaries, make notes for questions, and reach out to family members or other contacts, among other strategies. Even on a rushed basis and in circumstances where the ward was entirely non-interactive, I would not have considered anything less than 1-2 hours of review to be adequate representation of somebody in an adversarial hearing the result of which might be commitment for weeks or months or longer.
>
> In my time serving as a GAL, which can similarly impact a person's liberty interests, the absolute BARE minimum would've been something like an elderly patient in skilled nursing following a devastating stroke who could not communicate ideas at all, and who the public administrator or family needed guardianship to have him placed there and the service paid for. In those cases, no matter what I was told, I always still insisted on personally traveling to the facility to verify with my own eyes the person's condition and attempt to speak with them, and review the doctor's interrogatories, and find the nurse who works in his wing and ask her questions about him, and even under ideal circumstances this would take at least an hour not counting travel time.
>
> I seriously doubt that ANY attorney is handling serious commitment hearings in the fashion that Markie Post handled bail hearings on TV's "Night Court", and if you ever find one that is you should report them.
I have been involved in various commitment hearings, but only at the “few days to few weeks” level. At that level, I got the strong impression that most of the lawyers had never met their clients before the hearing, and had just read some notes and talked to them in the few minutes before the hearing. I’m glad to hear this is either atypical or doesn’t extend to longer-term commitments.
**TorontoLLB (works in Toronto mental health) [on street living](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in/comment/61451499):**
> I have worked with guardianship and mental health in downtown Toronto for over a decade.
>
> As long as it is an option to live on the street for free, lots of people will choose that option (or default to that option to avoid more difficult choices). Wherever they are permitted, encampment communities grow faster than Austin.
>
> It does not take too long living on the street using drugs and drinking every day for someone to convert themselves into the category of intractably addicted and mentally ill.
>
> I think Scott has started from the "intractably mentally ill" point and done a great job of discussing the tradeoffs and issues with coerced care options. This is where I worked and I agree.
>
> But isn't the real issue that we have SO MANY MORE homeless and mental health issues and drug addictions than in prior decades?
>
> I think the proper way to evaluate the benefit of making sleeping outside illegal is in how much it slows the current machine converting at risk people into lifelong mental health and addiction patients.
>
> I support zero tolerance for encampments despite the obvious fact that many current mentally ill and vulnerable people will suffer under such a policy. I believe a much larger number of people will be forced to find a path other than setting up a tent and self-medicating.
## 4. Closing Thoughts
I asked people to present plans. I think these fall into ~3 non-mutually-exculsive categories:
**First**, enforce existing laws better, such that any homeless person who commits a crime (including public harassment, littering, etc) gets caught and punished. Probably this has to include something like a three-strikes law to prevent a revolving door system. You could also add on some kind of diversion to locked inpatient psychiatric care if this seemed more humane.
I think this is basically a good idea, but I would want to hear more from law enforcement about why it’s so hard to do this now.
**Second,** make a law against camping on the street. Have good social services so that everyone has an option other than camping on the street, then arrest people who don’t use the social services. If people repeatedly violate the terms of the social services, send them to jail or a locked institution.
I think this is also basically a good idea, but it’s currently tied up in the “have good social services” stage, which - I can’t say this enough - repeating “BE TOUGH BE TOUGH BE TOUGH” won’t help with.
**Third,** get some kind of long-term mental institutions, train police to notice when people are being crazy on the street, have a legal system where one or two psych evaluations can commit them to the long-term institutions, then keep them at the long-term institutions indefinitely. Maybe combine this with some kind of social services where if they do well at the institution they can graduate to those services later.
I think this is also a potentially helpful idea. As someone who’s seen a lot of entirely sane people get committed to psych institutions for questionable reasons (which was less than a disaster only because the average stay at these institutions was only a few days) I would want to inspect the commitment criteria with a fine-toothed comb. But if you did a good job writing them, you could convince me.
Hopefully this convinces people that I am not some pro-homeless extremist who hates your clean streets and freedom to walk around un-harrassed. I really just want some actual plan that I can be for or against instead of constant exhortations that I’m not BEING TOUGH enough. | Scott Alexander | 146463231 | Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People | acx |
# Consciousness As Recursive Reflections
*[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of [On The Marble Cliffs](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs), has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]*
---
Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences”[1](#footnote-1), “the last frontier of brain science”[2](#footnote-2), and “as important as anything that can possibly exist”[3](#footnote-3) as well as “core to” all value and ethics.
So, let’s solve that in a blog post.
Don’t worry, Scott hasn’t gone megalomaniacal. My name is Daniel Böttger. A few of you know me as the author of the *[Seven Secular Sermons](https://sevensecularsermons.org/)*. Most of you have seen my [review of](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs) *[On the Marble Cliffs](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs)*, which won me the right to pitch Scott this guest post.
You came here to read Scott. Why would you stay around for this? Three reasons:
1. Scott has agreed to post this, so he thinks it might be worth your time.
2. It proposes a new, testable solution to a time-honored, pivotal mystery.
3. It utilizes a niche of electroencephalography research which is so obscure you’re almost certainly unfamiliar with it, and which as far as I know nobody has ever applied to the problem.
### What we talk about when we talk about qualia
The study of consciousness has differentiated its subject matter into the parts that can be studied normally (like wakefulness and complicated information processing juggling multiple bits of information, which in humans seems to require consciousness) from the weird part where there’s no consensus even on what would be the right questions to ask: subjective experience, a.k.a. “phenomenal” consciousness.
Phenomenal consciousness has been further refined into the concept of qualia (singular: quale) which are individual instances of subjective experience, of information (such as the taste of a food) being not only information known and processed, but also experienced, felt consciously. There is much disagreement on how qualia should be defined. There are common shorthands, “what it is like” or “the way things seem to us”, but when two people talk about qualia, these shorthands are too vague to help them to rule out the possibility they’re talking about different things. Still, the concept can be fleshed out with a list of characteristics qualia have.
I would start with a few basic ones that receive little attention in the philosophical literature because they’re so obvious, or because they’re also true of information being processed unconsciously, so they’re not “special”.
1. Distinguishability: qualia can be distinguished from each other.
2. Duration:
1. Qualia need some minimum duration to be experienced. The details are well-suited and have turned out to be complex, but you’re not far off if you take 80ms as a bare minimum, for simple perceptions like a blinking light that you’re poised to look for.
2. Detailed self-reflection, noticing that you’re noticing[4](#footnote-4), takes longer. In trained meditators it can go on for hours.
3. The maximum duration is until the next time consciousness is lost.
3. Simultaneity:
1. There are usually several qualia at the same time.
2. The maximum number is not obvious, although working memory capacity (usually 7 ± 2) provides a lower bound, but there are never billions of qualia perceived at the same time.
3. The [jhāna states](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem) seem to indicate that after considerable training in maintaining self-reflection, the minimum number of simultaneous qualia can go down to one. In that case, the remaining one quale will appear to pervade everything. If you don’t have any, you’re unconscious.
Then there are the four special characteristics of qualia that distinguish it from normal unconscious information processing, given by Daniel Dennett[5](#footnote-5).
4. Ineffable: qualia cannot be communicated, or apprehended in any way other than direct experience.
5. Intrinsic: qualia are simple properties, unanalyzable because they’re not composed of relations to other things.
6. Private: all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
7. Directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness: to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.
And here are another three, given by Thomas Metzinger[6](#footnote-6) as characteristics of (singular) self-awareness, translated into English and summarized into characteristics of (plural) qualia:
8. Mine-ness: qualia are experienced and described as one’s own.
9. Homogeneity: all qualia are felt to be of the same type. While differences between them can be appreciated, they are always experienced as the same kind of thing.
10. Perspectivity: qualia are experienced “from” somewhere.
Three more are given as “laws of qualia” by Ramachandran and Hirstein[7](#footnote-7). I’d summarize them as follows:
11. Irrevocability: qualia can’t be directly overridden by top-down attention.
12. Flexibility: qualia can be used for different purposes, rather than merely trigger a reflexive response.
13. Short-term memory: qualia remain available long enough for choices to be made based on them.
Some authors[8](#footnote-8) have differentiated into several characteristics what I’d call just one, and which Scott has already [written about](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/can-people-be-honestly-wrong-about):
14. Infallibility: qualia cannot be misperceived.
In reaction to my first draft of this post, Scott gave me another one to explain:
15. Unity: while qualia are multiple, there only ever seems to be one “consciousness” that apprehends them, at least according to itself.
Finally, here is one about the special case where the qualia being experienced happens to be self-referential, which will be obvious to anybody who has tried to ride a bicycle while trying to understand how they’re doing it:
16. Self-consciousness impedes complex unconscious information processing.
### Three bullets to bite
Failed searches for the nature of qualia were based on certain widespread but false assumptions. The following three corollaries of this theory negate these assumptions. So they’ll seem weird.
1. Humans are not conscious
> Only thoughts are conscious, some of the time. The part of you that’s reading this right now and feels itself to be conscious, is a thought.
2. Consciousness is not a thing
> “Consciousness” is a funny word. It takes the adjective “conscious” and makes it into a noun. That noun is then easily mistaken for an actual thing in and of itself, something with a degree of independence, rather than merely an attribute or a characteristic of something else.
>
> In fact, a thought can be conscious much like it can be right or wrong. You can talk about “the consciousness” of a thought if you’re talking about that attribute or characteristic, just like you can talk about “the rightness” or “the wrongness” of a thought. But just like rightness and wrongness aren’t things in and of themselves, so consciousness is not such a thing either.
3. You are not your consciousness
> An additional error is made when people identify themselves with “their” consciousness. Not only do they wrongly assume that there’s a thing there to identify with; this assumed identity also creates false intuitions:
1. The supposed thing-ness of consciousness seems more real, since people usually believe themselves to be real.
2. Consciousness seems like there’s only one of it, since people usually believe there’s only one of themselves.
3. It extends instinctual self-defense into defense of this false concept.
This does not mean a statement like “I am conscious” is always false. The word “I” is a useful shorthand for whatever the sense of self happens to point to at the time. It is imprecise but more convenient to say “That idiot cut *me* off” rather than “That idiot cut off the car that’s driven by the person that’s saying this”. It is imprecise but more convenient to say “I’m hungry” rather than “the person saying this is experiencing hunger”. In that sense, “I” and “me” just help get to the end of the sentence more quickly. Analogously, it is much more convenient to say “*I* am conscious of this moment” rather than “The thought that is directing this mouth to say this sentence is conscious of this moment”.[9](#footnote-9)
Just like “I’m hungry” is okay as a shorthand, so is “I’m conscious”. They take up less space than “I experience hunger” or “I experience consciousness”. But just like “I am this hunger” would be a confused thing to say, so is “I am this consciousness”.
And like when you say “I’m hungry” you’re really talking about the current state of your digestive tract, when you say “I’m conscious” you’re really talking about your current thoughts. So that’s where we’ll start looking.
### What are thoughts?
Thoughts are the processes you can introspectively notice in yourself when you deliberate, analyze, evaluate, reason, form concepts and solve problems. You can also notice similar, but simpler and briefer processes when you imagine, remember, notice, recognize or judge something or when you feel an emotion or motivation. These simpler, briefer mental events will also be called “thoughts” here.
Some serious thinkers insist that thoughts are a special category of things experienced from a first-person perspective, categorically and importantly different from the brain activity observable from the third-person perspective of outside observers and brain imaging technologies. I disagree, and use “thoughts” as merely pertaining to a level of functional abstraction of “what the neurons processing this information do”, just like “the mind” overall is merely an abstraction for “what the brain does”. This is a [physicalist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism) view. Physicalist theories have two main problems.
1. Brain imaging tech such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) does not show thoughts.
fMRI shows the slow-changing anatomy of [biological neural networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(biology)), and how they change on a timeframe of months and years as a nervous system learns, matures and incurs damage. The tiny, milliseconds-long workings of individual [neurons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron) and action potentials can also be studied, by isolating them under microscopes and examining the molecules, ions and electrical flows in great detail. Unfortunately, thoughts last from tenths of seconds for the briefest recognitions, to several minutes for the most focused uninterrupted problem-solving. They’re between the timescales that science has great methods for.
But a new method can do it! I’ll describe it in the last section of this post, because it provides hope that much of what I’m about to conjecture will be able to be tested experimentally.
2. Like all theories of the mind, physicalist theories have trouble bridging what has been termed the “[explanatory gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap)” between
* subjective experience, the world of qualia, where nothing could be more obvious than the fact that conscious experience is happening,
* and the world of objective facts, physics and brain imaging technology, where nobody has found these supposed qualia as a thing to point at.
> [Dualist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism) theories “solve” this by accepting subjective qualia and objective physics as separate worlds. Physicalist theories claim it’s all physics in the end, so they need to show how qualia arise out of physics... but none of the existing theories of how that goes (including [denying that qualia even exist, or that they can be meaningfully discussed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyiFLzSrkfkDW4S7o/why-it-s-so-hard-to-talk-about-consciousness)) have reached consensus.
>
> What follows is a theory of how qualia, with the 16 characteristics listed before, do exist, and necessarily arise out of physics.
An area that does not give physicalism such trouble is how the mind’s information processing (conscious or not) is based on neuronal activity, on neurons firing “spikes” (action potentials) of electricity at each other. There is a lot of good research on this. Mental information processing doesn’t seem possible without these electric spikes.
A living human brain [will contain between 9 and 200 billion spikes per second](https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/). Humans at peak performance can do many thoughts per second[10](#footnote-10), but whatever the average number is, it has to be orders of magnitude lower than *billions* per second. So, assuming the brain doesn’t just waste energy on billions of needless spikes, an average thought should encompass many million or several billion spikes per second[11](#footnote-11). So these have to be “somehow” organized into a pattern of correlated neuronal firing activity.
Patterns of spikes running through the same brain can meet, when they fire into each other. When that happens, they *can* merge. You see particular black and white pixels on this screen here (again, “thought” includes such very brief mental events as well) but they get merged into letters, words, this sentence and your understanding of this argument. You can re-focus on the particular pixel, but when you do, you re-perceive it; you can’t recall your previous perception of it, because it has merged into the thought of the letter, the word etc.
But they don’t *always* merge. You might listen intently, e.g. if you’re waiting on an acoustic signal that you want to react to as quickly as you can. Then when you hear a sound, a thought poised to react meets another thought that comes in from the ears with the signal received there. But while you’re doing that, other neuronal patterns continue to come in from e.g. your mouth, reflecting the perceptions of your tongue. Spikes from the ears and spikes from the tongue even have to pass through the same brain structure, the thalamus. Yet the spikes from the mouth remain uninvolved in your being poised to react, as long as you maintain focus on the modality of sound. This rules out the possibility that all neurons talk to all other neurons indiscriminately.
That’s a crucial problem that requires an explanation! Since
* billions of bits of neuronal activity, across many neurons in space and many milliseconds in time, can be part of a single pattern,
* but patterns can also remain separate, even while running into each other,
there has to be a difference between these two states of affairs. And in a physicalist framework, a distinction can’t be only at the level of abstraction of thoughts, where all sorts of rules could be postulated. The distinction must be grounded in the physical neurons that make it.
### Neuron ingroups and outgroups
The pattern that holds a lot of spikes together into a thought is a [neural oscillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation): neurons firing along circular paths in a synchronized rhythm[12](#footnote-12). These are commonly called brain waves and Scott has already [written about them](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain). They arise when neurons enter a circular, self-repeating pattern of activity, and fall apart as their neurons cease to maintain that pattern. A neuron that is part of one oscillation can hardly also be a part of another, so oscillations compete for neurons.
Higher frequency oscillations are smaller, which makes sense because higher frequency means less time for the circular signals to travel, and smaller means less space through which they travel.
Small, high frequency ones arise in response to sensory stimuli. They’re where multiple bits of information that synchronously arrive are [bound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_binding) together into a single representation of an object that those bits describe features of, such as its color and movement. This has been known since people like Francis Crick and Christof Koch researched it in the 1990s, and it is widely accepted, probably because it doesn’t make any claim why there would be anything like experience or qualia involved.
There are also larger and therefore slower oscillations. Neuronal signal propagation has very variable speeds, but the lowest of low estimates still gives it half a meter per second, i.e. much less than a second to travel straight across the entire brain. Every thought that lasts longer than that, such as your understanding of this sentence, has to be at least a bit circular and therefore oscillatory. This includes pieces of information being “stored in working memory” i.e. maintained for seconds or longer.
But the oscillation is just a pattern of interactions between many neurons, so it is itself an abstraction! A truly bottom-up explanation of how thoughts/oscillations can either merge or not merge has to answer how each individual neuron can react differently depending on whether spikes it receives are part of the same oscillation or not.
I think it works like this.
* Spikes that are part of the same oscillation fire in sync; they have a shared rhythm. For each neuron that is taking part in an oscillation, the time elapsed between its own sending of a spike via its axon, and the arrival at its dendrites of subsequent spikes from neurons it oscillates with, *remains constant over multiple such intervals*. That is what it means to share a constant rhythm.
* So when a neuron receives a spike, all the processing ability it needs to decide whether that spike is part of such a rhythm is
+ an ability to measure the interval of time elapsed since its own last spike
+ and an ability to compare this interval with the intervals after previous spikes.
* The measuring seems trivial. We already know every neuron has a refractory period after it has fired. This constitutes a built-in cellular timer that measures the interval since its last spike.
* The comparison of such intervals has to be “somewhere” in the dynamics of neuronal membrane potential, which is influenced by many factors and definitely features complicated feedback loops that could be harnessed for computation. I can’t break this down further to the chemical level. But since individual neurons can keep a rhythm all by themselves, this comparison doesn’t seem too much to ask of a single neuron.
* An ability to make such a comparison makes the neuron able to treat signals it receives in a shared rhythm (and therefore likely from other parts of the same oscillation) differently from signals that are not part of the same rhythm (and are therefore coming from elsewhere).
This physically implements the crucial distinction between neuronal interactions within the same oscillation, and interactions beyond the same oscillation. With this grounding achieved, let’s go back up to the level of abstraction of thoughts, where I’ll call this distinction the difference between the *inside* and the *outside* of a thought. We’ll need this difference to explain why thoughts that oscillate give rise to qualia, and sometimes to self-awareness.
### Inside conscious thoughts
You can notice your own mental activity. Let various thoughts arise and fall away, without engaging with them, or recognize a few as relevant or examine them for a while. Or drop some and look for new ones, either way is fine.
If you have never done mindfulness meditation, it really helps to keep doing this noticing process for a minute before you go on reading.
Now what is strange about that is: subjectively, it is not obvious that *that which is noticing* those thoughts… is itself a thought! It’s going on in the same brain as the ones it is noticing. It’s processing information just as they do: to notice something is to process information from it. It’s just as time-limited: there was a time before the noticing started, and there will be a time after. And it’s just as limited in scope, as is evident from the limit to how much it can notice simultaneously. But even examining itself thoroughly, it still *seems*,subjectively, to itself, very different from them!
What this noticing thought notices about those other thoughts, the information from them it processes, is what they “look like” (i.e. are neurally encoded as) “from outside” (i.e. not in sync with its own rhythm). The inside view of a thought (its internal rhythmic communication) is very different, much like the insides of cars, cartwheels and cardiologists look very different from their outsides. Each thought does not notice its own outside, so it can’t easily notice resemblances to the outsides of other thoughts, so it’s not obvious to itself that it is itself just another thought.
Again, this is just at the level of abstraction. What is really happening is:
* Since the oscillation/thought is made of neurons receiving and processing information, that’s all it ever does.
* But the processing of information that is part of the oscillation/thought is handled distinctly from the processing of information that is not. One of the differences between them is that internal processing can maintain bits of information over time by “juggling” them as long as they maintain their circular activity[13](#footnote-13).
* Since the distinction between internal and external information is neuronal activity, i.e. the exact kind of information that an oscillation/thought can process, it can notice this distinction and thereby notice itself.
+ This can be provoked deliberately by directing attention on attention itself[14](#footnote-14).
+ This noticing of itself is again “normal” neuronal information processing, i.e. the way neurons process anything, regardless of consciousness.
+ It is necessarily processed in the rhythmic activities that transmit internal information.
+ It is therefore self-referential and recursive: It notices something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself etc. A visual metaphor may serve to illustrate this:
* Qualia are *nothing but* information being processed internally, on their own information channel, encoded in the rhythm of the oscillation. We use special words like “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” to denote this actual, physical and knowable distinction from other neuronal information processing.
If this is the nature of qualia, all their characteristics should follow from it. Time for the payoff!
The first three characteristics follow from how qualia are information being processed.
1. Distinguishability: qualia have to be distinguishable from each other because they’re bits of information, and bits of information have to be distinguishable or information processing would not work.
2. Duration:
1. Qualia have to have some minimum duration to be experienced, because the rhythm needs to be established over a couple of cycles, in order for participating neurons to establish the distinction between internal and external information.
2. Detailed self-reflection, noticing that you’re noticing, has to take longer because it needs more cycles: a rhythm needs to be established in order to be noticed, and then the processing of what was noticed needs more such cycles.
3. Qualia have to end when the neurons cease to maintain the oscillation that contains them.
3. Simultaneity:
1. There have to usually be several qualia at the same time, at least in larger/slower oscillations, because each oscillation has a processing capacity determined by the number of neurons involved, and this capacity has to be filled because otherwise there wouldn’t be the activity that constitutes the oscillation.
2. The number of simultaneous qualia is limited because the processing capacity of the oscillation is limited.
3. After considerable training in maintaining self-reflection, jhāna states fill this capacity with (in the second jhāna as an example):
* Joy
* Reflections of itself reflecting on:
+ Joy
+ Reflections of itself reflecting on:
- Joy
- Reflections of itself reflecting on:
* Joy
* Reflections of itself reflecting on:
+ Joy
+ Reflections of itself reflecting on:
- Joy
- …
The aspects of the specialness of qualia follow from how they are processed in their own way.
4. Ineffable: qualia cannot be communicated because they are processed in their own, locally referenced way, separately from communicable “outside” information.
5. Intrinsic: qualia have to seem different and have to not seem based on other bits of information, because only this special internal processing can store information over time (bits of “working memory”), while outside information can only be streaming in.
6. Private: same as 4. Ineffable.
7. Directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness: qualia have to be immediately available because they’re part of the thought/oscillation that is experiencing/processing them.
The next three are focused on self-awareness, i.e. the special self-referential and recursive case. Here the oscillation is not just processing qualia, but processing the fact that it is processing the qualia of how it is processing qualia etc. In doing so, it recognizes true aspects of this state of affairs:
8. Mine-ness: this is the understanding of the qualia truly being part of that which is experiencing them.
9. Homogeneity: all qualia are felt to be of the same type because that’s what they truly are; they’re all bits of information being processed internally.
10. Perspectivity: qualia truly can only be experienced “from inside” the oscillation because neurons that aren’t tuned into the rhythm will not process the spikes accordingly.
The “laws of qualia” seem obvious:
11. Irrevocability: qualia can’t be directly overridden by top-down attention any more than other factual information being processed can.
12. Flexibility: since qualia are part of the type of processing that has memory, they have to allow deliberation on them.
13. Short-term memory: same as 2. Duration.
And the last three:
14. Infallibility: qualia cannot be misperceived, because how they are perceived is all that they are.
15. Unity: this theory says multiple oscillations can have qualia in separate places in the brain at the same time. This is subjectively not obvious because:
1. All thoughts (even the linear ones that are unconscious because they aren't oscillating) compress/simplify what they're thinking about. When they oscillate and notice themselves, they have to continue to do that, because each thought has to be more complicated than its own internal processing capacity can contain. So their self-representation is also compressed/simplified, usually into a notion called "me". Thoughts don't usually think of themselves "I'm a thought" but "I'm me, I'm a human". So conscious thoughts usually *anthropomorphize themselves*.
2. Each thought has access only to conscious phenomena that are internal to itself[15](#footnote-15), so the contradiction between multiple claims to be “me” cannot be noticed while the oscillations remain separate.
3. Self-representations do meet when two oscillations merge. But in that case, the simplicity of their self-representations[16](#footnote-16) usually makes it easy for those to merge as well, as the oscillations *mistake each other for themselves*, summoning unity.
16. Self-consciousness impedes complex unconscious information processing because it competes with it for neurons. Neurons that are tuned into the rhythm aren’t available for other things, and the recursion of self-referentiality can keep these neurons occupied for a long time.
So qualia arise out of neuronal information processing much like biology arises out of chemistry. When chemical reaction chains *build* each other, they can achieve self-replication. When neuronal activities *reflect* each other, they can achieve self-reflection. *Many processes that know each other become one process that knows itself.*
From the information processing angle, oscillations that can maintain bits of information have internal working memory, which is the only thing that non-oscillating neuronal activities lack in order to fit the definition of [nondeterministic Turing machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_Turing_machine). (The IT people among you should grok this immediately. Everyone else may have to dedicate some study time.) From this angle, there are not one, but two levels of information processing systems. The brain is one, obviously. But running inside the brain, oscillations/thoughts with memory are themselves additional information processing systems. It’s analogous to a physical computer system that has, running inside of it, one or more virtual machines. We have failed to locate qualia by imaging the former, because they happen in the latter.
This theory of qualia applies only to biological neuronal processes. A for loop is self-referential but is not a biological neuronal process, so I don’t claim it has qualia. “Surely” in the vast space of possible AI architectures, some could be designed to have phenomena that are more or less analogous, but I see no reason to believe the current LLMs do.
### How to test this theory
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was much hope in the study of consciousness that then-new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tools would let us look into the brain more deeply and thereby let us figure out consciousness. While science did indeed learn much more about the brain, the hope that this would help resolve the puzzle of consciousness did not pan out. But the hope wasn’t crazy: new measuring capabilities are a good reason to expect new data that can hopefully clarify matters.
There is new such hope, due to another new method called [EEG source analysis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2605581/). Electroencephalography (EEG) puts electrodes on the scalp and measures tiny electrical currents between them. EEG is very good at temporal resolution, but for most of the century since its invention in 1924, it had almost no spatial resolution. It could tell you the differences between individual milliseconds in your electrical flow measurements, but it couldn’t tell you where in the brain the signals were coming from[17](#footnote-17). However, if you hook those EEG electrodes up to the amounts of computational power available these days, you can mathematically reconstruct quite good guesses about where in the brain the electrical signals are coming from. And that’s a game changer. This combined temporal-spatial resolution lets you localize individual neural oscillations, if they’re large enough. And that’s how you get to look at (oscillating) thoughts!
There are multiple EEG source analysis algorithms. [Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA)](https://www.uzh.ch/keyinst/loreta.htm) is [arguably the best one](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/269753v1) at the moment. It still has low spatial resolution compared to fMRI, as it says right in the name, and it’ll remain that way. There is a strict physical limit to how much signal this method can ever get out of the noise. But it should suffice for oscillations large enough to exhibit interesting conscious phenomena like self-awareness.
Here are a few falsifiable hypotheses that follow from this theory of what makes thoughts/oscillations produce qualia. Most of them could not have been tested without this new method[18](#footnote-18).
1. Measure EEG of subjects who do the classic test paradigm where stimuli are presented very briefly and subjects report whether they experienced conscious awareness of the stimulus. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements. Variations of the threshold of how long a stimulus has to be presented in order to become conscious should be predictable from variations of the frequency of the oscillation that takes in the signal from the respective sensory neurons.
2. Measure EEG of subjects who see a silent video while hearing an unrelated soundtrack. Their task is to focus on either vision or hearing, and quickly press a button when they see or hear something particular. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements.
1. An oscillation for being poised to react (probably in the prefrontal cortex) should synchronize with either the oscillations evoked by vision or the ones evoked by hearing. EEG data should predict which sense the subjects focused on.
2. The permanence of the synchronization should correlate to reaction times and reaction correctness.
3. Measure EEG of subjects who are doing forms of meditation where the virtual “space” of conscious attention is given unusually large amounts of its own attention[19](#footnote-19), deliberately intensifying phenomenal consciousness. Define, control and vary the level of sensory stimulation that distracts the subjects from this meditation. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements.
1. Meditative states should exhibit fewer but larger mental oscillations than normal everyday states.
2. This difference should be more pronounced for more adept meditators, especially at higher levels of distracting stimulation. Some of this [has already been shown](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614811/), in the form of an amplified default state network, but much higher statistical certainty should be achievable by variance in experimental conditions and by correlating EEG source analysis data with meditator self-reports of what level they got to.
3. Advanced meditative states of extreme focus on a single conscious representation such as [jhānas](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana) should exhibit even fewer, even larger mental oscillations.
4. It should be possible to engineer arbitrary nontraditional jhāna-like meditation practices where arbitrary representations fill all conscious awareness.
5. Inside individual neurons, a mechanism that permits comparison of intervals elapsed between that neuron’s previous spikes (i.e. beginnings of refractory periods) and subsequent signals it received at its dendrites should be there to be found.
6. Link two brains using technologies such as NeuraLink.
1. Thoughts should be able to be shared across brains if and only if the link transmits oscillatory signals.
2. It should be impossible for a shared oscillation to have qualia according to one subject, but none according to the other.
But honestly, what makes this explanation of qualia persuasive to myself is as subjective as they are. Like my introspection about my information processing makes more sense since I learned about [predictive processing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/), so my introspection about my conscious experiences makes more sense since I understand them this way.
* For example, while I learn to perform a task it is quite conscious, but once it becomes routine, I can be unsure whether I have just done it. This makes perfect sense now: in accordance with [Hebbian learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory), the learning process requires repeated synchronous firing, i.e. oscillations, i.e. capacity for conscious phenomena. But the synaptic shortcuts this creates necessarily reduce the bandwidth required for the task, obviating large oscillations with their conscious phenomena.
* For another example, as I focus on typing this, other parts of my brain monitor the noise of traffic out in the street and the pressure of my buttocks on the chair. There have to be small oscillations there, binding the multitude of sensory neuron spikes into representations of specific cars and buttocks, but they did so separately from my typing and thinking, before I noticed them. Now I’m aware of them and type about them, so the thinking and typing oscillation has merged with the listening and pressure-feeling ones, which feels expansive, more like a mindfulness-like state. The merged oscillation is necessarily bigger, because it now encompasses the auditory cortex for listening and the cerebellum for proprioception. So the internal lines of communication are now longer, so the oscillation frequency has had to go down, and that’s why I’m typing this sentence more slowly than the first one in this paragraph.
* Even unusual conscious experiences caused by intense meditative practice now seem to me fully describable without resorting to the religious terminologies of the traditions that produced them[20](#footnote-20).
* The usual self-anthropomorphization of conscious self-perception is not inescapable. I can resolve to not anthropomorphize myself for once, and let my thoughts see themselves as thoughts. This used to be confusing, since it makes it harder for oscillations to merge, but I’ve gotten used to it. It reveals the dynamics I described above, and they seem to me like a coherent picture.
Will it work this way for anybody else? You tell me!
Philosophically, this explanation seems to obviate alternatives to [physicalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism), such as idealism and dualism. This feels like a relief, because these alternatives entail metaphysical conceptions that seem to me like they [aren’t paying rent](https://www.readthesequences.com/Making-Beliefs-Pay-Rent-In-Anticipated-Experiences). But to fully spell out and defend this general metaphysical claim is beyond the scope of this particular guest post.
Please point out mistakes and how to fix them in the comments or [on 𝕏](https://twitter.com/7SecularSermons), so I can be less wrong about this. Special thanks to those who have donated most such help so far: Professor Ulrich Hegerl, PhDs Lars Schuster, Idris Riahi and Robert Lehmann, and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
John Searle, [Consciousness](https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/paller/dialogue/csc1.pdf)
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Richard Carrier, [The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness](https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17536)
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
LessWrong user Q Home, [The importance of studying subjective experience](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BeyPBBoh3z9vJ8TMw/the-importance-of-studying-subjective-experience)
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
This is sometimes called sapience, to distinguish it from sentience, the ability to experience a quale without reflecting on it.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Daniel Dennett: [Quining Qualia](https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/). The summaries are from [the Wikipedia page on qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#Definitions).
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
Thomas Metzinger: [Subjekt und Selbstmodell](https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/388/3/SMT2-PDF.pdf).
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
Ramachandran, V.S., Hirstein, W.: [Three laws of qualia: what neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness](https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/1997/00000004/f0020005/803)
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Such as Sydney Shoemaker and Thomas Szanto.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
But it stops being true when the sense of self shifts, when you [get out of the car](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/), or when you [stop distinguishing yourself from the entire flow of causality that went all the way from the big bang into the experience of this moment](https://sevensecularsermons.org/why-atheists-need-ecstasy/).
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
The best e-Athletes can enter 350 to 400 actions per minute into games like StarCraft, and that doesn’t even count perceptions that do not lead to one of those actions.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
Why would the [neural coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding) of a thought require so many spikes? On the one hand, there is a vast number of distinguishable thoughts, so the differences between them need to be encoded. On the other hand, neurons are noisy and unreliable, so any information processing based on them will need error correction, and information theory says that error correction requires redundancy.
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
Even individual neurons can have rhythmic activity. I’m disregarding that type of neural oscillation here, in favor of oscillations that arise in [neuronal ensembles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuronal_ensemble) of many neurons, because conscious thoughts can process far more information than single neurons can.
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
This is a useful function of this special form of processing that explains why such a process would evolve.
[14](#footnote-anchor-14)
Doing this is the core of many meditative traditions.
[15](#footnote-anchor-15)
See also [dual consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness).
[16](#footnote-anchor-16)
Exceptions to this are mentioned at the end of Scott’s [Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/).
[17](#footnote-anchor-17)
To be fair, Independent Component Analysis does reveal, roughly, where in the outermost parts of the brain some of the signal is coming from.
[18](#footnote-anchor-18)
There is another new approach that also improves the intersection of spatial and temporal resolution. It combines the millimeter-scale spatial resolution of simultaneous fMRI and positron emission tomography (PET, that’s the one where you inject a radioactive tracer) with improvements of [temporal resolution down to as little as 12 seconds](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00699-5) using clever tweaks to radiotracer delivery. Currently that temporal resolution is still too long for most thoughts, but there’s ongoing development and the physical limits to improving the temporal resolution of this method are not yet established. This might end up superior to EEG source analysis, especially for studying the center of the brain.
[19](#footnote-anchor-19)
E.g. Vipassana.
[20](#footnote-anchor-20)
That’s a rabbit hole for another day. | Scott Alexander | 146660141 | Consciousness As Recursive Reflections | acx |
# Open Thread 338
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** The European branch of our conspiracy is hosting a Community Weekend just outside Berlin, September 13-16, expected attendance ~250. [See here for more information](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tBYRFJNgvKWLeE9ih/less-wrong-community-weekend-2024) and [see here to apply](https://airtable.com/appdYMNuMQvKWC8mv/pagiUldderZqbuBaP/form), base price €250 but discounts available.
**2:** Several people speculated that [the recent Don Juan review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan) was secretly by me. It wasn’t, but unrelatedly I *have* been working on a Don-Juan-related project, which I might show you at some point. I’m mentioning this now so that I don’t seem like I’m plagiarizing the (excellent) review.
**3:** And many people also enjoyed the [Family That Couldn’t Sleep review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that). If you want to know the latest on prions, and especially on chronic wasting disease of deer, I recommend this blog post by my friend EukaryoteWrites: [Will The Growing Deer Prion Epidemic Spread To Humans? Why Not?](https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2023/06/24/chronic-wasting-disease/) | Scott Alexander | 146593571 | Open Thread 338 | acx |
# Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
---
*“You wake up screaming, frightened by memories,*
*You’re plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?”*
*The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* by D. T. Max was published in late 2006. This glues it to a very particular era. A spectre was haunting Europe – the spectre of mad cow disease. Something was tearing through Britain’s cows, turning them inside out, eating their brains and thrashing their souls. It had been doing so since, DTM thinks, “the late 1970s”. When we look back in retrospect and think about a timeline like this, knowing everything we know, you can’t help but feel a shiver down your spine.
By 2006, some few hundred people had developed *variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease*, colloquially “mad cow disease”. They were almost all young adults in the United Kingdom. The disease was a nightmare – healthy young people succumbing to a terrifying dementia, caused by naught but a beef dinner they had enjoyed years ago. Few diseases were more horrific. Even the worst neurodegenerative disorders rarely struck people so young. The fact it was caused by – and covered up by – the cattle industry made it all the worse.
The numbers were down by this point; the fear of a mad cow pandemic seemed to flicker, then die. The dust was settling, as it were, and it was just now possible to write a history. Simultaneously, it was still in the spotlight. Prion diseases gripped people’s souls with fear. You couldn’t sell a book about mad cow so well ten years later; people were much less scared of it. “That thing people were panicking about in 1999? Wasn’t it a nothingburger?”
(forgive me for “nothingburger”)
*The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* comes from this era of...optimism? Yeah, let’s say optimism. The wildest predictions – that hundreds of thousands of people across Britain would be struck by vCJD around the turn of the millennium – were clearly wrong. The disease was severe enough to strike the fear of prion diseases into people’s hearts; the name, entirely unfamiliar a few years earlier, now defines a bogeyman cluster of The Worst Diseases Possible. It seemed possible they could be human epidemics, if small ones. This was enough to be scary. But it wasn’t quite as scary as a Game Over.
Having done all this work to set the scene, let’s talk about the book itself. It’s great! I really dig it.
Like all the best nonfiction, it’s a *cavalcade of characters*. Fiction is leashed by verisimilitude. We have some loose expectations of “how the world works”, and dismiss fiction as unrealistic if its events are too bizarre, its coincidences too forced, or its characters just that much larger than life. God does not care about any of this, and works with the trust you will believe what he says.
Accordingly, *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is beneath all else a “character-driven narrative”. It first introduces us to, of all poetic things, a fallen noble-blooded Venetian family. The money ran out, you see – not because of profligate spendthrifts or revolutionary uprisings, but because of whispers, taunts, that its members were cursed to go mad. In midlife, it seemed, a strangely high fraction of them were struck by a specific sort of insanity. It started with a fever that never quite let down, even after any supposed illness should have ran its course. A little trouble sleeping – but is that so unusual, for someone feverish in the languid Italian summers?
At first, perhaps, this could permit a paradoxical productivity. D. T. Max traces (he thinks) the first description of the family’s disease to a doctor who died in 1765. For a scholarly man in that era, less time spent sleeping may well permit more time pursuing one’s plans. “In the beginning,” he writes, “the feeling might not have been unpleasant—he could stay up all night playing cards or maybe read Morgagni’s famous comparisons of the body to a machine, published just a few years before.” Many of us scheme against the God of Sleep, trying to fight its teeth and claws, eke out more power from days and nights that would otherwise slip away. But we let it win, eventually. What happens if you can’t let it win?
The first part of the book is DTM’s pseudobiography of this doctor, and it presents a fascinating story – all hypotheticals, but all driven by what a learned man in the mid-eighteenth century could have thought while watching his body and mind betray him in a way no one else’s ever had. The story is beautiful, crossing the streams of fiction and nonfiction in an impossible way. As the disease wore on, DTM speculates, our physician friend would start thinking it a curse rather than a blessing. As he soaked through his clothes, his servants would find themselves pouring through his wardrobe several times a day for new shirts. He would guzzle wine, the supposed treatment for insomnia, and find himself drunken but no more capable of sleep; his limbs would grow heavy and his mind exhausted, but he could never cross the divide. He might try to leave the noisy city of Venice for quieter pastures, and find himself no more relieved. He could consult with his colleagues, and none of them would know a word more than he did; in all likelihood they would know far less, the curse of everyone interested in medicine and experiencing something beneath its umbrella.
The disease would wear on inexorably, no matter what he tried. He would find himself trapped in illucid places between waking and sleeping, never quite dreaming, never quite *not* dreaming. His fever would never abate, but it would gyrate – the fevers typical of the disease, we know, are marked not by consistent high temperatures but by impossible fluctuations, jumping rapidly between every possible extreme. Even today, they look like measurement errors.
When he died, no one would know what to call it. They didn’t know what to call it in his nephew[1](#footnote-1), or in any of his nephew’s children or grandchildren. As the disease spread across generations, it took upon thousands of names – every wasting disease, infection, or psychosis you could find. It wasn’t exceptionally good for the family’s prospects; the repeated deaths of able-bodied adults made the family poorer, and neighbours refused to marry into the “mad” bloodline.
A point about prion diseases that D. T. Max likes emphasizing is that they don’t steal your *reason*. Everyone was unanimous that across multiple prion diseases – fatal familial insomnia itself, but also many forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and plenty of other things you could grant such a name – the afflicted were consistently aware of their fates, even in the worst reaches of the illness. Many people with FFI never lost the ability to talk at all, and could express this very well for themselves. Others did, but seemed to know their surroundings infaillibly. There is a famous [case report](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1781276/) about a man with FFI who managed to slow the disease’s progression with a slew of treatments; he could consistently describe his state in his most “incapacitated” periods when remitting. I’ll let him speak for himself:
(This report was, as it happens, published in the exact same month as *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep*.)
DTM came to know the family well. He befriended them by way of two members of their younger generation, Lisi – a woman terrified by the shadow of the disease, and Ignazio – the doctor she had married, who was more terrified by the *shadow* of the disease. Ignazio put together the pieces of the family puzzle, consolidating all the disparate diagnoses into a single disorder and filling out a lot of blank spots on family trees. When DTM came along, he was able to help Ignazio make the case that the family would benefit from the spotlight – that greater awareness of FFI could lead to a cure both for them and for a slew of other prion diseases.
As it so happens, he is one of those nonfiction authors who serve as a character in their own story. DTM has some form of progressive muscular palsy. He is, or at least was in 2006, not entirely sure what it is. The relatively unimpressive state of genetics at the time had not identified his causative mutation, though it looked a lot like one of the rarer forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease[2](#footnote-2). DTM is pragmatic about this, the way everyone chronically ill is either pragmatic or doomed. Whatever he has, it is a defect in protein structure; his peripheral nerves decay not because of a problem with the nerves themselves but an inability of their scaffolding to hold them together, as he puts it. The last chapter of the book dwells on this, on the web of connections popping up between a thousand disorders. DTM’s disease is something vaguely similar, if you squint, to an exceptionally slow-progressing motor neurone disease; if you jump another level out, you see amyloid plaque diseases like Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s, and if you jump yet another level out, you see something like prions. His interest in the Venetian family was driven by this. Some of its members thought this a beautiful act of sympathy; others thought him a grotesque parody of themselves, an onlooker, a *gawker*, peddling their tragedy to salve his relatively insignificant problems. They are, he thinks, both right.
That’s the beginning, and that’s the end. What happens in the middle?
---------------------------------------------------------
The Venetian family lends the book its title, but they’re really more of a framing device. *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is separated into four parts, of which the first and fourth – the shortest by far – deal with the family. Part 2 is kuru, the king of fucked up diseases you read about in clickbait Weird Medicine listicles. Let’s talk about kuru!
Kuru, is, famously, the prion disease you get if you eat another person’s brain. Well, not quite. It’s a prion disease that became endemic amongst women in the Fore society, who ritually ate brains, one of which had an inherited or spontaneous prion disease. This is an important note – there’s a tendency (which the book’s later chapters engage in) to assume cannibalism just has a Prion Disease Generator attached. If you eat people who don’t have prion diseases, you won’t suddenly get one. Uh, don’t eat people.
Anyway, part 2 is DTM’s historiography of Fore-Westerner first contact. It’s hilarious. Papua New Guinea is a frankly ridiculous place; one of the all-time best [Lyttle Lytton](https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/2019.html) winners (worst first sentence from a hypothetical or, in this case, real work) was “Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there”. The native residents were so hostile to outsiders that all the colonial empires had cut their losses – and when you think about the places they colonized, that says something. After the First World War, PNG was ripped from its nominal German ‘owners’, but no one else wanted the place.
So, of course, they gave it to the Australians.
It was thirty years and another war before we actually made contact. 1940s Australia was as ‘settled’ as it’d ever be; the cities were bustling and the interior was mapped. The kind of explorer who two centuries before would be heading to new continents had to console himself with Pacific islands. Console he did. The native peoples of the PNG coasts were hostile enough to the wannabe-colonialists that the Australians, flying planes overhead, were the first people to *discover* that the island’s inland was populated too. No one had broken through on land.
In all this deep and angry rainforest, the Fore were the furthest out. They lived far into the island’s mountainous interior; DTM describes their territory as “nearly vertical”. Calling people primitives is a bit passe these days for understandable reasons, but no other term comes to mind. The Fore *had no name for themselves*; we call them by an exonym, “the people to the south”. They weren’t, to be clear, hunter-gatherers – they were slash-and-burn agriculturalists, but very well-fed ones. Despite the tendency in grain-focused cultures for poor agriculturalists to be stunted/malnourished, the Fore were a remarkably healthy people.
Well, except for the famous bit.
The first remarkable thing about the Fore was just how quickly they wanted to assimilate. Most PNG tribes weren’t particularly enthused by Western offers of injections/tractors/radios/Christianity. Yet as soon as the Australians arrived, the Fore made ceasefires in their wars with other tribes, volunteered to help large-scale Australian projects on the coast, started planting and trading coffee, and enthusiastically participated in censuses. It’s the only first-contact narrative I’ve seen where the colonizers were concerned about how badly the other guys wanted to be colonized.
The next was the one that got their names in the history books. Australian officials started to notice a remarkable lack of women in Fore camps. Some tribes sequestered their women, particularly when Westerners were around, so at first they thought nothing of it. The high rate of unpartnered young men, though, was *way* out of PNG norms.
DTM tells this part fantastically. The Fore chapters drip with the dread of dramatic irony. When the first breakthrough comes, you have to catch your breath:
> *“Tiny” Carey noted something in the middle of August 1950 that deepened this mystery. He noticed that near the village of Henganofi there had been an unusual number of deaths. “It appears,” he wrote his superiors, “natives suffer from stomach trouble, get violent shivering, as with the ague, and die fairly rapidly.” [...] McArthur investigated a little more [...] One day in August 1953 he ran into more of the shivering people Tiny Carey had seen several years before: “Nearing one of the dwellings, I observed a small girl sitting down beside a fire. She was shivering violently and her head was jerking spasmodically from side to side.”*
It would be quite some time before anyone figured out what caused it – but the problem, as DTM notes, was that its cause wasn’t possible. Everyone priored that the weird undescribed disease in the Fore lands was some nocebo sorcery-sickness. Vincent Zigas, the first actual doctor sent to work with the Fore, tried to placebo-effect them and failed miserably:
> *On the way, Apekono stopped at a hut and showed Zigas his first kuru victim. “On the ground in the far corner sat a woman of about thirty,” the doctor wrote. “She looked odd, not ill, rather emaciated, looking up with blank eyes with a mask-like expression. There was an occasional fine tremor of her head and trunk, as if she were shivering from cold, though the day was very warm.” It was almost exactly the tableau McArthur had witnessed in 1953. Zigas, though, was a doctor. He could do more than look—or so he thought: “I decided I might as well try my own variety of magic,” he remembered. He rubbed Sloan’s Liniment, a balm for sore muscles, on her and declared to her family and his guide: “The sorcerer has put a bad spirit inside the woman. I am going to burn this spirit so that it comes out of her and leaves her. You will not see the fire, but she will feel it. The bad spirit will leave her and she will not die.”*
>
> *The lotion penetrated the woman’s skin and she writhed in pain. “Get up! Walk!” Zigas commanded theatrically. “The woman struggled feebly as if to rise, then, exhausted, started to tremble more violently, making a sound of foolish laughter, akin to a titter.” That evening Apekono asked Zigas not to try to cure any more kuru victims; “Don’t use your magic medicine anymore. It will not win our strong sorcery.”*
This was a disaster. The Fore were so cooperative precisely because they hoped “Western magic” could conquer theirs. As it became clear it couldn’t, they turned hostile. The Australians had hoped to “modernize a Stone Age people”; now all their subjects were dropping dead before their eyes, from what they could only assume was a “hysterical reaction” to colonization itself.
So, to solve this, they needed a batshit insane American.
---
Carleton Gajdusek is one of the characters who dominates *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep*. He couldn’t not. You could put him in a car commercial and he’d dominate it.
Gajdusek was a physician with a rare, intense combination of science and practice. He was a romanticist, a field worker, and a lover of everything strange. He’d been an army doctor, a government conspiracy-cover-upper, and a postdoc under Linus Pauling who described his intent as “to straighten out Pauling’s ideas about proteins”. He hated civilization, in a slightly-to-Ted’s-centre sense, and was passionate about “primitives and isolates”. He jumped at the chance to work in Papua New Guinea; he planned to conduct a multi-site study on child development in such cultures, and relished the opportunity to live in a “primitive” environment himself.
He did all this so he could rape kids. Oh, he did it for the scientific curiosity and love of medicine, but he also did it so he could rape kids. Gajdusek was a pedophile in the actual-lifelong-exclusive-paraphilia sense, as opposed to the “metonym for child molester” sense. Some people who roll snake-eyes on the Sexuality Dice repress it, but some are perfectly happy to act on it; Gajdusek was #2 in its fullest form, the kind of guy who believes that a well-lived life includes raping some kids. DTM doesn’t shy from this, not for a moment. It’s the first thing he tells you about Gajdusek. It couldn’t not be; you couldn’t talk about why he went to PNG otherwise.
When Gajdusek landed in PNG, he first found the place too civilized. He’d been promised a land of “cannibal savages” – where were they? After some traipsing, he found them, right where he was promised. The Fore were perfect for Gajdusek. They had some kind of medical mystery that’d been lost on everyone else. They ate each other, in exactly the way he loved detailing in his diaries (“”Women and children, particularly, partake of the human flesh,” he noted with pleasure”). As kuru cases popped up, he aggressively recorded them. He wrote lovingly detailed notes that he sent back to his Australian advisor. He wrote with intensity, with exclamation marks, with the *joie de vivre* of a man just where he wanted to be. Gajdusek smothered the Fore with ‘cures’ that never worked, but they didn’t get angry at him. As DTM dryly puts it: “Their children trusted him, and that was enough for them.”
At some point, someone suggested sending an anthropologist...or an epidemiologist...or literally anyone with more credentials than Gajdusek and Zigas[3](#footnote-3). Gajdusek threw a shitfit, convinced this one-and-a-half-man team was enough to Solve The Problem Forever. But he got bored eventually – running off with another tribe with, as his diary notes at length, an apparent custom of youths ritually fellating older men – and Zigas, I dunno, the book neglects him a bit here. So they managed to sneak in some anthropologists.
The husband-and-wife team of Robert Glasse and Shirley Lindenbaum[4](#footnote-4) were the first involved parties to give a shit about the Fore as *people*, rather than as colonial subjects/medical mysteries/walking sex toys. What they uncovered was fascinating. The Fore were cannibals, yes, but they were *recent* cannibals.
They didn’t have an ancient tradition of eating their dead, like the other visitors assumed. They happened to be in contact with some cannibal groups, and after a Fore man died of “sorcery”, they thought: well, what would happen if we ate him? *“People tasting it expressed their approval. ‘”This is sweet,” they said, “What is the matter with us, are we mad? Here is good food and we have neglected to eat it.””* If not for the wild coincidence that the first Fore cannibalism victim had a prion disease, kuru would never have existed.
Glasse and Lindenbaum started to put together the pieces. They’d been sent down to rule out a genetic explanation – to track the kinship ties of the Fore and see how the disease ran through families. It didn’t run through families in any coherent sense, but it sure did run through cannibalism. The clincher was the age distribution. The Fore, ever enthused by colonialism, quit eating each other as soon as the Australians arrived. Children stopped dying of kuru shortly after; they simply weren’t exposed to the infectious agent.
The couple sent the news to Gajdusek, who was off raping kids somewhere else. In the next part of the book, DTM runs through Gajdusek’s many conjectures of kuru’s cause – more like sketches or abstract paintings than like true hypotheses. Gajdusek was annoyed that someone else was doing something he “totally could’ve done”, and even more annoyed that another lab was running similar experiments – an attempt at a vaccine for a particular sheep disease had accidentally created a prion generator. But he was happy to swoop in and claim the credit for what he was starting to think of as “slow viruses”, an infection that somehow lays dormant for years.
DTM portrays Gajdusek perfectly, in that “real life has no need for verisimilitude” way. Gajdusek was at once a brilliant man, an all-consuming narcissist, an entertaining character, and a monster beyond redemption. A lesser book might pick one or two. *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* portrays him as all four, and on a personality level (as opposed to a scientific one), the Gajdusek-focused parts are some of the most gripping.
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Outside of the jumps between the Venetian family and everything else, *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is not siloed. The narratives of all prion diseases are deeply intertwined. This is what makes it a great book. It’s 300 pages of dramatic irony. You read the whole thing, waiting for the eureka moment – the point everyone realizes they’re looking at the same cause. It does, however, make it a tad difficult to review or synopsize. The book’s story is so weird – and, often, so at odds with conventional wisdom that trickles down about the Fore et al – that you have to recap quite a bit, and the book steadfastly resists recapping.
The next couple chapters after we depart from Gajdusek’s credit-claiming are mostly about experiments with various prion diseases. They’re scientifically fascinating. Unlike some medical-books-for-general-audiences (cough, *How Not to Study a Disease*), DTM never talks down to the reader. He assumes someone reading a 300-page book about prions is smart and wants to learn about prions. He also has – you can feel it in his words – the agonizing experience of spending his life on the other side of the doctor’s desk, trying to beat into whoever he’s talking to that no, seriously, you don’t need to lie to him or try explain a complex disease at a fourth-grade level.
The first prion disease studied was scrapie. Scrapie was a big deal – it starved and killed large shares of British sheep flocks, making it a serious economic problem. Veterinary researchers had tried to prevent or cure it for centuries. It was a veritable graveyard of ambitions:
> *Quintessential was D. R. Wilson at the Moredun Institute in Scotland, who worked in the middle of the last century for more than a decade trying, with mounting frustration, to kill the scrapie agent. He found that it survived desiccation; dosing with chloroform, phenol, and formalin; ultraviolet light; and cooking at 100 degrees centigrade for thirty minutes. The scrapie researcher Alan Dickinson told me he remembered Wilson at the end of his career as “very, very, very quiet. Of course, that was after his breakdown.”*
“Now it is our turn to study prions. Perhaps we should approach the subject cautiously.”
The problem, as DTM explains, is that *prion diseases were impossible*. They violated 20th-century understandings of biology. Proteins “were no more alive, and no more infectious, than bone”. Prion diseases seemed to have too many causes – genetic, infectious, and sporadic. They looked infection-like in some ways, but patients didn’t produce virus antibodies. Sheep exposed to scrapie, or chimps infected with kuru, took years to develop symptoms. Their facts did not fit together.
In the 1960s, people started wondering. The unifying trait of prion agents was that they had to be denatured to be destroyed. Was this a particularly small virus defined by its protein coating? Or – even more outre – was it pure protein, no DNA at all? No one could figure out quite how the latter worked, but it was tempting. Gajdusek, by now a major figure in this field, kept a foot in both worlds. He didn’t want to stake his reputation on a no-DNA hypothesis, but he certainly sympathized.
Enter Prusiner. Stanley Prusiner was Gajdusek’s counterpart. Where Gajdusek seemed permanently manic, Prusiner was deliberate and exacting. He entered Gajdusek’s “slow viruses” field in the early 1970s after a chance encounter with a CJD patient. He relished the laboratory in a way Gajdusek didn’t at all, and set out to optimize the hell out of his projects.
Prusiner set out to isolate the smallest infectious particle in the scrapie agent. He injected tons of hamsters (hamsters got sick faster than mice) with increasingly tiny scrapie proteins, hoping to determine whether the Minimum Viable Scrapie was DNA. By the mid-1980s, he’d produced something so small it couldn’t possibly be a virus. Denaturing it destroyed it; exposing it to nucleic acid dissolvers actually made it stronger.
Emboldened by this discovery, Prusiner set out to anoint himself the King of Prions. Here emerges something of a Voldemort-Umbridge distinction – the difference between cartoonish villainy and banal evil. Gajdusek is a bad guy because he rapes kids. Prusiner is a bad guy because he is the most grotesque stereotype of the Advisor/Peer Reviewer from Hell made flesh. Everything Prusiner did was to build his reputation atop a pile of skulls. When recruited as a peer reviewer for other prion papers, he wrote negative reviews to undermine their authors. He worked his grad students to the bone and intentionally destroyed their careers, telling them he’d “ruin them” if they entered prion research as competitors. He lied about the origin of the protein-only hypothesis, claiming he originated it a decade after it was actually conjectured. But hey, he was good at getting grants.
I was surprised reading a lot of this, because for all the time I’ve been aware of it, the cause of prion disease has seemed settled. “Oh yeah, it’s a protein that gets all fucked up.” But DTM goes through just how unsettled it was right up through to *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep*’s publication. Serious confirmation only arrived [a couple years later](https://www.cell.com/trends/biochemical-sciences/fulltext/S0968-0004(10)00210-0). Many people were deeply critical of the prion hypothesis – often, it seemed, because they loathed Prusiner too much to go along. Throughout the book, he cuts an uncharismatic figure.
Gajdusek and Prusiner both won the Nobel for discovering prions, decades apart. This tells you something – the “discovery” of prions can be construed quite a few ways. Gajdusek formulated the hypothesis; Prusiner proved it. Gajdusek was grievously offended by Prusiner’s Nobel, perceiving his rival – not inaccurately – as a follower who never originated any ideas of his own. But Gajdusek was offended from a federal prison cell, so how’d that work out for him?
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Fascinating as all this is, no one published a book about prions in the mid-2000s because it was about kuru or FFI. They published books about prions because teenagers were dying, and people wanted to know why.
DTM lays the seeds for part 3 – the mad cow section – in part 1. This is a discussion of scrapie, the longstanding prion disease of sheep. Scrapie was a medical mystery for centuries (remember poor D. R. Wilson), precisely because of the intuitive implausibility of prions. The scrapie chapter is a great history-of-science piece, covering the agricultural productivity revolutions of the 18th century, the surfeit of bizarre origins veterinarians concocted, and the treatments that never worked.
Scrapie is not transmissible to humans – well, we hope. It’s [concerningly transmissible to primates](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11573). But it’s been around for a long, long time, and it doesn’t epidemiologically look like humans get it...we hope. Anyway, you ever tried to generalize from one example?
The British government did! In the mid-1980s, strange reports started coming out of the UK’s farms. Farmers were describing a new disease where dairy cows – incredibly docile creatures, under normal circumstances – turned hostile, kicking them as they went into the milking stalls. The symptoms looked to all the world like scrapie. Epidemiologists tracing the outbreaks found a unifying link with “cake” – animal protein feed sweetened with molasses. The scrapie-like symptoms must have traced to an infected sheep. But scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so it must be okay to keep slaughtering them, right?
We all know how this ended.
The best term for the British response to the mad cow outbreak is “cacklingly evil conspiracy”. The agricultural industry really, really didn’t need a huge zoonotic outbreak – so it decided it didn’t have one. They first suppressed all mentions that the disease looked like scrapie, then – when this became impossible – hyped up that scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so there’s nothing to worry about. The formal name of the disease, “bovine spongiform encephalopathy”, was supposedly chosen to optimize for unfamiliarity – it wouldn’t fit well in a headline. They emphasized, extensively, that there was nothing to worry about. Ever.
At some point, people started asking questions. If there was nothing to worry about, why was the agricultural industry panicking so hard? As things became ever more worry-inducing, this turned down ludicrously twisting paths:
> *Meanwhile, the Southwood Working Party and the experts who advised it were learning on the job. They learned, for instance, that the BSE agent entered the animal through the mouth and then followed the digestive tract into the organs that try to filter out infections—the tonsils, the guts, and the spleen—and from there traveled into the peripheral and central nervous system, and finally arrived at the brain. They also learned that pasties, meat pies, and even some baby foods contained tissues from a lot of those organs. So the Southwood Working Party recommended banning these organs, but only from baby food. This started a chain reaction of consumer doubt: if infected cow organs were unsafe for babies, how could they be good for adults? The government then banned offal, as the organs were collectively called, in all human food but gave the industry a grace period to get it out of the feed supply. Then pet food manufacturers began to wonder if what drove cows mad might not also drive dogs, cats, and parrots mad. The feed they sold came from concentrate made of the same sick animals that had previously made up the meat and bone meal farmers used. Their trade group decided to put a similar ban in place—immediately. So for five months it was safer to be a dog than a human in Britain.*
DTM spends pretty much this whole section of the book making fun of the British government. To be fair, they deserved it. They killed hundreds of kids in agonizing and preventable ways – they could take some ribbing.
This is all throughout the mid-1980s to early-mid 1990s. Through this period, it wasn’t yet clear that mad cow could spread to humans. The panic was clear, and deserved, but it didn’t yet have a match for its powder keg.
It would alight. The first suspected case of vCJD – human mad cow – was in 1994. Fifteen-year-old Vicky Rimmer developed a sudden, strange disease. Doctors gave her months to live...until she died in 1998. A couple other suspected cases trickled down through the mid-90s, including a young man who made meat pies for a living, whose grieving mother received a letter from the Prime Minister that “humans do NOT get mad cow disease”. (That must’ve been fun.)
Soon, they couldn’t deny it any longer.
> *On March 20, 1996, Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, stood up in Parliament to announce the news that had already appeared as a tentative conclusion in scientific journals and as rumor in newspapers for the previous two years: British beef was killing British teenagers. The first confirmed death was that of Stephen Churchill, a nineteen-year-old student from Wiltshire, who died in May 1995. Back in 1989, at the Southwood Working Party’s suggestion, the government had set up a surveillance unit in Edinburgh to watch for any evidence that BSE had crossed to humans. One worry had been that if BSE passed to humans, how would anyone know it? How would you recognize something you had never seen? It turned out to be easy: Churchill and the nine other teenagers who had gotten sick had spectacular amyloid plaques in their brains, chunks of dead protein almost visible to the naked eye. If sporadic CJD was a whisper, BSE-caused prion disease was a shout. The investigators sat open-mouthed looking at slides whose damage, they feared, portended the most severe epidemic in modern British history.*
This part of the book is not fun. It lacks the insane personalities and duelling careers of the other entries. It is an honest chronology of the vCJD epidemic – a gruesome failure of the agricultural industry, the one system that everyone is vulnerable to. The government and industry had completely violated their duty of care to citizens and consumers. They were paying the price. No one would buy British beef anymore – not while they watched their children die.
Now here’s the thing: this is ethnography, not historiography. *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is a book from the mid-2000s. The epidemic was not at all in the rear view mirror. There were piles of unanswered questions that DTM constantly alludes to. We have eighteen years more hindsight than he did then. What do we know now?
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In 2006, the vCJD epidemic looked like it was going to be a lot better than the worst fears. BSE itself was a huge problem for the cattle industry, but honestly, no one is too sympathetic to the cattle industry. People were not going to die in anywhere near the numbers believed. We had all sorts of reassuring data coming out about this, which DTM chronicles. We were learning that only some genotypes seemed susceptible to vCJD. We didn’t see any older people die of the disease. We were seeing numbers drop, such that vCJD must have a pretty short incubation period.
Anyway, all of this is wrong!
*The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* was written in the candidate gene era. Back then, the nascent field of human genetics was sure it was about to Solve Polygenism. Yes, the simple Mendelian monogenic patterns popular a few decades back clearly didn’t apply to common diseases, but how many variants could there be? We were about to discover the five genes influencing 20% of Alzheimer’s risk each, the five genes influencing 20% of heart disease risk each, etc., and once we were done we’d just do gene therapy and cure Alzheimer’s. A paper on autism genetics from 1999 was so outre as to speculate there might be as many as *fifteen* genes involved. The fact we are now using the term “[omnigenic model](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5536862/)” should tell you roughly how well this worked out.
Do you remember SNPedia? If you were a 2014 Slate Star Codex reader, [you might](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/12/how-to-use-23andme-irresponsibly/). 2014 was still pretty candidate gene. People were out there publishing papers saying a single variant could increase your life expectancy by 15 years. SNPedia was a site that beautifully categorized all of these, so you could do 23andme or whatever, look up your results on SNPedia, and make horrible life choices.[5](#footnote-5) It was eventually bought out by one of the consumer DNA companies, so no one ever edited it again, making it a great time capsule of early-mid 2010s behavioural/medical genetics takes.
[SNPedia](https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs1799990) will excitedly explain to you that common genetic variants make you immune to vCJD. They cite [a 2009 post](https://web.archive.org/web/20190911061655/https://blog.23andme.com/news/no-good-evidence-that-potential-pool-of-mad-cow-disease-victims-is-expanding/) from the now-archived 23andme blog titled “No Good Evidence That Potential Pool of Mad Cow Disease Victims Is Expanding”, explaining how fears of late-onset vCJD are clearly debunked by new Scientific Knowledge. Everyone who developed vCJD in the 1990s and 2000s had an M/M genotype in a particular part of the PRNP prion gene, so the roughly half the population with M/V or V/V genotypes were immune.
*The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* buys this, too. In fact, it buys it in an even more agonizingly 2000s way. The first sign that transmissible prion diseases weren’t genotype-restricted should’ve been the growth hormone kids. You might have heard this story – from the late 1950s through mid-1980s, human growth hormone produced from brain tissue was used as a treatment for pituitary dwarfism, until it turned out to spread CJD if the originating brain was infected.
DTM discusses this, to set the scene for the genetics thing. He mentions what was the state of the art at the time – that a disproportionate share of both the growth hormone kids and sporadic CJD cases were *V/V* homozygotes. This, uh – so the book was written in the mid-2000s, yeah?
[Yeah.](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/11/3386/330626)
The conclusion DTM drew – and this was a common conclusion at the time – was that homozygosity somehow made you more vulnerable to CJD, and M/M homozygosity made you vulnerable to BSE-borne CJD in particular. We cannot criticise the author for not predicting the future, but we live in the future, and can say how this worked out. Turns out, [nope, M/V heterozygotes totally get vCJD](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118418-many-more-people-could-still-die-from-mad-cow-disease-in-the-uk/). After a British man in his 30s died of CJD in 2016, he was found to have vCJD and an M/V genotype. He was tested for vCJD only because he was exceptionally young for someone with a sporadic prion disease – meaning people developing it later in life would be missed[6](#footnote-6).
Did you know [up to 1 in 2000 people in the UK have latent vCJD](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3805509/)?
There is one line in *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* that stopped me dead in my tracks when I read it:
> *What happens to the Italian family in the end depends less on their own actions than on the world’s interest in prion diseases, which they cannot control. If lots of people are afraid of getting variant CJD, the family benefits. If fear of prion disease goes the way of the fear of swine flu or Ebola, then they will be orphaned again.*
THIS BOOK IS FROM 2006! Three years before the swine flu pandemic! Eight years before the Ebola pandemic! “If you’re looking for a sign, this is it.”
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The last section of *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* addresses BSE fears in America and a nascent internet subculture DTM calls “Creutzfeldt Jakobins” – people who track American CJD cases, trying to spot vCJD patterns. When reading his description of the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, my mind constantly, uncontrollably turned to covid. Here it was – an online community of people deeply skeptical about a disease’s official story, tracking every contradiction, every implausibility, every statistic that failed to apply to the individual. Self-described “redneck hippies” and “soccer mom Republicans” teaming up to find the truth hidden behind an impossible world. You know what they’re doing now.
I’ve always combined a deep interest in medicine with a healthy distrust for it. People who are constitutionally inquisitive, anti-authoritarian, and suspicious about official narratives tend to end up skeptical of at least some mainstream claims in the field. This is not to say I think you should take [bleach enemas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement) or something, just that I understand the impulse behind concluding the US government was covering up a local vCJD wave.
Traditionally, sporadic prion diseases are said to have a prevalence of one in a million. (Hold on to that for a second.) The last section of the book is a chronology of Americans finding bizarrely more than one in a million of their friends dying of sporadic CJD, often at inexplicably young ages, sometimes in geographical clusters. This is understandably suspicious. Then DTM goes on to reassure us by saying none of these cases were confirmed to have an M/M genotype, which OH GOD OH FUCK
A number of high-profile people in the prion world, including Gajdusek, are clarified as not believing sporadic prion diseases exist. You get the impression DTM doesn’t, either. Now, how common are prion diseases?
Eric Vallabh Minikel [has an answer for you](https://www.cureffi.org/2018/12/06/prion-disease-is-not-one-in-a-million/)! Eric and his wife Sonia are prion researchers from a rather unique background – after Sonia was diagnosed as having a single-gene mutation with ~100% penetrance for prion disease, they left their previous jobs to dedicate their lives to curing it. It turns out, when you run the numbers, you get not one in a million but *1 in 5000* people dying of prion diseases.
This is best described as “nightmarishly high”. I’m normed on genetic disorders. A genetic disorder that affects one in five thousand people is pretty common! I have known, in person, completely unselected, just from “random people I’ve met in my life in a non-medical context”, someone with a ~1/250k syndrome and someone with a ~1/50k-100k syndrome. I don’t think anyone in my extended family knows someone who died of a prion disease. I feel like it would’ve come up if they did!
Prion diseases have distinctive phenotypes. Not distinctive enough, apparently, to avoid a lot of CJD being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s – but diagnosis is consistently insane. Something DTM reiterates throughout *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is just what prion dementia looks like. The characteristic dementia in prion diseases spares something – “self” or “recognition” or “reflection” – that is not spared by Alzheimer’s, or by most common dementias. Shouldn’t this be, uh, noticeable?[7](#footnote-7) They kill rapidly, often over the course of months, and often onset in midlife. ALS shares this pattern and is way, way more common than prion diseases; you hear about ALS far more in the “disorder people actually have” sense. What am I missing here?
Anyway: 1 in 2000 prevalence of latent vCJD in the UK + extreme lack of clarity over whether scrapie is human-transmissible + [blood donations spread vCJD](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1423-0410.2006.00833.x) + sporadic CJD prevalence keeps [going](https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/8FA6078276359430CA257BF0001A4C42/$File/creutzfeldt_jakob_disease_surveillance_in_australia_update_to_31_december_2022.pdf) [up](https://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/report31.pdf) = ???
(Yes, I *am* annoyed that most countries have lifted their ban on UK blood donors, thank you for asking!)
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But back to the book. The “American chapter” is one-third about the country’s response to vCJD, one-third about the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, and one-third about chronic wasting disease. The last part is the most interesting.
Chronic wasting disease is a prion disease of deer. Like scrapie, it “probably, we hope” isn’t human-transmissible (eat venison at your own risk). Under natural circumstances, deer shouldn’t get prion diseases:
> *A prion plague should not be possible among ruminants in the wild. Deer are not cannibals, as the cows that spread BSE were forced to be; and, because deer and elk are not domesticated, they do not have enough contact with one another to spread a prion infection the way sheep are thought to spread scrapie. But deer do not live as they used to live, humans having once again brought their ambitions to bear on the natural course of things.*
*The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is a book of medical anthropology. Anthropology of the Veneto, anthropology of Papua New Guinea, anthropology of 1990s Britain. Here, it is an anthropology of America. Americans, having won the world, still fight to win their own backyard. The North American continent is geographically diverse, cutting through rain-snow-shine, mountains jutting over plains, cities sprawling into wilderness, habitations criss-cross dotted with surprisingly few empty zones. Go somewhere like Denver, the Mile High City, three million people fighting against nature. Few other countries have anything like this; geographically vast polities usually have uninhabitable blocks. Australians are twenty-five million people clustered against the shore. It still surprises me, after all this time, how every US state has a meaningful city[8](#footnote-8).
Midcentury Denver, growing and sprawling out across its mountains, started to run into their natural inhabitants – deer.
> *Starvation is one way nature adjusts the deer population to the available food supply. People did not usually see this process, but in the 1950s and 1960s Colorado became more densely settled, reducing forested areas and forcing deer to look longer and harder for food. At the same time, the state enacted conservation laws, limiting when and where hunters could shoot. Soon emaciated deer began wandering onto the lawns and through suburban streets looking for a meal. People began to feed them, only to find that they died anyway. They would drop dead by haystacks, along highways, and in flower beds.*
In the late 1960s, a young biologist named Gene Schoonveld tried to figure out why the deer starved even when they were fed.[9](#footnote-9) He deprived some deer of food for a while, “[h]e cut windows in their stomachs to see what went on inside, and then he began to feed them”. While this was going on, he had a control group of healthy, well-fed deer as backups in case anything went wrong. It did...but not to the experimental group.
The pen in which the deer were kept also housed sheep, which, it turned out, were scrapie carriers. The deer somehow acquired scrapie – there’s a huge unanswered question here, which DTM doesn’t address. *How did they get scrapie?* They didn’t eat the sheep, presumably. Did it somehow transmit from casual contact? This is [not supposed to happen](https://www.cureffi.org/2017/12/08/skin-surgery-and-cjd/). And yet: the deer in the sheep pen started dying of a mysterious scrapie-like disease, one never reported before, that would go on to infect thousands.
These deer were released into the wild. Ten years later, the first reports of chronic wasting disease came out. The disease spread across deer and elk in the western half of the country. By the turn of the millennium, cases were exploding – and lost all geographical restriction. DTM can report up to 2005, at which point it was floating around Upstate New York.
This kind of spread doesn’t track natural deer migration. That’s irrelevant, because nothing about CWD’s spread is natural. We shift gears into an anthropology of the American hunter. The hunter wants to shoot the most impressive buck, to bag himself one with as many “points” as possible – one whose antlers branch out most. A “ten-point buck” has five branches on each horn:
Original by [Ric McArthur](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricmcarthur/51806642738)
Nature doesn’t make enough bucks with perfectly symmetrical ten-point horns. To fill the demand, the market had to step in. Thus was born the deer farm industry, which raises captive deer in better genetic and nutritional conditions than Nature permits, then ships them across the country so hunters who couldn’t get legit ten-point bucks get the taxidermy piece for their wall. These are [controversial](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hunting/comments/15hzqkc/deer_farms_should_be_illegal/) [amongst](https://thebiggamehuntingblog.com/what-is-canned-shooting/) [hunters](https://www.boone-crockett.org/bc-position-statement-canned-shoots) and [illegal in numerous states](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6433992) – but the industry is big enough to spread CWD. (The kind of hunter who needs a deer shipped to his house is the kind of hunter who will fumble killing it.) Another problem is supplemental feeding – leaving out protein-enriched food for deer to eat. This produces “[trophy class animals at an earlier age](https://tpwd.texas.gov/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_bk_w7000_0033.pdf)”, but again, what’s *in* that protein? (“It is much like feeding your cows 41 percent protein cottonseed cake during the winter to raise the protein level in the cow’s diet to a level that will maintain acceptable production”, says that article from 1991.)[10](#footnote-10)
The book segues into a vignette. CWD was new in Wisconsin in the early 2000s, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources was optimistic it could eradicate it. In a state with a love of hunting, you could, in theory, recruit people to kill every single deer in a 400-square-mile radius:
> *In many states, the state would have had to call out the National Guard for such an onslaught, but hunting is a passion in Wisconsin. Hunters shoot 450,000 deer every year, more than in any other state. “I’m looking for ardent hunters to help us, unless fear or their wives keep them away,” one DNR official told a Milwaukee magazine. The state extended the normal hunting season and waived the usual limit of one buck per hunter, and the hunters came out in force.*
The whole affair was gruesome – one official called it “hunting for slob hunters”. If you’re trying to eradicate a prion disease, you can’t very well let people take the carcasses home to eat. Bodies piled up in control stations, decomposition mingling with bleach. The 2002 hunt established a base rate of 2% for chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin deer, with the most affected areas getting up to 10%. Further hunts in 2003, 2004, and 2005 spread to wider and wider areas – and didn’t move the needle one bit.
This is to say that CWD is quite a bit more common in the American deer population than BSE ever was in British cattle. Since publication, it’s popped up in [Norway](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024462/) and [South Korea](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jvms/75/1/75_12-0077/_article). Notably, Norway doesn’t allow for the import of cervids, raising *numerous questions* about how it got there. There are no unambiguous cases of CWD transmission to humans, and in vivo/in vitro primate studies have [mixed results](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7766630/). There [sure are](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/780509) some unusually young hunters with sporadic CJD, though. But don’t worry, most of them aren’t M/M homozygotes!
---
There is an absolute ton going on in this book. I’ve had to skim over whole sections. Parts that couldn’t be easily slotted into a narrative review include:
1. When Gajdusek was invited to a party at Prusiner’s house, he was horrified to find his rival had purchased hundreds of New Guinean statues – all with the genitals removed.
2. Elio Lugaresi, the neurologist who clinically identified FFI, shipped his patient’s brain to his former student Pierluigi Gambetti. Gambetti at this point ran a neuropathology lab at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. Lugaresi was absolutely *bewildered* as to why his student would leave Italy for Cleveland.
3. The only time DTM ever saw Lugaresi upset was when Lugaresi took him out for dinner at a restaurant specializing in wine, and he had to tell him he didn’t drink it.
4. The British agricultural minister attempted to force-feed his four-year-old daughter a burger as a photo-op. Later, [a family friend’s daughter died of vCJD](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/oct/12/uk.bse).
5. BSE origin theories include: space dust, Gajdusek being a secret CIA operative who infected cows, CJD-infected human remains accidentally getting shipped to Britain as animal feed.
6. George Glenner, an Alzheimer’s expert and collaborator of Prusiner’s, died of cardiac amyloidosis, where amyloid plaques (similar to those seen in the brain in both prion diseases and Alzheimer’s) build up in the heart. Several of their collaborators suspect he was somehow infected.
7. Prusiner experimented with quinacrine, the malaria cure, as a potential CJD treatment. He gave a bunch of it to a young woman whose father heard about his research. It stopped her symptoms from progressing – and exploded her liver. *“By now, more than three hundred prion disease sufferers have tried quinacrine and, according to Graham Steel, the head of the CJD Alliance in the United Kingdom, “they’re all dead.””*
8. There were internet fora full of people convinced they had vCJD. Minor side notes like “symptoms persisting for several years without decline” or “spontaneous recovery” were not considered contraindications. Some claimed to be cured of vCJD, and shilled various alt-med solutions. *“[T]he woman who said she’d been cured responded with accidental ambiguity, “I don’t believe my information gives false hope—at the moment, what else is there?””*
“What else is there”, indeed.
I’ve also skimmed over most vignettes of the family. Some of these are real highlights, particularly the explication of Silvano’s illness – the man who brought FFI to medical attention, after decades of misdiagnosis. This is *impressively distinctive*. His illness does not look like much anything else:
> *During good moments, Silvano could still read. He wore his glasses on the end of his nose. He ticked off the days on a pad so he wouldn’t get disoriented. He dressed in black silk pajamas with a pocket square and continued to receive visitors.*
>
> *The nights were not so smooth. At night, Silvano dreamed, re-enacting memories of his old life, just as his sisters had. FFI strips its sufferers not just physically but psychologically. Silvano had always loved social life. He had even found the old crest of the Venetian doctor—black and red with a gold star—and hung it outside his bedroom. Now, in his dreams, Silvano carefully combed his hair, as if for a party. Once he saluted as if he were part of the changing guard at Buckingham Palace. He picked an orchid and offered it to the Queen of England.*
>
> *During lucid moments, Silvano could laugh with Ignazio and Lisi over what was happening—he joked that the brain-sensor cap on his head made him look like Celestine V, and that, like the thirteenth-century pope, he wanted to renounce his crown—but such joking did not disguise his terror. Two months into his stay at Bologna, he was howling in the night, his arms and legs wrapped around themselves, the tiny pocket square still in place. In the last days of his life he lay in a twitchy, exhausted nothingness.*
My thoughts turn back to DF, the FFI patient who swung between total lucidity and introverted serenity. Everyone was enraptured by Silvano’s illness precisely because he didn’t look “demented” in a traditional way, or even an unusually rapid way. This is supposed to be also true of CJD – some kind of lucidity persisting unusually far into the illness, even in a state that in any other disease would be marked by confusion and delirium.
So, let’s close on a question: is Alzheimer’s a prion disease?
Remember, earlier, that we mentioned how pituitary growth hormone treatment can spread CJD. Turns out – probably – that [it can also spread Alzheimer’s](https://www.gwasstories.com/p/the-first-case-reports-of-human-to). Tauopathies – which include Alzheimer’s – seem to be...[prion-like, in some way](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627314003626). Prusiner has been banging this particular drum since the 1980s, but hey, that’s part of what “good at getting grants” means.
What is Alzheimer’s? No, seriously, that’s an important question. “Alzheimer’s disease” originally referred to *a rare, early-onset dementia*. It’s always been characterised by a specific neuropathology, but the value of “specific” here is, uh, not specific, and Alzheimer’s-like pathology is seen in surprisingly many healthy elderly people. The neuropathology of autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s is not always identical to that of the sporadic disease, nor is that of the dementia seen in Down syndrome (also, people with Down’s develop Alzheimer’s neuropathology 15+ years before symptom onset, and some people with Down’s never get dementia despite having the pathology). It’s tricky to avoid the conclusion that modern Alzheimer’s is a wastebasket diagnosis.
Does this mean there are diseases that can operate by the “genetic-infectious-sporadic” prion triad without being prion diseases per se? It’s possible to transmit cancer via [organ donation](https://journals.lww.com/transplantjournal/FullText/2012/12270/Cancer_Transmission_From_Organ_Donors_Unavoidable.5.aspx), [maternal-fetal transmission](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5946918/), or [unhinged experiment](https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/1097-0142(196506)18%3A6%3C782%3A%3AAID-CNCR2820180616%3E3.0.CO%3B2-%23); cancer can be genetic (e.g. BRCA, Li-Fraumeni) or sporadic (e.g. most of it). “Prion disease” is probably not the best way to think about cancer. It’s also apparent, when you look at it this way, that what we’re calling “sporadic” is *not* “you always get it by bad luck with no external influence”; there are unambiguously environmental factors in many cancer cases.
~~What I’m saying is that we need to redo the pituitary HGH experiments with more diseases~~ My advisor has informed me not to say this.
This is interesting to dwell on. DTM mentions early in the book that modern medicine owes its existence to a fluke of prionlessness:
> *In 1862, Louis Pasteur boiled broth to kill the microscopic life in it, put some of the liquid in a goose-necked flask, and showed that if nothing living ever reached the liquid, no life would ever grow there. The experiment had enormous practical impact; it gave doctors the knowledge they still use to save lives by showing that because infections were living, reproducing things, if you could keep an environment sterile, you could keep a patient healthy. Had infectious prions been in Pasteur’s flask, curative medicine would never have gotten started. Doctors would still be competing with shamans and medicasters.*
Perhaps prion research owes its existence to a similar fluke. Prions are *recognizably* genetic-infectious-sporadic in a sense untrue of most diseases. But the mainstream take on prion infection is that it’s actually pretty tricky – animal prion research involves injecting the proteins directly into the brain, because anything else won’t work well enough. If we had tried harder to [shoot prisoners full of cancer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805961/pdf/bullnyacadmed00363-0072.pdf) in the 1950s, would it have scooped the recognition of prions? What if Alzheimer’s became a significant research area decades before it did in our world? (Maybe if a 1920s starlet rather than [a 1940s one](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-11-vw-1763-story.html) had an early-onset case.) It’s possible prions could never have been recognized as “unique”. We might still be running in circles with scrapie. We might – just might – have had a much bigger problem with BSE.
So goes the Land of Hypotheses. But we don’t live there, not in this life. In this life, we have a thousand unanswered questions. We can’t – yet – simulate all the universes where the prion question went different ways, where Alzheimer’s was a research focus in the 1950s, where we didn’t spend decades chasing the M/M homozygosity illusion, where the first Fore cannibalism victim died of something else, where prions were in Pasteur’s flask. But we can think, and dwell, and dream, and chase possibilities. *The Family That Couldn’t Sleep* is a great book, precisely because it inspires possibilities. Even the ways it’s become wrong with time are usefully wrong – illustrative, if you will.
“If prion fears go the way of swine flu or Ebola”, indeed.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Fatal familial insomnia is an autosomal dominant disorder. This implies that if the doctor had FFI, his sibling must have also had it, tracing the origin of the gene another generation back – a mutation in one of their parents. The book doesn’t really grapple with this; it seems that whoever the mutation really originated in must’ve died of unrelated causes before developing FFI, which is common in autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorders and makes it a real pain to construct family histories.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
I think DTM’s explanation is erroneous. He identifies his disorder as resembling “a form of CMT caused by a mutation on Chromosome 21”, then goes on to describe the specific gene affected. That particular gene is on *8p21*, so...understandable game of telephone. There is a reported form of CMT caused by a mutation on 21q22, but it seems to have been first described in 2019.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Despite the rhetorical description of Zigas as an “actual doctor”, quite a few people – including Gajdusek – were sure he was lying about having a medical degree.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
They divorced at some point in the 1960s, and Shirley reverted to her maiden name. The book refers to them as “the Glasses” and uses the same surname for both, but most sources write Lindenbaum.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Draw your preferred parallels to modern companies offering polygenic embryo screening.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
Realistically, this [wasn’t the first case](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673609615683). However, the man in 2009 with vCJD and an M/V genotype wasn’t confirmed at postmortem, so the medical community didn’t accept it until 2016.
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease is apparently more Alzheimer’s-like, in that DTM says the misdiagnosis is particularly common this way (I get the impression the Vallabh variant is phenotypically most GSS-like, from what I’ve read of Eric and Sonia’s work). GSS is really rare – or really underdescribed, one of those – and it’s hard to find good detailed case descriptions, the kind you’d need to compare it to FFI or CJD on this axis.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Let’s pretend for rhetorical purposes that somewhere like Cheyenne, Wyoming is a meaningful city. The metro area is 100k people – it’s meaningful enough. The equivalent spot in Australia has a population of “no one”.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
With the benefit of hindsight, this is known as *refeeding syndrome*. If someone is deprived of food for long enough, they can’t instantly return to a normal diet. The best-case scenario is that your digestive system is very unhappy with you for a while; the worst case is [sudden death](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-08/shane-warne-extreme-diets-nutrition-heart-health/100887810).
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
DTM refers to this as Quality Deer Management, but I think he’s wrong? QDM seems to be [a particular attitude towards hunting](https://deerassociation.com/qdm-vs-trophy-traditional-deer-management/) that avoids shooting young bucks to optimize antler development, while shooting more doe than a pure “kill all the cool-looking ones” strategy will to avoid overpopulation. You can do QDM with or without supplemental feeding. I might be wrong – I know very little about deer hunting | a reader | 146003442 | Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep | acx |
# Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
### I. Lifeboat Games
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food.
They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!”
They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him.
Something about this surprises me. It’s weird that there’s another solution which is more stable than the fair one of drawing lots. It’s strange that by shouting an obvious suggestion - one that adds no more information - Albert can save his own life with certainty. Still, that’s how it goes.
More weeks go by. They still aren’t rescued. They need another victim. Once again the lots come out. This time, just before the first lot is drawn, nine castaways all simultaneously shout “WAIT LET’S KILL AND EAT \_\_\_\_\_\_”, with a different name in the blank for all of them.
This is obvious, right? By being the proposer last time, Albert got 100% chance of avoiding death. Everyone else had *post facto* 100% chance of avoiding death, since Bob’s name was called instead of theirs. But before Albert called out the name, letting Albert call a name gives you a 1/9 chance of dying (since we know Albert won’t call out his own name). Letting Albert call out the name makes your chances *worse*, since you’re going from a 1/10 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone) to a 1/9 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone except Albert). So the “one person calls out a name” solution beats drawing lots post facto for everyone except the callee, but it’s worse ex ante unless you’re the caller. So everyone tries to be the caller. Since everyone calls out a different random name, nobody can coordinate, and nothing happens.
The castaways agree to take a day to think things over, and try again the next morning.
The next morning, the lots come out. Before anything happens, eight out of nine people call “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT CHARLOTTE”.
Charlotte, you see, is blonde. And everyone else in the raft is dark-haired. Just luck of the draw (hah!) - it so happened that eight dark-haired people and one blonde were stuck on the same lifeboat. There’s no racism or genuine bad feeling between the darks and blondes. Nobody actually cares about hair color. It was just the simplest Schelling point.
(remember, a [Schelling point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)) is a solution people choose in the absence of coordination. For example, suppose you were playing a game where you and ten other people you couldn’t talk to would each get $1 million if you guessed the same number out of an array, otherwise nothing. The array is [1, 2, 3, 4, 93850618, 5, 6, 7]. Which number do you choose? 93850618 is the obvious outlier, therefore easiest to coordinate on, so you might choose that number yourself and hope everyone else follows the same thought process.)
This is obvious, right? When everyone calls out a different name, nothing happens, and you’re stuck drawing lots. But if eight of the nine castaways call out the same name, they form a coalition which can easily overpower the one remainder. So the goal is to all converge upon the same coalition of eight against one. If everyone has dark hair except for one blonde, that’s the most salient possible coalition, so it’s the one that’s easiest for other people to converge on, so it’s the one you want to go with yourself. Everyone kills and eats Charlotte.
More weeks go by. Still no rescue. The lots come out again. Just before they get chosen, all eight remaining castaways should “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_”, again all naming a different person.
Daniel thinks they should kill and eat Erica, because all the rest of them are Americans, but Erica is Canadian.
Erica thinks they should kill and eat Frank, because all the rest of them are Methodists, but Frank is Episcopalian.
Frank thinks they should kill and eat Greg, because all the rest of them are lower-middle-class, but Greg is upper-middle-class.
Greg thinks they should kill and eat Heather, because all the rest of them work in retail, but Heather works in marketing.
Heather thinks they should kill and eat Iolanthe, because all the rest of them play basketball for fun, but Iolanthe plays soccer.
…and so on.
This is obvious, right? Now that you know you win by choosing a Schelling point, everyone tries to come up with a Schelling point that leaves them personally in the winning coalition. If there were an obvious self-recommending Schelling point, like one of them was a twelve-foot-tall green Martian, there would be no problem. But it seems like the only clear Schelling point was Charlotte’s blonde hair. Everything else is just a bunch of about-equally-compelling stories for who should be coordinated upon.
What happens next isn’t obvious, at least not to me. I still find this story interesting. It makes me wonder how much real-world coalition-building is like this. Consider for example racism. There are supposed justifications for racism - like that such and such a race is inferior, or oppressive, or plotting to kill us. But another justification is just “We’re the majority and they’re the minority, and if we all band together to profit at their expense, it probably goes well for us.” Any coalition of 51%+ can do this. But it’s easier if everybody comes color-coded so there’s one obvious coalition that occurs to everybody and which they can easily check that they’re a part of. And so on to nationalism, religious conflict, political ideology conflict, and so on.
### II. Backscratchers Clubs
After many weeks, six surviving castaways are rescued by the Coast Guard. The government decides not to prosecute them for the murder of their fellows, given their desperate circumstances, and they are reintegrated into society. Still, the experience has scarred them, and gotten them thinking along some weird lines.
*Daniel* goes back to his hometown and founds the Backscratchers Club (cf. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”). The Backscratchers Club has a simple purpose: whenever possible, club members must favor other club members over outsiders. If a member runs a company, they should preferentially hire other members for good positions. If they write for a newspaper, they should write puff pieces about other members and hatchet jobs on non-members. If they’re a politician, they should pass the policies other members want, and ignore their non-member constituents. If they’re just a normal person, they should be friends with the other members and invite them to their cool social events.
Everyone in town joins the Backscratchers Club immediately. This is obvious, right? There’s no downside to being in the club, and the upside is preferential treatment from all existing club members.
(maybe this isn’t obvious in the real world, where there are always transaction costs, and where people could avoid the club out of stubbornness or principle. But Daniel’s hometown is a farm town that cultivates [sparkroot](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/), the magic herb that rounds off people’s sharp edges and turns them into perfect economic actors.)
Since everyone is in the club, nobody prefers anyone over anyone else, and the club becomes meaningless, a 100% waste of time.
*Erica* hears Daniel’s story and decides to try an experiment of her own. She goes back to *her* hometown and starts the Advanced Backscratchers Club. Its rules are:
* Every year, members must give Erica $100 in club dues.
* Every February 1st, members must ride a gray horse naked around the tallest hill in town.
* Members must wear a silly purple hat all the time.
* Members must prefer other members over non-members, just like in Daniel’s club.
Erica figures that Daniel’s plan failed because there was no downside to being in his club. Add some mildly burdensome requirements, and some people will be attracted by the backscratching and join, other people will find the requirements too burdensome and not join, and the club can achieve its purpose. Or, if not, at least she gets $100 from everyone in town.
Here it’s *not* obvious to me what happens. I can imagine it going one of three ways:
1. Erica does a bad job promoting the club and the requirements are too burdensome. Maybe a handful of losers who can’t get friends any other way join, or some people who really like silly purple hats (and so don’t find the requirements burdensome). But overall the club has no effect.
2. Erica does a great job promoting the club. So many people join that you can’t get ahead in town at all without being a member. All the holdouts grumble and join too. We end up in the same degenerate case as with Daniel, except that everyone does some silly rituals and Erica is rich.
3. Erica does a medium job promoting the club. As the club catches on, the people who are increasing excluded from town life become angry and found the Anti-Backscratchers Coalition. They discriminate *against* Backscratchers in the same way that Backscratchers discriminate in favor of each other. Some sort of equilibrium is reached.
*Frank* hears Erica’s story and decides to try an even more promising version. He returns to his own hometown and founds the Orphan Support Club, with the following tenets:
* Members must donate $100/year to the Orphan Support Club
* Every February 1st, members are invited to the Orphan Support Gala, held on the tallest hill in town.
* Members must wear an purple ribbon to support Orphan Awareness at all times.
* There’s no, like, *rule* about this - but surely you would support other people who share your concern about orphans, and not the kind of callous anti-orphan Scrooge who wouldn’t even join an Orphan Support Club.
Frank’s design has a few advantages over Erica’s:
1. Part of Erica’s problem was getting off the ground. But Frank has a natural early constituency of people who care about orphans.
2. Another part of Erica’s problem was that once people realized what she was doing, they might feel threatened and resist. But Frank’s organization can always keep a fig leaf of “we’re just nice people who care a lot about orphans”; it takes some connect-the-dots to realize they’re another backscratchers club after all.
And a few disadvantages:
1. If they’re too nod-nod-wink-wink about it, people might not realize they’re a backscratchers club at all. Some might not join; others might join and not help one another to the best of their abilities.
2. Probably they need to spend a bit of time helping orphans or at least appearing to do so, or they lose their fig leaf.
In the end, they take over the world. This is obvious, right?
If the lifeboat games sound like racism and nationalism, what do the backscratchers’ clubs sound like? The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc. The more complicated versions sound like cults, religions, and ideologies.
Obviously one reason movements exist is to achieve their stated goal. In [The Ideology Is Not The Movement](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi5kP7V1uuDAxVcmWoFHYybBxIQFnoECA4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fslatestarcodex.com%2F2016%2F04%2F04%2Fthe-ideology-is-not-the-movement%2F&usg=AOvVaw01JrjveByv-K8-QbAWcqz_&opi=89978449), I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device. But a third reason - linked to the second - is as cover for a backscratchers club.
### III. Orphan Supporters
After the Orphan Support Club take over the world, the remaining castaways are dispirited - maybe they’ve missed their chance to get ahead through weird social engineering schemes. Still, after a while they manage to make the best of their situations.
*Greg* was a third-rate academic at a low-ranked school. His only advantage was that, through his friendship with Frank, he caught wind of the Orphan Support Club’s growing power a little faster than everyone else. He toned down his normal teaching and research and started aggressively advocating for orphans, accusing the administration and all his office-politics rivals of not taking their problems seriously enough.
Bad-mouthing your bosses usually ends poorly. But the local newspaper had just been taken over by OSC members, and they wrote several articles on how the town’s college was infested with orphan-hating Scrooges, and Greg was the only professor bold enough to stand up to them. And the local City Council had also just turned OSC, and they called in the college administrators and said they wouldn’t get the city funding they wanted unless they changed their orphan-hating ways. And lots of students were OSC too now, and they threatened to switch colleges unless Greg was taken more seriously. Eventually the college administration folded, gave Greg a promotion, and added him to the Board of Trustees - after which everyone stopped bothering them and they became popular again.
Greg remembered the debt he owed, so he spent the rest of his career writing bogus papers demonstrating that orphans were more likely to starve in counties that didn’t have OSC advocates in local government, or in cities that didn’t have OSC journalists in the local newspaper. Next time the OSC City Council members were in a close election, or the OSC newspaper bosses were involved in office politics, they could point to Greg’s studies to demonstrate their worthiness. It was a weird and indirect kind of backscratching - but backscratching it was.
*Heather* worked at a local nonprofit. She also wished she could get ahead in office politics, but by this point everyone for miles around was an OSC supporter and she couldn’t succeed on that basis alone.
One night she had dinner with her old friend Erica. “Daniel had this problem too,” Erica said. “He founded the original Backscratchers Club, way back when, but everyone joined it instantly and there was no way to use it to get ahead. My big innovation was adding some ridiculous bylaws that made it costly to get into. That way, only the people who were most committed would join, and we could outcompete everyone else. You should figure out some form of orphan advocacy that works like that.”
The next day, Heather announced that she had figured out a new and important way to support orphans. You could no longer use the word “orphan” metaphorically, to talk about orphan drugs or orphaned ideas; this spiritually harmed real orphans. She engaged in publicity stunts against any writers who spoke this way.
About half of people couldn’t pivot to the new way of using language, or thought it was beneath their honor to dignify this with a response. But the other half - aware that their status relied on being members in good standing of OSC, and aware that any slip in their perceived level of orphan support could ruin their careers - and equally aware that if they seemed to be better OSC members than others, it might give them a step up - enthusiastically joined Heather’s bandwagon. There was a brief internal struggle, which Heather won. She started a new nonprofit to remove anti-orphan terms from language, and remained powerful and respected to the end of her days.
*Iolanthe* jealously watched Heather’s success, and wanted to do something similar. She announced that she was adopting an orphan, and she believed everyone else should adopt one too. If everyone adopted an orphan, the orphan crisis would be over in no time.
Here’s another case where it’s not obvious to me what happens:
1. Many other people adopt orphans too. Society enters a new golden age where no child is abandoned, and Iolanthe is celebrated as a hero.
2. Other people decide this is too much of a sacrifice for a club they only joined to advance their self-interest. They say Iolanthe’s actions were supererogatory, and celebrate her, but don’t follow suit.
3. Other people decide this is too much of a sacrifice, and see it as a threat; just as Heather’s coalition of orphan-word-not-sayers took power at the expense of its enemies, so Iolanthe’s coalition could do the same, and they would be the losers. They come up with galaxy-brained reasons why adopting orphans actually hurts the orphans, all the OSC-captured institution push these as gospel truth, and parroting these reasons becomes a new sign of OSC membership and value-alignment. Iolanthe is vilified as a “would-be savior” or something.
Overall I would rather be Heather with her word-change campaign than Iolanthe with her adoption campaign.
If the Lifeboat Games seemed suspiciously like nationalism, and the Backscratchers Clubs seemed suspiciously like clubs/cults/ideologies, the stories in this section seem suspiciously like the Establishment - whether it’s the Catholic Establishment of the Middle Ages, the conservative Establishment of mid-20th-century America, or the progressive Establishment of today. Elites support each other not directly - which would be hard to coordinate - but by all supporting the same ideology. If it’s hard for non-elites to break into the ideology, then everyone with the ideology will be elites, and supporting the ideology is an indirect way of elites supporting other elites in a big backscratching network. This is one of the solutions to [Class Warfare Having A Free Rider Problem](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-have-a-free-rider-problem/).
I’m sure real sociologists have written about these issues, but it was hard to find them and I figured I might as well write this post without citations. Still, if you know who they are and what their terms are, let me know. | Scott Alexander | 140673111 | Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs | acx |
# Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People
**I.**
Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say “there should be less pollution”.
A technical expert might hear “there should be less pollution” and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is an inevitable byproduct of manufacturing baby formula, and millions of babies would die if you banned it?
Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it’s impossible to be “for” or “against” the broad concept of “reducing pollution”. Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it’s *incoherent* to support “reducing pollution”. You can only support (or oppose) particular plans.
And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.
I think you’re supposed to imagine the environmentalists’ experts and the industries’ experts meeting policy-makers and hammering out a compromise, then moving one direction or another along the Pareto frontier based on how loudly normal people protest pollution.
But if you’ve been demanding an end to pollution for years, and nothing has happened, then it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoil as soon as they have to think about the specifics.
**II.**
I’m not a pollution expert, but I’m a psychiatrist, and I’ve been involved in the involuntary commitment process. So when people say “we should do something about mentally ill homeless people”, I naturally tend towards thinking this is meaningless unless you specify *what* you want to do - something most of these people never get to.
Let’s start with a summary of the current process for dealing with disruptive mentally ill homeless people:
1. A police officer sees a mentally ill homeless person and assesses them as disruptive. Technically the officer should assess whether the person is “a danger to themselves or others”, but in practice it’s all vibes. They bring this person to the ER of a hospital with a psychiatric ward.
2. In the ER, psychiatrists evaluate the person. If some number of doctors, psychiatrists, and others (it varies on a state-by-state basis, and most people defer to the first psychiatrist anyway) agree the person is a “danger to themselves or others”, they can involuntarily commit them. Psychiatrists know lots of tricks for getting the evaluation result they want. For example, wasn’t the person brought in by the cops? Aren’t cops infamous for shooting mentally ill people? Sounds like whatever they did to attract the cops’ attention put them at risk of getting shot, which makes them a “danger to themselves or others”. Again, in reality this is all vibes.
3. The patient gets committed to the hospital. The hospital makes an appointment with a judge to legally evaluate the commitment order. But realistically the appointment is 4-14 days out (depending on the state), and by then the patient may well be gone anyway, in which case the hearing can be cancelled. If it does go to trial, the judge will always defer to the psychiatrists, because they’re experts trying to do a tough and socially important job, and the defendant is represented by an overworked public defender who has devoted 0.01 minutes of thought to this case. This is part of why everyone feels comfortable making commitment decisions on vibes.
4. If the patient seems psychotic, the doctors start them on antipsychotic drugs. These take about 2-4 weeks to make people less psychotic. But one of their side effects is sedation, that side effect kicks in right away, and heavily-sedated people seem less psychotic. So realistically the person will stop seeming psychotic right away.
5. After a few days, the hospital declares victory and discharges the patient with a prescription for antipsychotics and an appointment with an outpatient psychiatrist who can continue their treatment.
6. The patient stops taking the antipsychotics almost immediately. Sometimes this is because they’re having side effects. Other times it’s because they’re still psychotic and making irrational decisions. But most of the time, it’s because some trivial hiccup comes up in getting the prescription refilled, or in getting to the doctor’s appointment. Nobody likes dealing with healthcare bureaucracy, but semi-psychotic homeless people are even worse at this than usual. Social services can sometimes help here, but other times they’re just *another* bureaucracy that it’s hard to deal with, and it usually doesn’t take long for something to slip through the cracks.
7. Repeat steps 1-6 forever.
This isn’t going to win any of the people involved Doctor Of The Year awards. I’m sympathetic to attempts to change the system. But it’s hard to find the right point of leverage.
If your plan is to change the case law around involuntary commitment - to expand the definition of “dangerous to themselves or others” - it probably won’t matter, because most of these decisions are based on vibes that only loosely connect to the written law. But also, even if you find a way to make doctors commit many more people, it *still* won’t matter, because those people will stay in the hospital for a few days, then leave with antipsychotics which they will immediately stop taking.
If your plan is to change the law around guardianship and get all of these people state-sponsored guardians, that could help around the edges. But guardians can’t directly physically confine people or force drugs down their throats, so this won’t get them “off the streets” or “medicated” without additional steps.
If your plan is to “lock them up long-term”, keep in mind that (for now) there are almost no institutions equipped to do this. Each state usually has one center with a 3-digit number of beds for the most recalcitrant patients. Getting into these is like getting into Harvard, only in reverse - you need a spectacular anti-resume proving that you’re among the worst of the worst in the country. If you want tens of thousands of people in institutions like these, then you’ll need some kind of vast nationwide building program. Do you expect San Francisco to be good at this?
But okay, suppose you build those institutions. How long are you keeping people there? Remember, someone’s going to come in, start taking antipsychotics, and (if the drugs work) appear significantly saner within 2-4 weeks. Best-case scenario, they’re completely sane. Now what? Do you keep a completely sane person locked in the mental institution forever? Or do you let them out, at which point they will inevitably stop taking the drugs and become psychotic again?
Okay, sounds like you need some kind of social services to keep patients taking their drugs. There are lots of these, all around the country. The problem is, if the person isn’t taking the drugs (and sometimes even if they are), they won’t attend appointments with social workers. And the social workers can’t show up at their door, because these patients are homeless and hard to track down.
Okay, sounds like you need to get them homes. But there’s not enough government-subsidized housing. And anyway, now we’re back to Housing First, the solution that all of these “We Should Do Something About The Mentally Ill” articles treat as their foil.
Okay, then can you threaten people into attending appointments and taking drugs? There are Involuntary Outpatient Commitment orders, which say basically “go to your psychiatrist and follow their recommendations, or else we’ll put you in jail”. But remember, a lot of the problems happen when these people fail, through bad luck and bad executive function, to get refills. Typical cases might be:
* They lose their prescription and don’t know how to get another one. Or they call their insurance, insurance whines “these drugs cost $500 and you lost your last prescription too, we’re not paying”, and they don’t know what to do.
* Another homeless person steals their pill bottle thinking it might be opioids; later they will grind them up, snort them, and have the worst day of their lives.
* The pharmacy/insurance demands the doctor make some trivial irrelevant change to the prescription before they’ll accept it. The patient doesn’t know how to call their doctor, or doesn’t own a phone, or they contact their doctor but the doctor [is sick of pharmacies/insurances demanding trivial things](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-your-doctor-spends-80-of-their). In any case, nothing gets done.
* The patient messed up their appointment with the welfare bureaucracy that was supposed to give them a free subway pass, so they didn’t get one, so now they can’t make it to their doctor’s appointment.
* The patient went to their appointment with the welfare bureaucracy that was supposed to give them a free subway pass, but the welfare bureaucracy was inexplicably running three hours late and closed before seeing them, and the bureaucrats didn’t apologize or make an alternative appointment, so the patient didn’t get a subway pass and couldn’t make the appointment.
* The patient went to their appointment with the welfare bureaucracy that was supposed to give them a free subway pass, but in the waiting room they spotted a drug dealer who had a grudge against them, so they left because they worried they’d get beaten up.
* The patient was in the hospital with sepsis during their psychiatrist appointment, and nobody told them how to get an alternative psychiatry appointment.
* The patient wrote their appointment time on a piece of paper, which they left in their tent, which got flooded in a rainstorm and all their stuff was washed away.
* The patient is confused and sedated, which is a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs, and maybe if they made it to the doctor then the doctor could recommend something that would prevent this (realistically only the top 5% of doctors catering to the homeless will go this far), but they can’t make it to the doctor because they’re confused and sedated.
(Am I just being gullible? Are these people just making fake excuses? I don’t think so. I used to work at a clinic where visits were free with insurance, but missed appointments incurred a $200 fine that insurance didn’t cover. My low-income patients would miss a visit, then freak out because they couldn’t afford the $200 fine. Then I would talk to people, get permission to waive the fine once, and tell them okay, we won’t charge them this time, but they *had* to show up the next time. Then they would miss their next appointment too, their bill would go to collections, and I would never see them again. I asked the clinic director why we had such a punitive policy, and she said that without the policy, patients would miss so many appointments that the clinic couldn’t make money or pay staff.)
(you can slightly alleviate some of these problems with long-acting injectable antipsychotics, which can be given at the doctor’s office, but the patient still needs to go to the doctor once every few months.)
There are an infinite number of ways that semi-psychotic homeless people can miss appointments. The half-life of these people’s contact with the medical system is a month or two. So they’ll miss their appointment and get off the drugs. The police aren’t going to start a nationwide manhunt for a psychotic homeless person who’s indistinguishable from all the other psychotic homeless people. So realistically what will happen is they’ll be back on the street, a year later they’ll get arrested for some other reason, the police will notice they violated the treatment order, and the judge will try to add an extra year to their sentence for the treatment order violation. Then if their lawyer is really good, he’ll spend his 0.01 minutes on the case arguing that his patient has one of the excuses above, which will always be true. Then the judge will either give them an extra year in prison or not, and everyone will feel kind of dirty and ashamed of themselves either way.
(Also, even in the best case where you successfully treat somebody, I’m afraid that “1995 - 2024: psychotic homeless person” doesn’t look good on a resume, so they probably won’t be getting high-powered jobs. Meanwhile, cheap apartments in SF are $1000/month. So the connection between “no longer psychotic” and “no longer homeless on the street” is tenuous unless you also have some plan to provide free housing.)
Okay, then can you just make it a crime to be mentally ill, and throw *everyone* in prison? According to NIMH, 22.7% of Americans have a mental illness, so that’s a lot of prisoners. “You know what I mean, psychotic homeless people in tents!” Okay, fine, can you make homelessness a crime? As of last month, [yes you can!](https://www.npr.org/2024/06/28/nx-s1-4992010/supreme-court-homeless-punish-sleeping-encampments) But before doing this, consider:
* In San Francisco, the average wait time for a homeless shelter bed [is 826 days](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko). So people mostly don’t have the option to go to a homeless shelter. If you criminalize unsheltered homelessness, you’re criminalizing homelessness full stop; if someone can’t afford an apartment or hotel, they go to jail.
* Most (?) homeless people are only homeless for a few weeks, and [80%](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/who-experiences-homelessness/chronically-homeless/) of homeless people are homeless for less than a year. If someone was going to be homeless for a week, and instead you imprison them for a year, you’re not doing them or society any favors.
* How long should prison sentences for homelessness be? Theft is a year, so if homelessness is more than that, it becomes rational for people to steal in order to make rent. And realistically it will take police years to arrest all of the tens of thousands of homeless people, so if a sentence is *less than* a year, then most homeless people will be on the street (and not in prison) most of the time, and you won’t get much homelessness reduction.
* What’s your plan for when homeless people finish their prison sentence? Release them back onto the street, then immediately arrest them again (since there’s no way they can suddenly generate a house while in prison)? Connect them to social services in some magical way such that the social service will give them a house within 24 hours of them getting out of prison? If such magical social services exist, wouldn’t it be cheaper and more humane to invoke them *before* putting someone in prison?
I admit that if you’re willing to be arbitrarily cruel and draconian (life sentence for someone and their entire family the moment the bank forecloses on their home!) you can make this one “work”. But anything less than that and it becomes just another confusing bad option.
In practice, the government tries some combination of these things, each of which works a little. Sometimes they fiddle with the law around inpatient commitment around the edges. Sometimes they give people free houses. Sometimes they threaten them with Involuntary Outpatient Commitment orders. Sometimes they throw them in prison. Most of these things work a little. Some of them could work better with more funding.
Nobody thinks the current system is perfect. I respect people who want to change it. But you’ve got to propose a specific change! Don’t just write *yet another article* saying “the damn liberals are soft on the mentally ill”.
The damn liberals are soft because some of them are the people who have to develop an alternative plan, and they can’t think of a good one. If you’re going to write yet another article like this, and you want to change minds, you should skip the one hundred paragraphs about the damn liberals, and go straight to the part where you explain how you plan to do better.
If your plan is “be cruel and draconian”, then that will work. It might even be justifiable, if it helps protect other vulnerable people - I talk more about this [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko). But please admit it. Don’t mumble something about “I just want these poor people to be able to get the treatment they deserve yet don’t know how to ask for” before going back to railing against the damn liberals.
If your plan is something else that will solve everything with no tradeoffs, then you owe it to your readers to explain what that is.
**Continued at:** [Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally) | Scott Alexander | 146308961 | Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People | acx |
# Open Thread 337
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Comment of the week is [Peter Gerdes here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing/comment/60688036), arguing that publicly pressuring Sotomayor to resign makes Sotomayor less likely to resign (because she can’t look like she’s giving in to political pressure). I [don’t know](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing/comment/60722079) if I buy it, but worth thinking about.
**2:** Related: some Democrat friends have asked me to [signal-boost this post they wrote](https://maketrumploseagain.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-trump-call-your-representatives?utm-source=acx&fbclid=IwY2xjawD4l7pleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZRr_My-NacNEH1JMG3r-AJm33tfBISH5Ip8M8h6yQ7H9VQDTHOP331Oug_aem_V0Zk4_XaUiDUVyK8HqFMiQ) about why and how to help get Biden to step down (basically: other candidates do better in adjusted head-to-head polls; calling your representative will help). | Scott Alexander | 146391958 | Open Thread 337 | acx |
# Your Book Review: Don Juan
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
O Muse! Awaken from your hibernation,
For Poesy has fallen since you’ve rested;
Each word’s now placed with careful calculation,
Each sentence focus-grouped and tried and tested.
So lead us on a flight of inspiration,
To leave the public stirred, moved, roused, arrested;
We’ll soar [on wings of song](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Song_(poem)) — just one reproach:
Sweet Musie, don’t you *dare* put us in coach.
**I.**
I need a poem — well, I need a *poet*To give us some heroic tale to sing.
Shakespeare? Each tale’s the same — besides, you know it:
The king’s most trusted ally kills the king;
Someone, disguised, is smitten (yet can’t show it);
They all soliloquize on everything;
The actors play, a noble plays insane;
They die (or wed), except one guy to reign,
And one to tell the tale, plus two disarming
Poor commoners who— well, you get the point.
Blake?[That’s been done](http://unsongbook.com/). Keats? There’s no doubt he’s charming,
But [none too popular](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the-merely-real) around this joint.
Ovid’s just porn; [Piet Hein](https://allpoetry.com/Piet-Hein)’s too bent on harming
> Our eyes
> with all
> those line breaks
> to anoint.
Pope? Clickbait, ‘less you’ve realized — I’ll reward ya —
“Pope, Alexander” won’t refer to [Borgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Alexander_VI).
But *Byron*? After all, it’s been a century
Since George gave up his life to join the Greeks
In [breaking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_War_of_Independence) from their Turkish penitentiary
Before the Brits could lap up [their antiques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles).
However great his corpus, what adventure re-
Sung here can match its author’s final weeks?
Yet still, I told myself that I’d review one,
And so I guess we’ll settle for *Don Juan*.
Don Juan (rhymes with ‘through one,’ *à la gringo*)
Dates back to — I don’t know — some days of yore.
The legends say this playboy struck a bingo
With women wed and single, rich and poor:
He’d charm, disguise, connive — forgive the lingo —
To please (*ahem*) his little matador,
And shush his conscience, nagging at his vice,
By crying, *[“Tan largo me lo fiàis!”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan#:~:text=The%20aphorism%20that%20Don%20Juan%20lives%20by%20is%3A%20%22Tan%20largo%20me%20lo%20fi%C3%A1is%22%20(translated%20as%20%22What%20a%20long%20term%20you%20are%20giving%20me!%22%5B1%5D).%20This%20is%20his%20way%20of%20indicating%20that%20he%20is%20young%20and%20that%20death%20is%20still%20distant%E2%80%94he%20thinks%20he%20has%20plenty%20of%20time%20to%20repent%20later%20for%20his%20sins.%5B2%5D)*
Until one Doña Ana was his victim,
Which set the mai— the now-*ex*-maiden’s father
Ablaze with hope to kill, maim, or afflict him;
He slayed her old papá — but did he bother
Repenting to embrace his Savior’s [dictum](https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Acts-2-38/)
Beside the old man’s tomb? He rather (rah-ther?
For Rhyme is king here) asked — oh, witty sinner! —
The effigy upon it home to dinner.
Yet when our dear corrupter of the ladies
Sat down to dine that evening, soon his face
Immediately forgot its usual staid ease:
The statue came, accepting Juan’s grace,
And dragged the screaming fellow down to Hades,
With crazed Satanic courts to try his case.
(Repent, ye sinners! If you won’t return, know
You too could find yourself in the Inferno.)
We owe this tale to [Tirso de Molina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirso_de_Molina),
Who sought to school young Spaniards in morality,
Though others showed it — odds are if you’ve seen a
Production, it’s [Molière’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_Juan) — some partiality;
Mozart saw (says each self-proclaimed Athena)
His father in the statue’s [grim finality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Giovanni),
And Strauss made it [a piece](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Strauss)) that— fine, I’ll say it:
I’d sooner dine in Hell than try to play it.
But Byron makes the story, well, *Byronic*:
Propelled on by the clip-clap of his cadence,
It’s *devilish*, of course, but less *demonic*,
In subject after subject making stray dents,
With tangents far too long to be so chronic,
That leave us, puzzled, questioning the way dents
Like George’s grow to chasms while digressing—
It does, I must admit, keep readers guessing.
And yet, the greatest change with *this* young Juan
(For Byron starts his story from his birth)
Is that he doesn’t pave his road to ruin
By being the greatest [rake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_(stock_character)) on God’s green earth.
(Perhaps his fate was *meant* to match the true one —
The work’s unfinished) Here, he proves his worth
Stumbling into affairs, not even bent to
Seduce — why try, when Lady Luck’s your [Yenta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_on_the_Roof#Principal_characters:~:text=Yente%2C%20the%20gossipy%20village%20matchmaker%20who%20matches%20Tzeitel%20and%20Lazar.)?
**II.**
Don Juan’s childhood was a true anomaly;
His father was a serial philanderer,
So Juan’s learning was awash with homily:
His brilliant mother (I don’t want to slander her)
Defied her intellect and raised a qualm all ye
Free-thinkers understand — or so I’ll gander: her
Son learned the classics, but with strict omission
Of sex, to keep him from his pop’s tradition;
Yet soon, one Donna Julia, twenty-three,
Fell for young Juan’s charms (for he had plenty);
She had a husband (fifty) — says Lord B.,
“’Twere better to have TWO of five and twenty” —
And though she nursed her feelings guiltily,
Don Juan’s youth still masked to what extent he
Had fallen, ‘till he finally learned to grapple
With love (Man’s fall requires an Adam’s apple).
“Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression,
And stolen glances, sweeter for the theft,
And burning blushes, though for no transgression,
Tremblings when met, and restlessness when left,”
But let’s move on — the gradual, slow progression
Of their affair’s too long, however deft
The telling — to a cloudy night that fall,
With Julia sleeping gently (if at all).
Her husband led a mob into her quarters
(And one fee-hunting lawyer, loath to miss a row);
They rummaged through the bedroom on his orders
To find a man, but Julia went full Cicero
And gave a speech, protesting that no boarders
Were occupying her bed (the thought!): at this, a row
Of searchers left; her husband followed suit,
And — last — the lawyer, doubting her repute.
Her lord came to apo— well, to *excuse*The raid (‘ere her harangue had made him pause it) —
He didn’t justifyhis great *[J’accuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27Accuse...!)*,
But *did* try to explain what made him cause it,
Until he stumbled on a pair of shoes
And found their owner hiding in the closet;
Don Juan, naked, sprinted through the foyer —
And likely made a killing for that lawyer.
With Julia told to “[get thee to a nunnery](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/3/1/#:~:text=Get%C2%A0thee%C2%A0%E2%9F%A8to%E2%9F%A9%C2%A0a%C2%A0nunnery),”
Don Juan’s mother shipped him to Leghorn;
His ship, though it avoided hostile gunnery,
Soon hit a storm and, mast by mast, was torn.
He watched his lifeboat-mates drop one by one (or he,
Perhaps, just rued the day that he was born);
They killed his dog; no sooner had they chewed her
Than, starving, they drew lots — and ate his tutor.
Juan abstained — and wisely, for the horde
Of tutor-eaters fell to some disease;
The rest, with only raindrops for their board,
Gave up their late companions to the seas,
Until a dove (and turtle, which they gored
And ate) announced the rocky [Cyclades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclades);
They ran, but sharks — yes, *sharks* — bit each poor diver,
‘Till Juan crawled ashore, the sole survivor.
He woke up in a cave — not quite [platonically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave),
For staring at him was a lovely maiden;
Her maid (and friend) beheld the pair sardonically
And gave a dish to Juan, freshly laden
With eggs and fish and bread, while she symphonically
Spoke Greek to him (‘twas Greek to him); he stayed in
This bed, beside the sources of his aid:
Haidée and Zoe, maiden and her maid.
Dear Haidée’s courage (for we should admire it)
Kept Juan, hidden, healing in the cave:
Her father was a feared and fearsome pirate
Who gladly would have made the youth a slave —
And from his island (which, should he require it,
Had wealth enough to last him to the grave),
If found, our hero would be quickly hauled —
Except he sailed away, for booty called.
Not *that* way, you sick freak: the impious sailor,
Lambro, on far-flung loot began to creep;
Now Juan, free from his unknowing jailer
And Haidée, walked along the azure sweep;
O Fates! Show me a purer love — or frailer!
Her first, his best — her last — do you not weep?
Beneath the rosy sky and weathered stone,
The couple— well, we’ll leave the two alone.
Godspeed, dear Muse, to Lambro’s swift return:
He found his house in Bacchanalian revels,
Where dancers whirled, wine flowed from every urn,
Pipes played, and fruits were stacked in bulging levels;
They’d heard reports that (so he soon would learn)
His soul was now his Maker’s — or the Devil’s —
And once they’d mourned, their mistress, newly boasting
Her father’s wealth, had gaily turned to hosting.
Old Lambro, seeing the couple, took Haidée,
As Juan fought his crew (for Juan’s part,
He battled well) but couldn’t win the fray
‘Gainst twenty pirates, practiced in their art;
They bound the wretch; once he’d been shipped away,
Haidée soon perished of a broken heart.
(Poor Juan, I’ve no doubt, had planned to marry her —
Assuming they could scale the language barrier.)
**III.**
Our hero’s luck, he found, had reached its nadir:
From Don to slave, Fortuna’s rash vicissitude
Had struck; he met actors, sold by their traitor
Of a director with no great solicitude;
They sailed by Troy, an instance (there’s no greater)
Of how far one can fall; and, lest we miss it, you’d
Best catch the [Hellespont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dardanelles) — Byron remarks,
He swam the strait once (no, *that* had no sharks).
They reached Constantinople, richly gleaming
With palaces along the Golden Horn;
And, chained, were brought to market, buyers teeming
With offers as the slaves looked on, forlorn.
Our Juan met an Englishman who, seeming
At ease, had from the Russian front been borne:
“And taking lately, by [Suwarrow’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Suvorov) bidding,
A town, was ta’en myself instead of [Widin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidin).”
The two were purchased by an old black eunuch,
Baba, who led them to the Sultan’s palace,
The greatest from Hyderabad to Munich
(Though I to dear Vienna mean no malice);
He gave Johnson (the Englishman) a tunic,
And Juan — in a manner cold and callous —
A dress, which Juan finally deigned to touch.
(Methinks the “lady” did [protest too much](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/3/2/#:~:text=The%C2%A0lady%C2%A0doth%C2%A0protest%C2%A0too%C2%A0much%2C%C2%A0methinks.).)
Juan soon met the Queen — not genuflecting,
Despite her wishes — as her concubine:
She asked him, “Christian, canst though love?”, expecting
That this would move him; yet he kept his spine,
Insisting that enslavement (while reflecting
On poor Haidée) can’t make his heart align —
Love’s not a prize, however great your ardor,
You earn by hunk’ring down and wanting harder.
Now Queen Gulbeyaz thought of execution,
But what good would that do? And though her cries
Soon filled the room for lack of a solution,
A great crescendo bid her dry her eyes:
The Sultan came, and Juan’s restitution
Among *his* concubines (hence his disguise)
Allowed him to escape her growing spite —
But made for an odd place to spend the night.
Our Juan (or Juanna) made it through
The day; the matrons overlooked his trick,
And had him share a bed with one Dudù,
Though she was, as the kids say, “dummy thicc;”
Her scream that night was heard in Kathmandu,
And woke all (save Juanna): if you’re quick,
Its *cause*, I’m sure, you’re tempted to divine —
Your guess, dear Reader, is as good as mine.
Yet with [the morn in russet mantle clad](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/1/1/#:~:text=the%C2%A0morn%C2%A0in%C2%A0russet%C2%A0mantle%C2%A0clad),
On to the jealous Queen came new suspicions;
She, fearing Juan was no Galahad,
Heard Baba’s news — and pressed for his omissions.
She sent her eunuch to go fetch the lad
And sweet Dudù (and maybe the morticians) —
But, trusting him, we’ll leave this splendid shore
And fly, in Byron’s wake, to sing of war.
**IV.**
Along the flowing Danube stood the fortress
Of Ismail, commanded by the Turks,
With rows of nested palisades (too torturous
To scale), walls, bastions, ramparts, and such works;
The Russian fleet, without some loyal portress,
Was firing with the rage of Norse [berserks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker),
And yet each bursting, thund’ring cannonball
Could scarcely be enough to breach the wall.
Commanding in the camp was one Suwarrow
(Or Suvorov), a favorite of the court,
Who drilled the troops himself; quick as an arrow,
He switched from cool command to warm cavort.
The Providence in [any falling sparrow](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/5/2/#:~:text=There%C2%A0is%C2%A0%E2%9F%A8a%E2%9F%A9%0A%C2%A0special%C2%A0providence%C2%A0in%C2%A0the%C2%A0fall%C2%A0of%C2%A0a%C2%A0sparrow)
Paled next to what he’d need to take the fort;
And yet, no sooner had the cannons halted
Than he declared the town should be assaulted.
On came Juan and Johnson, nearly tardy,
Two women and a eunuch in their train
(Were Baba and Dudù among the party?
Here, Byron doesn’t bother to explain),
One proving he was valiant and hardy;
The other, his position to regain;
They left the others (as will we — a pity),
And led the great assault to breach the city.
Though Byron’s writing oddly found a beauty
Among the cannons, here the waves of blood,
As soldiers slaughtered far beyond their duty,
Proved that Humanity deserved the Flood;
Juan avoided this appalling *tutti*And in these burning branches found a bud:
He saved an orphan’s life amidst the mania
(Much as Lord B. himself did near Albania).
After the siege, Don Juan, for his battling,
Received a further triumph for his fate:
He and the orphaned Leila, carriage rattling,
Went to the court of Catherine the Great
And met the Queen; despite the nobles’ prattling,
She took him as her lover (Byron’s hate
For despots enters here with forceful trumpeting —
And several jokes about *this* despot’s strumpeting).
Our hero’s health soon foundered, for the chirrups
Of spring had yet to reach the Baltic coast;
Again, Juan (with Leila) took the stirrups
To Britain as an envoy; lest he boast,
As Juan galloped through those towns of Europe’s,
Byron points out how much he owed his post.
(“Post” in *both* senses — do not reprehend,
For [if you pardon](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/5/1/#:~:text=If%C2%A0you%C2%A0pardon%2C%C2%A0we%C2%A0will%C2%A0mend.), we will innuend.)
Juan had lived through shipwrecks, loves, and warring,
‘Ere he arrived in London Town at last;
Compared to that, the rest is rather boring,
As Byron dwells at length upon his past:
Society can’t help but leave him snoring,
Yet *he* can’t help but satirize his caste;
And so we get soirées that blend together,
Though George’s wit still sears in milder weather.
In London, Juan found himself in fashion:
[Blue-stockings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestocking) were pursuing him in droves
And, practicing their Spanglish with a passion,
Swapped rumors of his time in Grecian coves.
He found Leila a tutor — the once-ashen
Girl safe, he spent his autumn in the groves
And house of his dear friends, to hunt and dine:
Lord Henry A. and Lady Adeline.
The polished, youthful Adeline was planning
To pair our Spanish bachelor with a bride;
She spent her husband’s lavish banquets scanning
The table, ‘till each maiden had been eyed,
And yet she disapproved when Juan’s panning
(Perhaps *she* wished to end up at his side?)
Fell on ethereal Aurora Raby,
An orphan (Adeline thought her a baby).
One night, while thinking through the whole affair,
He saw a ghost, cowled in a friar’s habit;
The next day, Juan asked about this scare:
The house was haunted by that spectral abbot,
His hosts said; so, that night, to clear the air,
He sought the ghost — and, trembling, reached to grab it:
“In full, voluptuous, but not o'ergrown bulk,”
He found — the impish Duchess of Fitz-Fulke.
Soon morning came, Lord Henry’s guests convening
To take their breakfast in the sumptuous hall;
Fitz-Fulke and Juan looked — so thought the preening
Guests — worn, as if they’d barely ‘scaped a brawl;
Dear Reader, I’m aware you want the meaning
Of this (in fact, *I* want it most of all),
But here we hit the end, abrupt and terse —
For when the poet dies, so goes the verse.
**V.**
What should we glean from Byron’s sacrifices
In leaving us this masterpiece of style?
Its lavish scenes can make you smell the spices;
Its wit can leave you rolling in the aisle.
Yet Juan’s just an object: the devices
Of lovers, friends, and Fortune all beguile
Him into his affairs, with little grunting.
He has no game — he *is* game, ripe for hunting.
The work, in mockery, is dedicated
To [Robert Southey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southey), who betrayed his morals
(In Byron’s view) at once when he created
His odes to George the Third — for copious laurels.
His former liberalism denigrated,
He and Lord Byron soon began their quarrels,
For Byron hated men (or so he prodded)
Who sold their independence to be lauded.
Instead, our fiery author pours his praise
On Bonaparte, who proved at last — in lighting
His country and his continent ablaze
To save (or end) his reign — that one man’s fighting
To shape the world could do so; Juan’s days
Are less agentic (though no less exciting).
Why *weaken*, then, Molina’s sly romancer?
Perhaps this might help point us toward an answer:
In 1812 a youth, now back in Britain
From his [Grand Tour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour) along the *Mare Nostrum*,
Entranced the social set with verse he’d written,
And rumors swirled around him; from this rostrum,
His [mad, bad, dangerous ways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron#England_1811%E2%80%931816:~:text=In%201812%2C%20Byron,115%5D%5B114%5D) left maidens smitten,
And each wife craved the days when Fate had tossed her him:
A man, without a tail, and yet a siren —
The man, of course, was one George Gordon Byron.
But gossip turned against him: speculation
That Byron slept with his half-sister made a
Great splash; his marriage, loveless, in frustration
Collapsed (Or Lovelace? It *did* give us [Ada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace));
The slanders grew, until he fled the nation
(The accusations could have filled a Veda);
Though scandal’s in the eye of the beholder,
It must have left a chip upon his shoulder.
Was Juan meant to end up as a rake,
So rakes — like Byron — would be more relatable?
Did Byron want a hapless foil, to make
His own mystique seem greater? It’s debatable
That this unfinished work will let us take
A lesson here (besides “It’s untranslatable”),
For on our questions, Byron’s all but quiet —
You want a moral? Fine, then: *I’ll* supply it.
**Coda.**
It’s tempting, now to *want* to be our hero
(Or any hero — here, they’re all the same),
And stumble into love and war, with zero
Effort on your part (J.R.R.’s [to blame](https://scholars-stage.org/on-the-tolkienic-hero/)
For this phenomenon, says Mr. Greer) O
Readers: don’t hate the player, hate the game!
Lest this pathetic wallowing continue,
Allow this verse to rouse the agent in you.
For Byron, too, had gone on his adventures
(And, unlike Juan, at his own direction);
His sexcapades in full would make your dentures
Fall out; and he, to end the Greeks’ subjection,
Took up his arms and perished. Your indentures
To safety leave you with a fine objection:
“It’s risky!” Quite — and yet, if you with doubt look
On this, I’ll leave you with Lord Byron’s outlook:
> “Well, if I don’t succeed, I *have* succeeded,
> And that’s enough; succeeded in my youth,
> The only time when much success is needed:
> And my success produced what I in sooth
> Cared most about; it need not now be pleaded—
> Whate’er it was, ‘twas mine: I’ve paid, in truth,
> Of late, the penalty of such success,
> But have not learned to wish it any less.” | a reader | 146003326 | Your Book Review: Don Juan | acx |
# Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden
The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong.
Some of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.
(see my [Prediction Market FAQ](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq) for why I think they are good for cases like these)
Before we go into specifics, the summary result: **Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 - 15 percentage points.** There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden’s chances rather than underestimate them.
The rest of this post is mostly sources and technical discussion trying to establish that this is true. You can skip it if you don’t care. But in case you do:
John Stossel and Maxim Lott have a site called [Election Betting Odds](https://electionbettingodds.com/ElectabilityDEM.html) which tries to aggregate information from many different betting markets to answer questions like these. Here are their claimed headline results - this is probability conditional on being nominated:
I assume they chose these three because they’re the only ones discussed enough to have enough data. I am following their lead.
I appreciate John and Maxim’s work, but I’m not completely comfortable trusting it. Their model is based on results from Betfair, Smarkets, PredictIt, and Polymarket. But I don’t know much about the first two (as an American, I’m banned from even reading Betfair), and the latter two are notoriously bad at partisan political questions. They usually overestimate Republicans’ chances, partly because Democrats’ opposition to online political betting has turned the pool of online political bettors disproportionately red. While a fluid and easily-accessible prediction market should be able to avoid biases like these, neither PredictIt nor Polymarket really qualifies. The CFTC, which regulates prediction markets, has crippled both - PredictIt has very low maximum investments per market, and Polymarket is crypto-only and banned for US citizens. These have prevented their biases from being corrected and made both of them perform relatively weakly in head-to-head contests.
And Stossel/Lott’s focus on betting sites automatically excludes two of the biggest and most historically accurate forecasting engines from their calculation - Metaculus and Manifold.
In order to get numbers I trusted more than theirs, I looked at Metaculus, Manifold, PredictIt, and Polymarket, weighting each by how much I trusted it. Here’s what I found:
The Biden number is about 4% higher than Nate Silver’s model over the same time period; see below for why that might be.
**[EDIT 7/2/24: Original version had a miscalculation which decreased everyone’s odds by about 10%. Above version should be correct.]**
You can find my sources at the bottom of the post. “Explicit” odds are based on questions like “What are the chances of Biden winning if he is the nominee?” “Implied” odds were generated by combining the questions “What is the chance of Biden being the nominee?” and “What is the chance of Biden winning?”; this is safe enough with Biden, but with unlikely nominees like Newsom, some of the percentages can get small enough that they start running into small-number-biases and become less trustworthy. I’ve weighted each market’s explicit calculation higher than their implicit one to compensate.
A possible objection to these results: conditional probabilities don’t exactly reflect the intuitive concept of decision-making. That is, we’re not asking “We want to know whether or not to keep Biden, so what are the chances that he’ll win if we do?”, we’re asking the market for the chance that he’ll win, *in the set of worlds where people decide to keep him for other reasons*. We should expect this to overestimate his performance. That is, imagine that tomorrow, Biden has completely recovered, he easily wins his next debate with Trump, and everyone agrees the most recent debate was just a fluke - in that world, he is both more likely to be nominated *and* more likely to win. Alternatively, if tomorrow he gets much worse and can’t even speak in full sentences, he’s much less likely to be nominated *and* much more likely to lose. Since the real world includes both those possibilities, restricting ourselves to the set of worlds where he gets nominated means we’re overestimating the chance that he wins. There are similar-albeit-less-severe problems with other candidates - if we choose Newsom, that might be because he won some kind of debate or process versus Harris and all the other potential replacements. Overall I expect this to be mostly correct, but probably overestimate Biden’s chances by a percent or two relative to others.
Along with these three candidates, Metaculus had an explicit “should the Democrats replace Biden?” question:
Manifold also asks how Democrats will do if they replace Biden (without specifying a particular replacement):
We can compare this to their Biden market…
…and find that once again, they expect replacing Biden to go better (though I think 51% is just cope).
At the Manifest prediction market conference in early June, I interviewed Nate Silver:
…and asked him for his probability that the Democrats would win this election, versus his probability that the Democrats would win conditional on Biden not being the nominee (specifically “drops dead tomorrow of natural causes”). He said 40-45% chance normally, 50% chance without Biden. This was before the debate, but I think it matches the markets’ opinion that switching candidates would help the Democrats’ chances - and this has only become more true since the debate.
On the other hand, polls asking people how they would vote in possible matchups don’t show any advantage of alternate candidates over Biden. [Here’s](https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/6/29/in-post-debate-poll-voters-think-biden-is-too-old-to-be-president-yet-alternative-candidates-perform-similarly-against-trump) the only post-debate poll I could find:
And if Biden does need to be replaced, Democrats mostly support Harris, who the prediction markets find least promising:
Maybe Democrats are the wrong people to ask - they’re already going to vote Biden, so you want someone who’s more attractive to independents. Of course, in a normal primary it would be Democrats making the decision. But if elites are going to do something behind closed doors, maybe they should take advantage and choose the candidate most likely to win, for once.
I think these polls are the strongest objection to the prediction markets’ verdict. You could make an argument where prediction market users are mostly educated liberal white males, and even though they’re incentivized to honestly determine what ordinary people think, they’re too out-of-touch with ordinary people to do so effectively. Or they might be over-fixating on “voters don’t like Biden’s senility” without considering that, even if voters didn’t know Biden was currently senile before Thursday, they probably guessed that he would become senile sometime in his four-year term, and had basically accepted that his aides would do the hard work. Maybe they prefer a well-known likeable incumbent over an unknown quantity (and the unknown quantity’s potential new/weird aides), even if the well-known likeable incumbent is senile. Maybe elites know more than we do about how hard it is to inject a new candidate at the last moment, how dangerous it is to have someone who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted for scandals, et cetera.
Still, for now I trust the prediction markets. I think replacing Biden would add ~10 prcentage points to the Democrats’ chance of victory.
At the end of this post, I’ll list the prediction markets I’m using as sources. But before then, a brief interlude of:
### Fuzzy Subjective Human Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About
Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?”
*I* was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning.
Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”.
Notice this is from 2020; according to polls, he did win the debate that year ([source](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/donald-trump-joe-biden-debate-drugs))
I [think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results), and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid.
Still, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site *Babylon Bee* had some funny articles about this:
[Babylon Bee](https://babylonbee.com/news/dc-area-pharmacies-all-out-of-stimulants), after Biden gave a good State of the Union speech earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the *Democrats* were spreading the alternate narrative that *Trump* was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did.
Wait, why is a psychoanalyst getting quoted as a top expert in dementia? ([source](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-dementia-evidence-overwhelming-top-psychiatrist-1881247))
I didn’t know you could diagnose someone via [Change.org petition](https://www.change.org/p/our-diagnostic-impression-of-trump-is-probable-dementia-for-licensed-professionals-only), but 2544 people who claim to be licensed professionals can’t be wrong!
So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.
[Reversed stupidity is not intelligence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence). Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.
But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.
I’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of:
* He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.
* He’s better in the daytime than at night (this is a classic dementia symptom called “sundowning”), his aides mostly only saw him during the day, but this debate was at night (9 - 11 PM in his time zone).
* He’s still good at simple tasks like reading from a teleprompter, and they hoped this would extend to harder tasks like a debate.
I think the most likely story is that his aides noticed he had good days and bad days, thought that most days were good, and figured they’d roll the dice, schedule him for two debates, and hopefully they’d be good days and this would defuse questions about his health. But their luck ran out, they got a bad day, and also they were caught unprepared for how bad he was during the evening.
If this is true, they were probably telling themselves something like “well, he’s an incumbent, the party is united around him, it would be a disaster if we had to replace him, and we can probably make it through the election before this blows up. Since he’s *often* *mostly* lucid, we’ll say he’s *always completely* lucid. It’s just a few white lies, and it will save our party a lot of trouble”.
If that was their thought process, then I think it’s a good lesson in how bad what seem like “a few white lies” can be.
I support the Principle of Charity. Nobody ever thinks in their own head “Haha, I am an evil person who is deceiving my friends and the world”. They think “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, [for the greater good](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou)”. But the flip side of that is that every horrible giant deception was perpetrated by people saying “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. And so if *you* are ever tempted to tell what seem like little white lies that don’t matter for the greater good, you should consider the possibility that actually, you’re being about as mendacious as anybody ever gets, and you have a decent chance of causing a disaster. And if you do cause a disaster, the fact that you didn’t go into it smirking “muahaha, now I shall be an evil person and cause a disaster” won’t be exculpatory.
My quick scan of the law suggests that although DNC delegates can vote their conscience, they were selected for being hardcore Biden supporters, and there’s no way to convince them to ditch him unless he bows out gracefully. I think he should bow out gracefully - not just for pragmatic reasons about helping his party win the election, but because it seems like his administration lied to the American people every time they said he was lucid and things were fine.
In normal times, I wouldn’t blame him for this. *Every* early-stage dementia patient (and their family and friends) always tells themselves (and everyone else) that they’re fine. It’s an easy thing to think, there’s never a clear bright-line where things obviously stop being fine, and the charade saves them from having to confront horrifying questions about their own mortality. When I start getting demented, I plan to also insist I’m fine, and you guys will just have to cope with whatever incomprehensible garbage ends up on this blog. But Joe Biden and his family have the future of the country in the balance. They need to step up and do the hard thing.
So I think he should decline the nomination and endorse some likeable purple-state governor. If Kamala Harris gets angry, he should just say “sorry, I’m a demented old man, you can’t blame me for my actions”. If she gets angry at the other Democrats, they should just say “sorry, it’s an old man’s dying wish, it would be cruel not to honor it”. If Biden endorses Newsom, fine, whatever. I don’t like Newsom because he’s all style and no substance, but maybe that’s what we need for a time like this. He’s the closest we can come in the real world to literally putting Generic Democrat on the ballot. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
But the markets say there’s only a ~25% any of this will happen. So maybe it’s too late to fix things. I think the proper Rationalist response is - okay, we screwed this one up. Now that we’ve learned our lesson, what’s the next upcoming thing like this - the one where we really *are* still in the window where we can affect it?
I think it’s Sonia Sotomayor. Nate Silver, who was right on Biden very early, [has been pushing this really hard](https://www.natesilver.net/p/sonia-sotomayors-retirement-is-a). Sotomayor is getting old and unhealthy, and might die within the next four years. If she dies, and Republicans win the Presidency and Senate, Trump will get to nominate her replacement, making the Supreme Court 7-2 conservative. This is the same thing that happened with RBG. Most Democrats wish RBG would have retired when she had the chance. Now Sotomayor has the chance, so she should do it. If we’re going to have a national moment where we worry about aging government officials staying on longer than is good for their party or their country, she should be the next target. Elites can sublimate whatever emotions they’re having about Biden onto Sotomayor, and maybe it’ll do some good.
(I hate saying “elites should” as if I’m just lodging a complaint into the ether. But I genuinely don’t know who I would pressure, or how, to make this happen. I don’t think calling my representative is appropriate here. If someone knows what *is* appropriate, let me know.)
Speaking of elites - one other update I’ve had from this situation is that I’m less confident that some group fairly called “Democratic elites” is in control in any meaningful way. I always knew that the party had different factions and nobody had obvious, trivial control. But I thought if the party was threatened, some important people could meet in a room and talk things out. Wasn’t this what happened when Obama endorsed Biden over Bernie, everyone pivoted in lockstep, and Bernie’s campaign imploded? I mean sure, maybe this was bad, but didn’t it at least demonstrate “state capacity” that the party could use in more important situations? I don’t know, maybe that was just a fluke and the party has no state capacity at all. I’m not even sure *Biden’s aides* have state capacity. Maybe the answer to “why didn’t his aides come up with a better plan for this debate?” is just “it wasn’t any particular aide’s job to do that, and they didn’t coordinate”.
This is getting depressing, so here are my prediction market sources for the summary above. Some of these are embeds, which mean they auto-update, which means by the time you read this they might not say what I said they said - all of my numbers are correct as of 1 AM on July 1.
### Prediction Market Sources | Scott Alexander | 146153982 | Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden | acx |
# Open Thread 336
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Now I’ve also released the new version of Unsong as an ebook on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Unsong-Scott-Siskind-ebook/dp/B0D84DLKZW/) and [Gumroad](https://astralcodexten.gumroad.com/l/wbefjq?_gl=1*9x0cux*_ga*NzAzNzI3Mzg4LjE3MTk0MDUwNTI.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*MTcxOTgzNTQ5Ny4yLjEuMTcxOTgzNTcxOC4wLjAuMA..), both $4.99. Yes, somehow the Amazon hardcopy is my pen name and the ebook is my real name, probably I made a mistake, probably I’ll get it corrected soon.
**2:** New [subscriber only post,](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscriber-bonus-debate-questions) with bonus questions from Thursday’s mock debate post. | Scott Alexander | 146162562 | Open Thread 336 | acx |
# Your Book Review: Dominion
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
Matthew Scully, author of *Dominion*, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.”
Scully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. Let this be a warning to other authors — write just [one little State of the Union](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/transcripts/bushtext_012004.html) address that exalts the War on Terror and your books might not get a lot of reach in more liberal, EA-adjacent circles.
Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s *[Consider the Lobster](https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)*and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” *Dominion* is the book for you.
If you are intrigued by the type of person who would use their ingroup status to get other conservatives to let their guard down, only to roast them in print for their views on animals, *Dominion* is the book for you.
If you have a bone to pick with Peter Singer’s particular brand of utilitarianism but you also begrudgingly respect him, *Dominion* is *definitely* the book for you. Singer is mentioned at least a dozen times, and it’s usually to remind people that he’s a godless infanticide defender.
It’s really no offense to Singer though, that’s just how Scully rolls. He’s an equal opportunity criticizer. Whether you’re an icon of the animal rights movement, some guy bragging about shooting a fenced-in lion, a revered conservative thinker like Roger Scruton, basically every Christian except St. Francis of Assisi, the head of a public company, or a dear personal friend who happened to write an article that annoyed him, you get the same treatment in *Dominion* — cutting, well-researched, and often really funny arguments as to why your views on animals are misguided.
He sees it as a huge moral failing of modern society that most people are indifferent to the suffering of animals that are not our pets. It pains him deeply that this blindspot exists. It is so obvious to him that all animals deserve our respect. But as someone in George W. Bush’s inner circle would surely understand, ethics are complicated and smart people can disagree. In order to stave off as many objections as possible, Scully explores every inch of the animal welfare landscape.
It’s the variety of ways in which he tries to make his plea for mercy that gives the book its unique flavor. He explores hunting, whaling, factory farming, religion, ethics, capitalism, and the science of consciousness. He puts boots on the ground at hunting conventions and inside factory farms, touching squealing piglets with his bare hands. He talks to hippie activists. He engages with lifelong hunters who will die on the hill that dolphins are, in fact, really dumb. He secures interviews with high ranking diplomats from Japan. He can be repetitive, and some of his arguments miss the mark, but the sheer determination of the effort has to be commended. I have yet to encounter another animal welfare writer who put their credibility on the line to secure an exclusive interview with a high-ranking meat industry executive and then called them a moral monster to their face.
The title of the book comes from the Book of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The ultimate question of the book is whether having dominion means we are free to do whatever we want to animals, or if we owe them mercy. Scully leaves no stone unturned in making the case that we should mostly let the creeping things creepeth in peace.
## God cares about animal welfare and so should you
Science and reason aside, the bedrock of Scully’s generous spirit toward animals comes from a personal belief that all of God’s creatures deserve “whatever measure of happiness their creator intended for them.” We should care for them simply because “they are fellow creatures, sharing with you and me the breath of life, each in their own way bearing His unmistakable mark.”
It’s a big departure from most interpretations of the bible, especially by conservatives. Most people say that we got dominion, and we can use it as we see fit. If we want to exercise dominion in the name of cramming animals into dark sheds so we can have cheap bacon, so be it. God made the rules.
Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
Lambs are a big deal in the bible. Jesus is named both The Lamb of God and The Good Shepherd. He also helps a sheep who fell into a pit on the sabbath, because it's the right thing to do even though Jews aren’t supposed to do work that day. The sheep references are layered metaphors, sure. They can still be revealing of a deeper intent. As Scully puts it, “What kind of mind was it that went back again and again to the lamb and other animals like the birds and fox to convey images of gentleness and suffering and providential love? And why a helpless, harmless creature to illustrate the Christian way instead of a proud and violent predator?”
But weren’t they sacrificing animals all the time back then, and also eating animals? Yes, but focusing on that aspect misses the forest for the trees. Sure, Jesus was not a vegetarian, and there are no stirring quotes where he implores everyone to be kind to the animals. But Jesus’s thing was more about ending barbaric practices. Jesus tells the Pharisees at one point: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.” Perhaps if early Judea had ‘guaranteed kill’ hunting expeditions targeting endangered animals, factory farms, and rocket propelled harpoons for hunting Whales, Jesus would have condemned those practices too.
While we do have dominion over the creatures, the bible tells us to rule their world with “holiness and justice.” Is it holy to capture baby monkeys and serve their brains to tourists in Indonesia in search of an exotic delicacy? Where is the justice in selectively breeding deers to have gigantic racks and then shooting them in fenced-in preserves?
Another interesting case to consider is that of the post-flood second covenant, where we are told of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” Hmm, ‘all flesh’ sounds pretty unambiguous to me. Even more curious is a part in Genesis where it sure sounds like we are told to stop with all this meat eating:
> *“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.”*
It doesn't say we can’t eat meat. The writers themselves were meat eaters. It does make you pause, though.
I find Scully’s viewpoint refreshing. I’m so used to reading about neuron counts, moral weights, and nociceptors that it can be easy to forget that there are other ways of getting through to people. Maybe it’s worth investing more in an approach that asks whether we really think God/the universe/the simulator smiles on those that castrate baby pigs without anesthetic so that their boar musk doesn't make our pork taste slightly off?
Here is Scully’s summary of the situation:
> *“Here I only put to you one simple proposition about the animals we raise for fur and flesh. If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows — for me it’s an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures’ little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given to them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us — but for them it is the world.”*
This current of thought also interests me because making any inroads with Christians has the potential to greatly reduce animal suffering. There are 2.4 billion Christians on the planet. Convincing even a small fraction of them that God wants them to be nicer to animals could have a hugely positive effect.
My dad is a born-again Christian. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from him it’s that evangelicals love, nay positively live, for quoting scripture. The other day, instead of just being a passive recipient, I tossed back some lines I learned from Dominion. But Dad, doesn't Jesus count every sparrow? Is there not a covenant between God and the animals, too? And what’s this I hear about Moses being chosen by God in part because Moses offered to help a lost lamb quench its thirst?
These questions opened up a rich new vein of conversation for us. He went from flatly declaring that concern for animals should never get in the way of a farmer’s profit motive to saying, “Sure, allowing them a little more space seems like a decent and godly thing to do.” Then he tried to convince me to start a company that invents more humane slaughter methods. Progress.
As to whether God actually wants us to be kind to animals, we can never really know. But in a Pascal’s wager sort of way, it seems like a good bet to extend love to our furry, feathery, scaly, and even chitin-y friends just in case.
## I can’t find the expiration date on this divine mandate
Scully is adamant that we should not pass judgment on farmers, hunters, or furriers of the past. At one point we needed all that meat and fur to survive. Now we have tractors, plant-based proteins, and synthetic fibers. Can’t we thank the animals for their service and send them on their way? Scully thinks so. Once we no longer need the animal, “Responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once ‘necessary evils’ become just evils.”
But it’s not clear what those “necessary evils” are these days, and Scully doesn't provide a clear framework to judge. He leans a little too heavily for my taste on the idea that we can know evil when we see it. I don’t think he adequately addresses how messy this all gets in the real world.
For example, Scully is no fan of xenotransplantation, the process of transplanting animal organs into human bodies. He puts it firmly in the speculative, high-risk, and disturbing category of animal research. While Scully believes biotechnology can be a force for good, he thinks genetic engineering and the making of chimeras tilts us into the realm of playing God. He heeds the words of Pope John Paul II: “Resist the temptation of productivity and profit that work to the detriment of respect for nature.”
But what if we turn to the guy who recently went through the [first ever successful transplant](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68630020) of a pig kidney that was genetically designed to be used in humans? I bet he’d consider all the previous carnage a necessary evil indeed.
Scully is also horrified by the research programs that were going on in the early 2000’s that aimed to get rid of the “stress gene” in pigs. Apparently, stressed pigs release a hormone that gives the meat a bad taste. He rails against human hubris and how disturbing it is that we would experiment on these harmless creatures just to make their flesh slightly more palatable.
But he ignores the fact that a less stressed line of pigs will, in theory, be more comfortable. The ACX grant winners at the [Far Out Initiative](https://faroutinitiative.com/) are pushing things even further than those scientists with the stress gene. They are on a quest to alter farm animal genetics so that they don’t feel pain at all. Would it be a bad thing if they succeed? There could be unintended consequences of course, but on the other hand, the most eloquent plea for mercy isn’t going to make the day-to-day pain of being a farm animal hurt any less. There are billions of farmed creatures out there who could use a little more than thoughts, prayers, and philosophical musings about what does and does not qualify as “respect for nature.”
## Meeting a parrot is worth a thousand theories
Even if God bestows his love on all creatures, a lot of the oomph of Scully’s argument falls away if animals are merely unfeeling machines. Redwood trees and LLMs aside, it’s hard to get people fired up about the moral treatment of anything but sentient beings.
So, do animals feel pain? Are they conscious? Do they have thoughts in the same way we do, however different from ours? The dominant paradigm in animal research when this book was published was that animals are unconscious. They reflexively react to stimuli but feel nothing. Scully cites many eminent researchers who are adamant about that being the case, but his main foil is the influential writer Stephen Budiansky, who argues that:
> *“The premise of animal ‘rights’ is that sentience is sentience, that an animal by virtue above all of its capacity to feel pain deserves equal consideration. But sentience is not sentience, and pain isn’t even pain. Or, perhaps, following Daniel Dennet’s distinction, we should say that pain is not the same as suffering...Our ability to have thoughts about our experiences turns emotions into something far greater and sometimes far worse than mere pain...”*
In response, Scully calls us to examine how we, as conscious humans, react when we are actually in the throes of pain. There’s not a lot of language use, not a lot of theorizing and rhapsodizing and bemoaning your future. “A kick in the shorts does not send a man into existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts.”
Also, animals dream. That seems to be a pretty good indicator that they have world simulation models somewhat similar to ours. Or else, what are they dreaming about? A 2001 MIT study stated that rats indeed dream, meaning “the ability to recall, reflect, and evaluate prior experience is something that goes on in animals at many levels.”
I was glad to see Scully focus as well on the fact that the same pain medication that works on humans works on animals. We use them as pain models in research all the time for a reason.
My favorite way Scully repudiates the behaviorists is by flat out rejecting the notion that we can’t know what it’s like to be a different creature. Wittgenstein thought that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Budiansky says that to see inside an animal brain would be “to enter a world without the words to describe it — and so is meaningless to us.” Scully is not buying it.
> *“Both of these strike me as the kind of observations that sound profound on first hearing and preposterous on the second. Observing a lion or lioness, prior to any theories we might bring to leonine reality, you or I might match the creature’s behavior with simple words like: ‘I’m hungry — time to go run down a zebra...I’m tired — time for a nap...The cubs are driving me to distraction...’*
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, [Thomas Nagel](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf). Scully firmly believes that while other beings don’t have conceptual language, it’s not a huge leap to think that we can describe the rudimentary thoughts and desires they have based on their behavior.
Scully’s approach can appear almost childish at times. He liberally quotes from books like *Bambi*, *Charlotte’s Web,* and *White Fang* as ways to express what animals might be thinking and feeling. But I think there’s a method to his madness. He’s getting us to tap into the feeling many of us get when we look at our pet and just *know* that they have an inner life that matters. Something like that happens to Daniel Dennet himself, he who was once so sure that animals are unfeeling automatons. The incident occurs during an appearance on NPR in the late 90’s. Dennet is on the show with an African Gray Parrot named Alex, as well as Alex’s trainer. After witnessing Alex do things like count out how many blocks of each color were in front of him, Dennet is bowled over, apparently convinced of Alex’s consciousness. He proclaims to all the viewers that:
> *“Alex is a remarkable and important individual in this world. I have seen enough of what Alex, the parrot, can do to realize that he is not just a well-trained circus animal. He is not just doing this by rote memorization. It hasn’t just been dinned into him. He makes remarkable transfers of knowledge and inferences. Alex is a pretty amazing parrot.”*
If animals have any feeling at all, it is incumbent upon us to up our mercy meter by like, 1000x. All of this really, really matters. While some of the most hardened among us truly don’t care if animals actually feel pain, people like Budiansky and Dennet do. And the first step toward a much less hellish world is to get people to see that while a lab rat might not be as smart as Alex the Parrot, can we be sure it feels literally no pain whatsoever?
These days, the consensus seems to be shifting toward recognizing most animals as sentient. Scully was surely heartened by the Declaration on Animal Consciousness that came out of NYU in 2024. It states that: “There is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.” It has collected hundreds of signatures from prominent scientists.
Still, the debate rages on. Eliezer Yudkowsky once gave [a full-throated defense](https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/) of the idea that pigs don’t feel pain because they lack an “inner listener.”
I wonder if Yudkowsky would change his mind if he had witnessed first hand the pig we meet in the first chapter of Dominion. This porcine hero noticed it’s owner was having a heart attack, started crying literal tears (pigs cry, who knew), left the confines of it’s fenced in yard for the first time ever, laid down in front of a passing car to force someone to stop and get out, and led that person to the house so they could rescue their owner. Inner listener or not, mirror test passer or not, that pig seems to be experiencing *something.*
## Dogs will never be bank managers and that’s okay
Comedian Neal Brennan has [a bit in his 2023 special](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1215147569070186) about how he doesn't like it when people ask him if his dog is a rescue.
> *“Yeah, they’re all rescues. None of these dogs were thriving on their own.*
>
> *I’ve never heard a story like, ‘Hey, where’d you guys get your labradoodle?’*
>
> *And they’re like, ‘I went into Bank of America, and she was the manager. Now, she’s our full-time labradoodle!’”*
It touches on a key theme in *Dominion*, which is that we don’t need to assign animals specific rights, or act like they are of equal intelligence to humans, in order to show them mercy. It also shouldn’t matter whether these animals can claim any rights of their own, and it’s irrelevant that they kill and eat each other. The entire point of being given dominion was so that we could exercise reason. We are not supposed to treat the animal kingdom as a moral guidepost.
There are people who insist that because no non-human animal can claim any rights, and because they don't treat each other as if they have rights, we have no obligation to accord them rights either. In fact, these people say, if we were to grant animals any moral status whatsoever it could lead to a slippery slope, and next thing you know you could be thrown in jail for swatting a fly.
Scully bites the bullet here and says, nah, that slippery slope you speak of, it does not exist. He thinks that what’s actually happening is that people fear they have a limited reservoir of love. They assume that by apportioning kindness out to animals, they will have less for humans. Jean Paul Sartre famously said as much: “When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.” Scully doesn't think that’s how the human heart works at all. Rather, our ability to feel compassion is nearly infinite, and deep down we all understand how powerful and gratifying it is to act with benevolence.
To make this point, Scully recounts the story of a mule who was being used in a coal mine in the late 1800s. A novelist who toured the Pennsylvania mine wrote of mules being kept underground for years at a time in particularly brutal conditions. When eventually brought to the surface, they “almost go mad with fantastic joy...they caper and career with extravagant mulish glee.” This mule refused to go back in at its appointed time, and the workers mercifully decided to just let it stay above ground.
Reflecting on the unbridled jubilance of the freed mule, Scully notes that, “Whenever any animal is locked away, or treated cruelly, or hunted or trapped, that is what we are taking away.” He also writes about a dolphin who is able to escape a fishing net after initially being caught. The dolphin is clearly ecstatic. It speeds off, leaping, spinning, reveling in its freedom. Scully wonders how one could witness such a thing and come away thinking that it matters one iota whether dolphins can “claim rights”.
Similarly, look at how most people react to stories about escaped farm animals. He cites a 1998 story about two pigs escaping from a slaughterhouse in England. Soon “all of Britain was following the drama.” After they were recaptured they were sent not to be killed but given over to an animal sanctuary, as their celebrity status made it intolerable to just eliminate them. Scores of similar stories can be found, such as [an escaped cow in the Netherlands](https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/dutch-cow-escapes-and-crowdfunding-saves-her-slaughter) that became a social media sensation. A quick crowdfunding campaign ensued, and there was no issue finding 50,000 euros to save her life. When people are actually confronted with the raw specter of a defenseless and innocent creature fighting for its life, the majority are reflexively merciful. It’s like the animal’s struggle for freedom, acting just as any of us would in the same situation, somehow unlocks hidden reservoirs of empathy.
Nowhere is our merciful and loving instinct more clear than when it comes to pets. Scully uses the archetypal family dog as an example:
> *“You do not ask more of him than he can give, nor do you think less of Scruffy because he can’t rake the leaves or handle the family finances. You don’t even think of him as having ‘rights’ and yet, useless as he is to the practical affairs of the household, over time he comes to fill a crucial place. He’s just sort of there, this furry, funny, needful, affectionate, and mysterious being creeping around the house. Everybody in the end gains something, and when her or she is gone a little bit of love has been subtracted.”*
It’s when talk of rights gives way to talk of liberation that Scully gets his hackles up. Though he “admires those who bother to take the matter of animal liberation seriously,” he finds it annoying, for instance, that some people don’t want him to use the word pet to describe his dog:
> *“‘Companion animal’, the suggested alternative, has a slightly false ring, as if our dogs and cats, if the relationship wasn’t working out, could go out into the world and set up for themselves somewhere else.”*
This is where, in my opinion, he starts to lose the plot. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the animal liberation crowd is aiming at literal equality between man and dog. I get the sense that those folks think of granting rights less as a way to put animals on the same plane as humans and more as a way to guarantee them the basic, decent treatment that Scully argues for throughout the book.
In theory, Scully should fully support an organization like the [Nonhuman Rights Project](https://www.nonhumanrights.org/), which brings lawsuits on behalf of creatures like great apes and elephants. Their goal is to change the law so that mammals of such immense intellect are recognized as people. Not people in the sense that they could get a driver’s license and run for office, but so that they can gain the right to live at a sanctuary instead of a barren cell in the zoo. If a corporation can be a legal person, why not Happy the Elephant? Scully, perhaps already feeling way out on a limb in a book where he admits that he almost didn’t talk about farmed animals for fear of alienating potential readers, never satisfactorily answers that question.
To his credit, he does think that lawmakers have a super important role to play, and he’s a big champion of making legal changes to protect animals. He just stubbornly wants the impulse toward change to be driven not by a desire to liberate, but by feelings of mercy, love, and responsibility.
## With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Scully, let’s recall, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Perhaps it is from having climbed so high in the conservative ranks that he gained the status and security necessary to feel comfortable absolutely roasting his fellow right-wingers.
He is particularly galled by what he sees as blatant hypocrisy. Conservatives are the first to complain about “man the perpetual victim, man the whiny special pleader, man the all-conquering consumer facing the universe with limitless entitlements and appetites to be met no matter what the costs.” Then these same conservatives turn around and do stuff like:
* Say on the one hand that all hunting is okay because it’s the natural state of things, and a core part of being human, while also claiming that humans are rational and scientifically minded beings who have good reasons for the actions they take.
* Proclaim that “the worst crime against nature is waste, not to use resources” as a defense of ‘harvesting’ any animal at any time, but ignore the enormous amount of waste generated by activities like industrial scale fishing, or the waste that flows into our rivers from factory farms.
* Demonize animal rights activists for being too sentimental and emotional, then fall back on arguments about tradition to justify things like clubbing seals or eating foie gras.
* Condemn those who raise cats and dogs for food in other countries while having no problem with the farming of cows and chickens in America. (I imagine Scully gets a kick out of what the folks at [Elwood Organic Dog Meat](https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/) are doing.)
* Call people who want to ban fur coats fascists.
Above all else, his biggest critique of the early 2000’s American conservatives is that they have let capitalism run amok. When he looks at how we are commodifying living, feeling creatures, it sickens him. When he sees how sentient beings are bought, sold, stuffed, trapped, shot, and persecuted, with very limited checks on what even the most barbaric human can do to the most majestic, he recoils.
To Scully, being a conservative means more than just being a free market absolutist, it means being a “fundamentally moral and not just economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” Laissez faire policies can be great, but they can lead to some dark places when applied to animal well-being and left unchecked. The Safari Club, an influential organization of wealthy, mostly conservative hunters, is exhibit A.
Scully spends 40+ pages decrying the excesses and absurdities he sees while attending the annual Safari Club convention in Reno, Nevada. He leaves wondering “if there is a wild creature left on the good earth that is not for sale in someone’s brochure, a single plain or forest or depth of sea that is not today being turned to profit.” It’s the type of place where visitors are encouraged to spend $35,000 on a White Rhino hunt before they get put on an endangered species list. Where proprietors can offer packages that guarantee a lion “trophy” because the animals are fenced in and, if needed, drugged. Where a popular DVD for sale is called *With Deadly Intent*. The climax of that film features hunters unloading their military grade rifles on an Elephant who is trying to protect its babies, felling it with “four dramatic brain shots.”
In March of 2023, the Humane Society released [a scathing undercover report](https://www.humanesociety.org/news/undercover-investigation-safari-club-international-convention-exposes-hypocrisy-used-promote) after attending a Safari Club convention. It documented potential violations of state law as well as numerous heinous acts that violate both common decency and, apparently, hunting ethics. All I could think when I saw it was how impressive it was that Scully beat them to this scoop by almost a quarter century, and how sad it was that nothing has changed.
Far worse than hunting in terms of scale and cultural penetration is what is happening on our large factory farms. Only a small minority of people hunt for sport, but most people eat meat. And the vast majority of that meat comes from animals raised in abhorrent conditions so as to keep costs as low as possible.
Scully goes to a hog farm in North Carolina owned by one of the world’s largest pork producers, Smithfield Foods, to see for himself what we lose when we treat animals like literal production machines. He uses his conservative credentials to slide under their radar. He’s given a full tour of the farm, access that other animal activists can only achieve by breaking in under cover of night.
What follows is the best and most haunting account I’ve read of what life is like for a factory farmed pig. The whole book is worth getting just to read this chapter about farming if, like me, you have some sort of compulsion to fully immerse yourself in the grisly, horrible nature of it all. Just a brief glimpse of what life is is enough to get the picture.
In the farrowing barn for pregnant sows, we find 500 pound pregnant pigs stuffed into crates that are seven feet long and about 22 inches wide. They can barely lie down, and they can’t turn around. They are covered in sores and tumors, and many have broken legs. One pig “is lying there covered in feces and dried blood, yanking maniacally on chains that have torn her mouth raw, as foraging animals will do when caged and denied straw or other roughage to chew.” When Scully remarks that the pig is hurting herself, his tour guide gives a nonplussed, “Oh, that’s normal.” Vets come by only to keep the sows just barely alive. Vet care is expensive, and these pigs are destined to die soon anyway.
After his visit, Scully sits down for an interview with a corporate executive from Smithfield and self-described conservative, Jerry Godwin. The reader is left to wonder whether Scully finds it amusing that this ultimate bad guy boss, this affront to all he holds dear, has the last name “God win.”
Scully asks him to comment on the frankly disturbing living conditions, only to have Godwin reject the premise. He thinks that the pigs like where they live. He says it’s good for them. They eat all they want, there are no predators, it’s warm, it’s monitored by PhD’s, and there’s nothing he would do differently. He also gives a curious concession to the fact that the pigs are not actually unfeeling robots:
> *“Pigs get bored...you need to give them something to play with. So what do you do? You take a piece of chain, and you put it in front of ‘em so they can reach up, play with it, and that’s about the extent of occupying their time. I mean, it sounds crude to you and me, but I think the people that seem to know more about it, and have studied the issue, say that is a proper way of getting rid of the boredom and keeping them busy.”*
How thoughtful. Scully’s line of questioning finally raises suspicion, and it dawns on Godwin that this is not a friendly interview with a conservative chum after all. Scully is denied the final phase of his tour, which was supposed to be a slaughter facility. He’s able to get one last jab in, telling Godwin, “If I ran a place like that, I wouldn’t let people in either.”
When Scully reflects on all that he’s witnessed, he is dismayed at the bastardization of conservatism that can justify what he saw at the Safari Club convention and on the Smithfield pork farm:
> *“I find nothing in the conservative moral tradition remotely resembling this sacrifice of every creature in sight before the almighty dollar. It is a different spirit entirely. It isn’t rooted in conservatism, or Christianity, or Judaism, or classic capitalism, or any other tradition with honorable origin. It is much closer to what, in conservative big-think circles, they call ‘the modern spirit.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, despite a personal abhorrence to animal cruelty, would today fit right in at one of our libertarian think tanks with his notions of human morality: ‘Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms...exploitation.’”*
It’s all enough to get him to reject the ‘logic of the larder’ arguments in favor of keeping the farming system as it is. That line of thinking says that it’s better these creatures get to live at all, rather than having never been born. Wouldn’t you prefer at least a little bit of life, however brief? No, says Scully. Absolutely not. He has seen a version of the repugnant conclusion as applied to pigs, and it’s a lot worse than muzak and potatoes.
## May all beings one day receive puppy love
Despite what is implied by the preponderance of vegan restaurants in my mid-sized midwestern city, animals on the whole are doing just as bad in 2024 as they were in 2002, when *Dominion* was published. By the numbers, [more animals are suffering under factory farming conditions](https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed#:~:text=It's%20estimated%20that%20three%2Dquarters,chickens%20are%20slaughtered%20each%20year.) than at any point in human history. We’re even [starting to farm the intelligent and sensitive Octopus](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-12-20/is-farm-breeding-octopus-an-act-of-cruelty), a depressing notion if there ever was one. As of this writing, [an avian flu epidemic](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-bird-flu-outbreak-spreads-chickens-cattle-raises-concerns-over-human-2024-05-01/) is decimating farmed chicken populations and has even spread to cows.
That said, there are flowers of hope that spring through the cracks. There was the [passage of Prop 12 in California](https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/a-year-of-wins-for-farmed-animals), where voters opted to give more space to farmed animals. The appeals went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the law was upheld. Scully spends the last part of the book imploring us to change the laws so that more animals are protected, so I’m sure he smiled at that one.
There have also been great strides made in corporate campaigns to get companies to move to cage free eggs. And a group of activists broke into a Smithfield pork farm, rescued sick piglets, and [got acquitted on all burglary and theft charges](https://theintercept.com/2022/10/08/smithfield-animal-rights-piglets-trial/). That happened in a red county in Utah, of all places.
But there’s one particular story from 2024 that shows how, despite those wins, not much has truly changed in our attitude towards animals. It has to do with the evangelical governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem.
In a recently released autobiography, Noem proudly admits to killing her 14 month old puppy. She said that the dog wasn’t a good hunter, wasn’t a good listener, and that it attacked some of her neighbor’s chickens. So, naturally, she took it out back and shot it in the head. Isn’t that the tough love this country needs? Doesn't that show good leadership instincts and an ability to make hard choices?
The public did not think so. When the story made the news, there was [considerable outrage from the right and left alike](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/01/opinion/kristi-noem-killing-puppy-trump/). Rarely does a story so cleanly unite people on both sides of the political aisle. Once a longshot GOP vice presidential candidate, Noem’s political star has dimmed. Bragging about carrying out a mafia-style killing of your own puppy will have that effect.
The average person viewed the act as one of those unequivocal evils that Scully talks about, a moment “when you do not need doctrines, when even rights become irrelevant, when life demands some basic response of fellow-feeling and mercy and love.” What a fine kumbaya moment for humanity. Look at us all, recognizing that it’s just not right to treat our fellow creatures with such disdain.
Except if you read beyond the headlines, you find out that she decided to kill one of her goats right after the dog. And it was the goat who didn’t die with one shot. He had to lay on the ground in agony while Noem went back to her car to get another bullet.
The dog was named Cricket. The goat had no name. It was just another machine on the farm. | a reader | 146003130 | Your Book Review: Dominion | acx |
# My 2024 Presidential Debate
**Alexander:** Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated ([2016](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/), [2020](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/05/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate-2020/), [2023](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate)), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.
Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was *Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health,* which overturned *Roe* *v. Wade* and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?
**Biden:** I’m not even sure states exist.
**Alexander:** You’re . . . not sure states exist?
**Biden:** The Pledge of Allegiance says that America is “one nation, indivisible.” Taken seriously, we have pledged to regard America as not being composed of parts. It is, like God, a perfectly simple entity, not requiring further explanation. How, then, could it have states? I realize this position may seem strange. But I pledged to believe it, and I am a man of my word[1](#footnote-1).
**Alexander:** I see. Mr. Trump, your response?
**Trump:** I think you can rescue the idea of states, if you think of them not as real in themselves, but as different aspects of the American atom. When we consider America in the context of its vastness and its freedom, we call it "Texas". When we consider America in the context of its innovation and cultural influence, we call it "California". When we consider America in the context of its barrenness and oil-producing-capacity, we call it "North Dakota". And so on. America does not have states in the sense that Queensland is a state of Australia, it has states in the sense that ice or steam is a state of water. This isn’t to say that America ever changes between these states, because change is a property of compound entities. But it may appear to outside observers in one or another of these ways at different times.
**Alexander:** President Biden, your position?
**Biden:** Yes, I think it is permissible to believe in states in the way that Mr. Trump thinks of them. There’s no difference between us on this issue.
**Alexander:** All right, thank you. I wasn’t really intending to get sidetracked by this. I mostly wanted to know your policy on abortion.
**Biden:** I’m pro-choice. That’s all there is to it. I think women have a fundamental right to decide what happens to their own body, and I think life begins at birth. And not one of these hokey Caesarian “births” either - a normal, natural childbirth.
**Alexander:** Can you clarify that last part?
**Biden:** Have you read Shakespeare? Being “from your mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” doesn’t count as being born. I think the anti-choice side is covertly trying to restrict abortion rights by expanding the definition of “born” until basically any method of separating a fetus from its mother would count.
**Alexander:** So if someone does get delivered by Caesarian section, what happens?
**Biden:** Legally they’re still part of their mother.
**Alexander:** And the mother can terminate them at any time?
**Biden:** Uh-huh.
**Trump:** Wait, what if they’re an evangelical Christian who’s born again?
**Biden:** Well, they can’t be born again. That would be their first birth.
**Trump:** But if they had that experience - if the Spirit came down and gave them the baptism of fire - would that count as a birth, end their status as a fetus, and prevent their mother from terminating them?
**Biden:** I suppose it would.
**Trump:** Great. Then there’s no difference between me and the President on this matter. Let’s keep going.
**Alexander:** Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?
**Biden:** Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, *The Golden Bough*. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.
**Alexander:** Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?
**Trump:** I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.
**Biden:** I agree that sacrificing celebrities to the Sun God is a reasonable fertility ritual. I don’t think my administration would do anything differently from Donald’s here either.
**Alexander:** Hmmm, this is tough. Let’s keep going on the cultural topics. Mr. Biden, some people say our country is overrun with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Do you think these are dangerous, and what do you plan to do about them?
**Biden:** Yes, I find conspiracy theories noxious. Every time I mention I’m from Delaware, people give me the side-eye. They say awful things like “Isn’t it weird that every major corporation is based in the same state? Isn’t it weird that the President also comes from this state? Isn’t it weird that it was supposedly the first state in the union, the nucleus around which all the rest of America coalesced? Isn’t it weird that it has all these firsts and mosts and bests, but nobody knows anyone who lives there? Isn’t it weird that nobody’s ever *been* there, even though it’s supposed to be right smack between NYC and DC?” I think questions like these should be banned. I think the people who ask them should be put in jail.
**Alexander:** Thank you President Biden, that’s consistent with the strong stance against misinformation that you’ve taken in the past. But Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?
**Trump:** GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.
The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture - and seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.
So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our *soma,* we will invent adrenochrome.
If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great.
**Alexander:** Griffons seem innocuous enough, but what about misinformation that’s dangerous to our democracy? Like, some people call you an election denier —
**Trump:** —oh, that’s absolutely true. You can read my social media posts for the full story, but I think there are just too many loose ends. Like, 2020 was the year we were all under COVID lockdown. How could we have had an election? People would have had to go out to caucuses, to polling places. It just doesn’t make sense.
People say “But Donald, I remember voting for you!” Yeah, you voted for me in 2016. Or “No, I remember voting for Joe Biden”. But Joe was on the ballot as Barack Obama’s vice-president in 2012. Or “I remember voting for Bernie Sanders in the primary, I was devastated when he lost.” That was 2016 too! If there was really an election in 2020, why can’t people remember anything about it that isn’t just a rehash of a previous election cycle?
**Biden:** Isn’t there an election every four years? There was one in 2016. There’s one now. Why wouldn’t there have been one in 2020?
**Trump:** The Gregorian year of 365 days doesn’t exactly match the Earth’s orbit around the sun. To keep the electoral calendar synced with the astronomical calendar, the rule goes that there’s an election once every four years, *except* once every one hundred years when there isn’t, *except* once every four hundred years when there is. The last year with no election was 1820[2](#footnote-2), we held one 1920 because of the four hundred year cycle, and then 2020 was another no-election year.
**Alexander:** If there wasn’t an election, how is Joe Biden president now?
**Trump:** That’s the conspiracy. He said there was an election and that he won, and the media went along with it. People had vague memories of voting in past elections, so they confabulated a memory of a 2020 election that never happened.
**Alexander:** President Biden, what do you have to say to the idea that your memories of the 2020 election are confabulated?
**Biden:** I guess I wouldn’t have any way of knowing if that was true or not.
**Alexander:** Then I guess this is another unproductive line of conversation. We’ll have to keep looking for some other cultural topic where the two of you disagree. How about this - Mr. Trump, you’ve given some conflicting messages on LGBT+ rights. Will you promise to support *Obergefell v. Hodges*, which enshrines a constitutional right to same-sex marriage?
**Trump:** Sorry, I can’t support it. I believe all men are brothers. But that means all gay sex is incest. And incest is wrong.
**Alexander:** What about lesbians?
**Trump:** Same as straight women. They can only marry if they have no brothers. If they do have brothers, then the two lesbians’ brothers are themselves brothers. And the sister of your brother’s brother is your sister. So that would make the two lesbians sisters.
**Biden:** But even if they didn’t have brothers, wouldn’t they still have fathers? And then the fathers would be brothers, which would make the two lesbians cousins, right? Isn’t that still incest?
**Trump:** I believe there are no fathers in America.
**Biden:** No fathers?
**Trump:** The Constitution bans any American from holding a noble title. And what title could be nobler than that of “father”?
**Biden:** Then who contributes the Y-chromosomes to male children?
**Trump:** Don’t get me wrong, I agree that men contribute half of the genetic material to an embryo. I just don’t think they should be considered a formal relative of the child. That’s why abortion is a woman’s choice. Because the man doesn’t count as a legal relative.
**Alexander:** Mr. Trump, I guess I’m getting increasingly confused about your position on abortion. Are you saying that fathers shouldn’t have any rights in abortion decisions?
**Trump:** I think that, insofar as fathers exist, their rights in abortion decisions should be left up to the states, insofar as states exist.
**Biden:** That seems suitably cautious. I agree with Mr. Trump.
**Alexander:** Aaargh, fine. Let’s get something really controversial. The two of you have consistently been at odds on immigration. President Biden, Mr. Trump accuses you of presiding over a “border crisis”, where hundreds of thousand of foreigners have entered the country illegally. Is he right or wrong?
**Biden:** “Foreigner” is the wrong word to use here. I believe that during the theophany at Philadelphia, the souls of all future Americans were present, and agreed to the Constitution along with the delegates. But some of these souls were erroneously born into foreign bodies, and as part of the Messianic process we must gather them back into America.
**Trump:** But how would you separate these souls from purely economic migrants?
**Biden:** I believe that only those with a spark of American-ness in their soul will survive the journey. I believe the Rio Grande is a spiritual as well as a physical river, like the Jordan or the Rubicon. I believe that if one sets out to swim across the Rio Grande, truly accepting death in one’s heart as a potential outcome, then when one reaches the northern shore one is cleansed of all one’s foreignness, an American by baptism.
**Trump:** I don’t buy it. I still think the only solution to immigration is a big, beautiful wall.
**Alexander:** Yes, tell us about your wall plans.
**Trump:** It will be one hundred forty-four cubits high, made of jasper, with fifty gates, and names written thereon which are the names of the fifty states. And the wall will have thirteen foundations, and on them the names of the thirteen colonies The foundations of the wall will be garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation will be jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst; the thirteenth, an adamant. And the fifty gates will be fifty pearls; each of the gates shall be of one pearl.
**Biden:** Hmmmm - my biggest concern about this is - with a wall that big, I’m not even sure that you, or I, or other American citizens could get over it. And that’s unfair. If we’re going to do this, we need to start from square one. Everyone starts outside the wall. Then the people who manage to make it past get to repopulate the country. That’s the fair way to do things.
**Trump:** Yes, that’s already what I meant. There’s no difference between us on this issue.
**Alexander:** Mmmhhhm. Well, we’re almost out of time and I still haven’t been able to find any substantial disagreement. Let’s just wrap this up early. President Biden, you get the first closing statement.
**Biden:** My fellow Americans, I am humbled to standing here before you today as your President. No, more than humbled. Flabbergasted. Do you realize how bizarre it is, that, out of eight billion humans, I’m the leader of the most powerful country in the world? It doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to you, because someone has to be President. But it doesn’t make sense to me, because the sheer coincidence that the person I happen to be is also the person who is President - that has one in eight billion odds. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. Sometimes I think it’s some sort of weird dream I’m having, and I’ll wake up and be a sanitation engineer in Pittsburgh or something. But this seems more vivid and more continuous than a dream. I think the more likely explanation is that some future posthuman is running a historical simulation of the 2024 US election, and that only I and maybe my opponent are fully-conscious humans with real internal experiences. For years I’ve tried to escape this conclusion, but it looms before me, as compelling as it’s ever been.
If, sitting at home in this moment, you are fully conscious, then you know a true fact that you can never communicate to me. No matter how loudly you insist on your own interiority, I would just hear it as an NPC programmed to say those words. But imagine if you could convince me! Imagine how wonderful it would be! This great country - all entirely real! The redwoods of California - real! The mighty Mississippi - real! The skyscrapers of Manhattan - real! All you three hundred million Americans, in your countless races and religions and separate lives - real, every one of you! I think my heart would break with joy.
If this is true, I will never know. But I would like to think I don’t have to. If our country is a phantasm, I love it still. Once I dreamt about a woman as beautiful as the sun, and when I woke, I found I loved her still. Even to this day I pine for her. Can I not love America too, even if it is also a dream? If you are all cogs in the historical simulation of some posthuman artillect, can I not love the America that must once have been, even as our hearts stir still when we remember Greece or Rome?
So this is my campaign promise: I will fight for every one of you just as hard as if you were actual people. And when the final votes come in this November, as the world disintegrates all around us - like stagehands, dragging the scenery away at the end of a Broadway pageant, the last letters to escape my lips before I dissolve into code and air will be “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
**Alexander:** Donald Trump, your closing?
**Trump:** Well, it looks like we finally found a real disagreement. Joe Biden doesn’t believe in this country. He doesn’t believe it exists. Well, I think he’s wrong on anthropics, and wrong for America.
If you accept the self-indication assumption, ie that you’re more likely to exist in worlds that have more people, then that exactly counterbalances his concern. Consider two worlds, one of which contains a billion people and one of which contains only Biden. It’s true that Biden is approximately a billion times more likely to be President in the second world. But he’s a billion times more likely to exist at all in the first world. The two billion-to-one odds ratios cancel out, leaving each world equally likely. Therefore, Biden should be agnostic over various different sizes of America.
But I’m not currently President, and neither is the average American. We don’t have to explain away our presidency. That means that, conditional on us observing that we’re American, worlds with more Americans are more likely. The world with three hundred million Americans isn’t just equally likely, but far more likely than the solipsistic world where we exist alone[3](#footnote-3).
But this same line of argument suggests that Americas even bigger than ours are more likely still. Under some assumptions, they are so extraordinarily likely that they overwhelm the evidence we have for a three-hundred-million person America, forcing us to posit some conspiracy to conceal the true size of our country, or some sort of topological twist in the North American continent hiding its true extent.
My fellow Americans, I believe in America. I believe in it so hard that I think there must be more to America than the fifty states we see. I think the argument I just laid out suggests there may be hundreds, maybe even thousands of states. And that’s why I’m running for President here tonight.
I want to fight for all Americans. Not just rich people, or white people, or people who are causally connected to the visible universe. I will be the president of all the trillions of pan-dimensional hyper-Americans who anthropic arguments assure us must exist. I will work to find them, bring them back into the fold, and make our country greater and freer than it has ever been before.
So let freedom ring from the marble pillars of New Cornwall to the baobabs of Van Buren!
Let freedom ring from the vortices of Magec to the shores of Lake Doremos[4](#footnote-4)!
Let freedom ring from the fungus-forests of Elevennessee to the minarets of Washington DCXVII!
And when all of these places have been restored to the same 4-manifold, and the United States has achieved its manifest destiny of stretching from Nonbeing even unto Eternity, then, and only then, will we be able to say we have Made America Great Again. Thank you, God bless, and good night.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
This is self-plagiarism; I originally published a version of this argument on my Tumblr.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Look it up!
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
See further discussion [here](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-argument-for-god/comment/59798871).
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
Cf. https://backstates.fandom.com/wiki/Backstates\_Wiki | Scott Alexander | 142237570 | My 2024 Presidential Debate | acx |
# Clarification On "Fake Tradition Is Traditional"
I think I got [the original post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional) slightly off.
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.
The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?
Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence [but doesn’t seem too successful](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/). People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.
But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means. Arches and columns are iconic architectural features. But they were originally invented by people just trying to figure out how to efficiently support buildings (columns might have started as tree trunks, and only later been translated into stone). Likewise, gargoyles are whimsical and exciting, but they started life as utilitarian rainspouts that gradually became more ornamented and fanciful.
Moving from objects to observances - Jews break a glass at weddings because some ancient rabbi broke a glass at a wedding to get people’s attention and tell them to stop being so loud and rowdy. Even very weird supernatural traditions are in some sense “utilitarian” - some theories trace Halloween costumes back to people who genuinely believed vengeful ghosts might be out for revenge that night, and very practically disguised themselves from potential unfriendly spirits.
So instead of the original post’s two opposed things, it might make more sense to think of three things:
1. Doing something for completely practical reasons, without intending for it to form an aesthetic/ritual/community.
2. Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with no reference to sacredness or tradition.
3. Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with a story of how it relates to sacredness and tradition.
My claim is that both (1) and (3) work well and can potentially be the origin of valuable aesthetics/rituals/communities, but (2) works less well.
But if you need an aesthetic/ritual/community in a hurry, you can’t just do random utilitarian things that make sense for your practical problems and expect them to turn into beloved traditions in a reasonable amount of time - the whole point of the utilitarian route is that you’re *not* thinking about aesthetic/ritual/community while you do it. At that point, (3) is your best bet. | Scott Alexander | 145888347 | Clarification On "Fake Tradition Is Traditional" | acx |
# Open Thread 335
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** GiveWell is looking for a Head of Operations, probably someone with many years of leadership experience. Compensation $250K - 300K, remote work acceptable. [See here for more details](https://boards.greenhouse.io/givewell/jobs/4048923008?gh_src=173bb58b8us).
**2:** New subscriber only post, [The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mistakes-are-all-waiting-to-be), on my very early experience as a parent. Current plan is to make most parenting posts subscriber-only to prevent too much information about my kids from getting all over the Internet, sorry.
**3:** I may have to remove one of the book review finalists, *Sixth Day And Other Tales*, for voting irregularities. If you wrote the review, please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) so we can try to figure out what happened. | Scott Alexander | 145938359 | Open Thread 335 | acx |
# Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one.
But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well.
Editor’s note: I have added this picture for context.
In his portrait, gracefully curled back hair and expressive eyebrows sit above two wide eyes that communicate a kind of amused resignation. It is the face of someone watching from afar as a trivial misunderstanding blossoms into a full-fledged argument.
His name, I learned, was Yukichi Fukuzawa. And an English translation of his autobiography happened to be available in main stacks of the University of Tokyo library.
Fukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Osaka in 1835. He is often described as a Japanese Benjamin Franklin. But with his knack for popping up at moments of great historical importance he also slightly resembles a Japanese Forrest Gump. When Japan opens its ports to American and European ships, he’s there. When Japan makes its first diplomatic missions abroad, he’s there. And when you dive into the history of Japan’s modern institutions—the police force, the universities, the banking system, the press—Fuzukawa is there as well.
He is most famous for translating, distilling, and disseminating Western knowledge in multiple fields through books such as *An Encouragement of Learning* and *An Outline of a Theory of Civilization*. But it is his autobiography, published just two years before his death in 1901, that offers the most comprehensive record of his life and thought.
We are lucky to have the book at all. As one of Fukuzawa’s students says in the preface, for years he rebuffed requests to set down his life story in writing. But when a visiting foreign dignitary began asking him some questions about his early childhood and education, Fukuzawa summoned a stenographer to record his answers. The book we have is an edited transcript of that impromptu oral history. And—as I found to my great surprise—it’s absolutely hilarious.
## Abominable Numbers
Fukuzawa’s father is a frustrated scholar who wants nothing more than to study his Chinese classics in peace. However, due to his position as treasurer for the lord of Nankatsu, he must spend his days negotiating loans on his superior’s behalf.
Hoping to give his children a proper Confucian education, he sends Fukuzawa’s older siblings to calligraphy classes, only to be shocked to discover that they are also being taught math: “It is abominable,” he recalls his father saying, “that innocent children should be taught to use numbers—the instrument of merchants. There is no telling what the teacher may do next.”
When his father dies, the family moves to the small village of Nankatsu, where Fukuzawa proceeds to spend his childhood… not doing much of anything. He says he didn’t go to school because “there was nobody to force me to do so.” So instead he spends his time learning how to mend sandals and engaging in casual acts of blasphemy.
One day he inadvertently steps on a paper charm. After being upbraided by his brother for this breach of propriety, he decides to test the powers of these sacred charms by stealing one and deliberately trampling on it. When “heavenly vengeance” fails to manifest, he decides to up his impiety game by dropping the same charm in the stinky outhouse. When nothing happens again, he concludes that all religion is superstitious nonsense. He proceeds to replace the sacred stones in the local shrines with stones that he picks up along the side of the road. A little later, watching his neighbors make rice wine offerings to the shrines during a holy festival, he scoffs to himself: “There they are—worshipping my stones, the fools!”
From an early age he bristles at the hierarchical structure of Edo-period Japan. One objection is that feudalism forces people like his father into roles they have no interest in or aptitude for. But he also rails against the innumerable regulations, which make people behave in ridiculous ways. For example, there is a law banning samurai from attending theatrical performances (it was considered vulgar entertainment). To circumvent this ban, he says, “[m]any of the less scrupulous samurai would go to the plays with their faces wrapped in towels.” But these incognito samurai were not about to pay for their tickets like commoners, so instead they would break through the bamboo fence surrounding the theater. If the management of the establishment objected, the offending samurai would simply “utter a menacing roar and go striding on to take the best seats.”
Mostly, Fukuzawa resented the deferential attitude he had to adopt when interacting with higher-ranking samurai, especially if they were stupid. To be fair, he also expresses disdain for the sycophantic tones that peasants, artisans, and merchants were trained to assume when addressing samurai like him.
He decides to leave Nankatsu as soon as he can, in the hopes that the social atmosphere elsewhere might prove less stifling. But first he must finally attend to his education.
By the age of “fourteen or fifteen,” he says, “many of the boys of my age were studying… and I became ashamed of myself.” He finally begins going to school, which, in his case, involves reading aloud passages from Confucius and other Chinese sages in the morning and then debating the meaning of those same passages in the afternoons. Despite his late start, he learns Chinese, and proves himself a quick study. After a few years he graduates to the position of “*zenza*, or sub-master, in Chinese classics.”
## Climbing by One’s Brush
When Fukuzawa was born, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate—a hereditary military dictatorship founded in 1603. Under the rule of the shoguns, Japan enjoyed a remarkable two and a half centuries of peace. This was accomplished through a combination of techniques, including a policy of isolationism, the codification of a social hierarchy that granted privileges to the samurai warrior class (particularly those samurai whose ancestors had been allies of the first Tokugawa shogun), and the embrace of a Confucian ideology of duty and subservience.
Fukuzawa says that the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ships in 1853 and 1854 “made its impression on every remote town in Japan.” The resulting treaty, the Convention of Kanagawa, opened select Japanese ports to American ships. Harmless as such a treaty may sound, the Japanese had just watched Britain attack the Qing dynasty over domestic trade policy. Japan seemed destined to endure a similar loss of sovereignty now that the Americans had gotten a foot in the door.
Also worth remembering is the fact that the shogun’s formal title was *sei’i-tai shogun*, roughly “the general in charge of defeating the barbarians.” Given this was precisely what the shogun had failed to do in this instance, dissent was bound to grow.
Indeed, the failure of the shogun to expel the barbarians cast suspicion on every pillar of the Tokugawa regime. Far from protecting Japan, many perceived Japan’s isolationism as contributing to its technological stagnation. Moreover, the contradictions between Confucian teachings, which advocated meritocracy, and the reality of Tokugawa society, in which rank was determined by birth, threatened the intellectual rationale underpinning feudal society. This was particularly true among the samurai, whose relative status was largely determined by the side for which their distant ancestors had fought at the Battle of Sekigahara over 250 years earlier.
Finally, those who were dissatisfied with the status quo were quick to point out that the shogun nominally ruled at the pleasure of the emperor (who lived a cloistered life in Kyoto under the shogunate’s watchful eye). This imperial imprimatur had previously cemented the shogun’s legitimacy. But it suddenly seemed like a massive vulnerability. If the emperor had authorized the shogunate, the thinking went, he could also dissolve it.
These political matters seem to have hardly entered into the consciousness of the young Fukuzawa except for the fact that the intensified interest in Western learning represented a ticket out of Nankatsu.
For over two centuries, the sole point of contact between Japan and Europe had been an artificial island in Nagasaki called Dejima. The Dutch had occupied the island since 1641, exercising a carefully monitored monopoly in trade. As a result, the few Western books that entered Japan were generally written in Dutch. Any Japanese person who wanted to learn Western science therefore needed to gain fluency in that language (which, given the limited opportunities for interaction between the two groups, was not so easy).
Soon after Perry’s arrival, Fukuzawa’s older brother tells him that Japan needs more people to study Western science. He asks Fukuzawa: “Are you willing to learn the Dutch language?”
It is worth noting at this point that not everyone in Japan was thrilled at the prospect of studying Dutch.
Some of these objections were aesthetic in nature. One Japanese scholar [complained](https://www.google.co.jp/books/edition/Civilization_and_Enlightenment/GEyvP_LZARQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=western+dutch+japanese+characters+slavering+cow&pg=PA7&printsec=frontcover) that Dutch letters were simply too ugly to communicate civilized ideas. Whereas Chinese characters were “balanced and well-proportioned” like “beautiful women” and “deftly constructed” like “golden palaces and jade pagodas,” the letters of the Latin alphabet were “confused and irregular,” resembling nothing so much as “dried bones” and the “slime lines left by snails.”
Popular verse conveyed a similar message. “When the samisen string snaps,” one Japanese poet exclaimed, “it looks like a Dutch letter.”
Whether or not the scholars and poets had a point, such sentiments were also indicative of what the kids today would call “massive cope.” After the arrival of Perry’s ships, notions of Japanese supremacy had collided headlong with an unforgiving reality wherein Japan was at the mercy of powerful and predatory Western nations.
Of these consequential political developments, the young Fukuzawa seems to have been mostly unaware. Remembering this time near the end of his life, he says, “I would have been glad to study a foreign language or the military art or anything else if it only gave me the chance to go away.”
Undoubtedly, part of the attraction of such a course of action lay in the fact that the classroom formed a rare place in Japanese society where a parallel hierarchy based on competence could emerge. Despite never evincing a concern with acquiring a better social position, Fukuzawa could not have been totally ignorant of the fact that scholarship represented one of the few opportunities for upward social mobility in the shogunate—a phenomenon captured by the delightful phrase “climbing by one’s brush.” Schoolrooms were a rare place where he could leave his social betters in his dust; and by becoming a noted scholar he could force his superiors to acknowledge his abilities.
## A Two-Sworded Man
After setting his mind to learning Dutch, Fukuzawa accompanies his brother on a business trip to Nagasaki.
Things begin smoothly enough. Soon after his arrival, he manages to get a position as an “eating guest” in the house of an expert on Dutch artillery. The son of his lord’s chancellor is also studying Dutch in Nagasaki and helps show him the ropes. But within a few months, Fukuzawa has become an indispensable assistant to his host. He earns his keep making handwritten copies of Dutch books and translating diagrams for operating field cannons.
Fukuzawa’s swift progress upsets the chancellor’s son, his social superior. In a fit of jealousy, the chancellor’s son asks his father to order Fukuzawa home.
Because defying such an order by staying in Nagasaki would be unthinkable, Fukuzawa decides to defy the order by leaving for Osaka instead. He fakes a letter of introduction for himself which earns him a stay in some hotels. By sailboat and by foot he gradually makes his way to his family’s storage office in Osaka where his brother has assumed their father’s role as treasurer.
In Osaka he resumes his studies of Dutch at a local academy. But before too much time has passed, Fukuzawa’s brother dies. Fukuzawa returns to Nankatsu to observe the mandatory fifty days of mourning. But upon his arrival, he finds that his relatives have decided on his behalf that he will assume his brother’s position—a role filled with obligations and responsibilities that would tie him down for life.
In order to return to his studies, Fukuzawa must now navigate a minefield of formal and informal rules. On the informal side, he must manage his family, who are all furious that he is even considering abandoning his post. He gets approval from his mother to return to Osaka, which overrides the objections of his other disgruntled relatives. But there is also the matter of attaining official sanction from his lord. Due to his new status as a household head, he must get a permit to travel “abroad” (in this case, to another city).
He writes a petition asking for permission to go study Dutch. The lord’s secretary reviews the petition and tells Fukuzawa flatly that it “will not be accepted.” The reasoning is simple: “in this clan,” says the secretary, “there has not been any precedent of a samurai leaving his duty for the purpose of studying Dutch culture.” But the solution is simple: Fukuzawa is to lie and say he is going to study artillery instead, because someone else has done that before. When Fukuzawa objects to such underhanded tactics, the secretary responds with a statement that is very culturally revealing: “It does not matter whether your statement is true to fact or not so long as it follows precedent.”
After rewriting his petition in the recommended fashion, Fukuzawa gets his permit and sets off again for Osaka. At this point the reader is treated to a detailed description of Japanese student life in the late 1850s.
There are sophomore hijinks, many of them involving alcohol (*plus ça change*): “I was pretty well behaved in most respects,” he says, “but in drink I was a boy without conscience.” At one point he decides to quit drinking. To ease his cravings, he takes up smoking instead. But after less than a month he relents (“my old love of wine—it would not be forgotten”) and finds himself a “‘two-sworded’ man”: a drinker and a smoker.
In summer, the students walk around drunk and naked (to the horror of the maids); in winter they leave their undergarments outside in the freezing cold to kill the hordes of lice that infest them. They threaten gatekeepers and rampage through the city’s dark streets and steal cups and trays from their favorite restaurants.
Nevertheless, Fukuzawa is keen to impress upon his readers that a lot of studying happened as well. There were sleepless nights spent practicing for the reading competitions that would determine their rank in the academy. As they copied out passages from chemistry textbooks and metallurgical texts they also engaged in haphazard experiments, occasionally producing sickening gases and noxious fumes. At one point, though, Fukuzawa and a group of friends bask in the triumph of having plated iron with tin using zinc chloride—“a feat beyond the practice of any tin craftsman in the land.”
Due to the fortuitous arrival of a new Dutch science book at the school’s library, Fukuzawa and his fellow students also become the country’s leading experts in electricity. Such were the times: because of their uncommon linguistic skills, their knowledge of the world outstripped that of any “prince or nobleman.” He says: “we students were conscious of the fact that we were the sole possessors of the key to knowledge of the great European civilization.”
## To Edo and Beyond
Having become one of the best students in Osaka, Fukuzawa is invited by a leading advocate of Dutch culture to open a school in Edo. His timing is very good. Soon after his arrival the Ansei Treaties are signed, which open up more of Japan’s ports to foreign ships. Excited to communicate with real foreigners, he goes to Yokohama and begins speaking to some of the merchants in residence there. Only he is saddened to realize that communication is impossible. Nobody speaks Dutch.
Eventually he learns that the Dutch have ceased to be a naval superpower and that their language is not very widely spoken at all. “I had been striving with all my powers for many years to learn the Dutch language,” he says, “[a]nd now when I had reason to believe myself one of the best interpreters in the country, I found that I could not even read the signs of merchants who had come to trade with us from foreign lands.”
Rather than Dutch, he learns that English is now dominant. He realizes “that a man would have to be able to read and converse in English to be recognized as a scholar in foreign subjects.” There’s one big problem with this: nobody in Japan knows English.
He manages to find a Dutch-English dictionary and begins the difficult business of learning the new words. At first, he is fearful that English will prove to be as different from Dutch as Dutch is from Japanese. Happily, this turns out not to be the case. “In truth,” he says, “Dutch and English were both ‘strange languages written sideways’ of the same origin. Our knowledge of Dutch could be applied directly to English.”
While Fukuzawa is in Edo, the shogunate decides to send a diplomatic mission to the United States. It will be the first Japanese ship ever to cross the Pacific Ocean. Fukuzawa desperately wants to go, so he approaches the captain with a letter of introduction (a real one this time) and is accepted to become part of the crew.
What follows is an exquisite outsider’s view of nineteenth-century Californian society. Upon their arrival in San Francisco, the Japanese are shocked by the sight of horse-drawn carriages, wall-to-wall carpeting, and ice-filled champagne glasses. Fukuzawa is also amazed by the prices of groceries in California (*plus ça change*) and is even more astounded when a gentleman he meets says he does not know where George Washington’s descendants live (“I could not help feeling that the family of Washington should be regarded as apart from all other families”).
But Fukuzawa’s greatest joy comes from having his photograph taken. At the studio, he invites the photographer’s daughter to pose next to him, to which she readily agrees. After leaving San Francisco harbor, Fukuzawa shows his prize to his fellow crew members: “You all talk a lot about your affairs,” he jokes, “but how many of you have brought back a picture of yourselves with a young lady as a souvenir of San Francisco?” Fukuzawa basks in the crew’s “extreme envy of [his] relic.”
At one point, he reflects on the significance of this voyage, and the reader cannot help but agree with the general sentiment: “It was not until the sixth year of Kaei (1853) that a steamship was seen for the first time; it was only in the second year of Ansei (1855) that we began to study navigation from the Dutch in Nagasaki; by 1860, the science was sufficiently understood to enable us to sail a ship across the Pacific. This means that about seven years after the first sight of a steamship, after only about five years of practice, the Japanese people made a trans-Pacific crossing without help from foreign experts. I think we can without undue pride boast before the world of this courage and skill.”
Once back in Japan, Fukuzawa publishes his first book: a Japanese-English dictionary. Two years later, he is invited to join Japan’s first embassy to Europe as an interpreter. He purchases stacks of books in London, marvels at the size of the Hotel du Louvre (“the large party of our Japanese envoys was lost in it”), and faints while watching surgery performed in a St. Petersburg hospital.
## Race-Fight
When Fukuzawa began studying Dutch, he says people often thought of it as an eccentric habit. They were more incredulous than anything that someone would choose to spend their time doing such a thing. But upon his return from Europe, he says the mood changed considerably. “All Japan was now hopelessly swept by the anti-Western feeling, and nothing could stop its force from rushing to the ultimate consequence.”
Of course, there had been precedents for such outbreaks of anti-foreign sentiment. In 1839, before Perry’s arrival, a group of scholars founded the “Barbarian Studies Group” to advocate for the study of Western culture. But when they criticized the shogunate’s aggressive attitude towards foreigners, they were charged with “planning to leave Japan”—a crime punishable by death. This event, known as the “Purge of the Barbarian Scholars” resulted in the three men committing suicide.
During the subsequent period, in a grim foreshadowing of the twentieth century, many politicians publicly embraced hostile rhetoric (the phrase “expel the barbarians” was popular) while acknowledging privately that such a course was untenable. Various radical groups, lacking the same discernment, embarked on a campaign of assassination against anyone perceived as pro-Western.
Fear was palpable. Fukuzawa says that “even some of the merchants engaged in foreign trade suddenly closed up their shops for fear of these lawless warriors.” One of his friends narrowly escapes assassination by jumping into a castle moat. Another manages to escape through the back door of his house when it is broken into. For all this, Fukuzawa says that he “could not think of giving up [his] major interest nor [his] chosen studies.” Nevertheless, for a period of about “thirteen or fourteen years,” he does “not once venture out of doors at night.” He becomes, by his own admission, a “recluse.”
As much as his social life may have suffered as a result of this isolation, he makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, *kyoso*, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on *kyoso*, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.
Against this backdrop, the shogunate and supporters of the imperial house begin waging a civil war. Fukuzawa does not take sides. “After all, both parties seemed to be alike in their anti-foreign prejudice.” On the one hand, the end of the feudal society that Fukuzawa disliked so intensely was in sight. On the other hand, the opposing side had a habit of murdering people with his chosen profession. He does his best to stay out of it, and as war comes to the streets of Edo, he begins building a new school just as everyone else evacuates the city. So much the better, he says, for “all the carpenters and masons were delighted to get work then.” The school would form the basis of the institution that would eventually be named Keio University.
He goes on to found a newspaper and write many more books that are “accepted eagerly by the public.” Most writers of the time, he says, composed works that they hoped would earn them government posts (the nineteenth-century equivalent of publishing for tenure), and as a result, Fukuzawa “seemed to be alone in writing for popular causes.” His success leads people to assume that he must covet a post in the new imperial government anyway, and he delights in foiling these expectations.
## Fukuzawa Sensei’s Guide to Life
The autobiography concludes with some remarks on his “household economy” and private life. Despite his drinking habit, he is happy to say that he has never acquired debts or lived beyond his means. The future success or failure of his school does not seem to bother him. If he could not afford to keep his teachers, he would simply “teach by [himself] as many students as [he] could handle alone.”
He explains his philosophy of childrearing in some depth, which entails encouraging “gentleness of mind and liveliness of body.” That seems to mean no physical punishment and taking the occasional piece of broken furniture or torn sliding door in stride. His unorthodox thoughts on educating children also deserve mention: “I do not show them a single letter of the alphabet until after they are four or five years old. At seven or eight, I sometimes give them calligraphy lessons.” Fukuzawa stresses that his “chief care is always for their physical health.” While “many parents are liable to be overanxious about their children’s studies,” he says, “in my house no child is praised for reading a book.” Instead, he rewards them “when they take an unusually long walk, or if they show an improvement in jujitsu or gymnastics.”
When his grown sons leave to study in America, he writes them every week—for six years. Before they go, he tells them: “I don’t want you to come back great scholars, pale and sickly. I would much rather have you come back ignorant but healthy.”
In his old age, he begins to wean himself off alcohol. “First I gave up my morning wine, then my noon wine.” In these times his “mouth and mind were always at war.” But he manages. He pounds rice and chops wood for exercise, walks four miles every day before breakfast, and dresses himself in simple cotton shirts. When the mood strikes, he composes poems about autumn dawns and temple bells.
But perhaps his greatest piece of advice is this one: “I never forget that all my personal worries and immediate concerns are but a part of the ‘comedy’ of this ‘floating world,’” and “our entire lives but an aspect of some higher consciousness.”
## What Would Fukuzawa Do?
As I write this, the American president has accused the Japanese of xenophobia. As Fukuzawa’s story demonstrates, such sentiments have played a major role in Japanese history. Though I must say, having lived for nearly two years in Japan, I have never been treated poorly. On the contrary, I struggle to name another place in the world where people might have been so patient with a foreigner who can hardly speak the language and who understands so little of the local customs.
But Japan does have some problems.
The litany is familiar: a shrinking and aging population, low growth, falling productivity, a depreciating currency, static wages. Proposed measures to address these challenges (Abenomics, childcare allowances, etc) have had limited success. After reading his autobiography, I have to wonder: “What would Fukuzawa do?”
A man who dedicated himself to teaching people English may balk at the state of English language education in Japan, where only around 5% of the population are fluent. This arguably has some benefits, insofar as it insulates Japan from some of the silly ideas currently infesting the Anglosphere (though QAnon still [seems](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/photo/39347204) to have made it through). But the link between English language fluency and global economic competitiveness seems pretty well established.
If I could summarize Fukuzawa’s primary skill in one clunky phrase, it would be “cultural arbitrage.” As a teenager he seemed to realize the vast world of information hidden in foreign languages. And with only a cursory grasp of global geopolitics, he saw that knowledge of English would be key to future success on the international stage. Becoming one of the first Japanese people fluent in English made him the gateway through which torrents of knowledge in every field entered Japanese society.
So what opportunities for cultural arbitrage exist today? How can Japan put Fukuzawa’s skillset to work?
One capacity that Japan enjoys that seems beyond the reach of their American counterparts is the operation of clean, safe, and dynamic cities. Some are so distraught by the state of American urban life that they are trying to [build](https://www.wired.com/story/balaji-srinivasan-ditch-chaos-country-cloud/) new countries in the cloud or [secede](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqJoXaNFFjY) from the U.S. Given the massive [spike](https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-urban-violent-crime-spike-is-real#:~:text=The%20best%20available%20figures%2C%20from,year%20for%20which%20finalized%20federal) in urban crime after the pandemic, such ideas are understandable.
Japanese policymakers should look at this situation with Fukuzawa’s eyes. What would he see? I venture he might notice two things: 1) a country with a shrinking population but an unmatched capacity to build, and 2) a large group of wealthy and competent people desperately seeking a functional urban space to live and work.
Bring these things together, and you get Dejima 2.0: a new Japanese city for skilled foreigners fleeing urban dysfunction. Dejima 2.0, much like the first Dejima during the shogunate, would serve as an interface between Japan and the outside world, facilitating trade and offering a test bed for new technologies.
Imagine it: a new Hong Kong without the authoritarianism, a Próspera with better sushi. Many islands in Japan are now populated by more [cats](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/a-visit-to-aoshima-a-cat-island-in-japan/386647/) than people. There’s not a shortage of promising sites.
But the best thing of all, which I think should make it palatable to even the most conservative Japanese official: it follows precedent. | Scott Alexander | 145867018 | Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa | acx |
# Fake Tradition Is Traditional
**I.**
> **A:** I like Indian food.
>
> **B:** Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?
>
> **A:** I just like paneer tikka.
This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.
But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!
In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!
**II.**
But there’s another anti-tradition argument which goes deeper than this. It’s something like “ah, but you’re a hypocrite, because the people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history. They just did what made sense in their present environment.”
There were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent [article about a fertility festival](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/this-green-and-growing-earth) in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time.
Most of the people involved assumed it derived from the Druids or something. It was popular not just as a good party, but because it felt like a connection to primeval days of magic and mystery. But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.
Kriss wrote:
> I don’t think the Jack in the Green is worse because it’s not really an ancient fertility rite, but I do think it’s a little worse because it *pretends* to be…tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time: it turns the past into eternity. The opposite of tradition is *invention*.
>
> Tradition is fake, and invention is real. Most of the human activity of the past consists of people *just doing stuff*…they didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun.
>
> I’ve been thinking a lot about [a seagull float in the Hastings parade] . . . in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it. I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, *just doing stuff*, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.
I’m nervous to ever disagree with Sam Kriss about ancient history, but this strikes me as totally false.
Modern traditionalists look back fondly on Victorian times. But the Victorians didn’t get their culture by *just doing stuff* without ever thinking of the past. They were writing pseudo-Arthurian poetry, building neo-Gothic palaces, and painting pre-Raphaelite art hearkening back to the early Renaissance. And the Renaissance itself was based on the idea of a *re-naissance* of Greco-Roman culture. And the Roman Empire at its peak spent half of its cultural energy obsessing over restoring the virtue of the ancient days of the Roman Republic:
> Then none was for a party;
> Then all were for the state;
> Then the great man helped the poor,
> And the poor man loved the great:
> Then lands were fairly portioned;
> Then spoils were fairly sold:
> The Romans were like brothers
> In the brave days of old.
>
> Now Roman is to Roman
> More hateful than a foe,
> And the Tribunes beard the high,
> And the Fathers grind the low.
> As we wax hot in faction,
> In battle we wax cold:
> Wherefore men fight not as they fought
> In the brave days of old.
(of course, [this isn’t from](https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius) a real Imperial Roman poem - it’s by a Victorian Brit *pretending to be* a later Roman yearning for the grand old days of Republican Rome. And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.)
As for the ancient Roman Republic, they spoke fondly of a Golden Age when they were ruled by the god Saturn. As far as anyone knows, Saturn is a wholly mythical figure. But if he did exist, there are good odds he inspired his people (supposedly the fauns and nymphs) through stories of some even Goldener Age that came before.
The left is a New York synagogue. It’s Moorish Revival style, which means its architect was working off a basically false and idealized picture of 1100s al-Andalus. The right is a different New York synagogue, by an architect who was “just doing stuff”.
I don’t have a great explanation for why I like the one on the left so much better. Some of it might be about creativity: “what’s the best idea you can think of?” might not be a fertile prompt. “How did the Moors do it?” might be a great prompt, *especially* if you know nothing about Morocco and you end up getting it totally wrong. Your imaginary version of Morocco, or the way you fill in the blanks in your idealized version of Morocco, or what happens when Morocco collides with everything else in your brain, [might be more interesting than whatever you invent from whole cloth](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/06/random-noise-is-our-most-valuable-resource/).
But I think of it more in a psychological way. I don’t think Sam Kriss has it in him to ask a dozen people to start cawing and flapping their arms around the seagull idol (this isn’t an attack on him; neither do I). It’s too silly. Or if it’s not silly - if it comes from something deep in his subconscious, then it’s *too* deep, it reveals too much about his inner self. Dreaming of something too big, too glorious, too beautiful is a sort of status claim. “Look at me, I am qualified to midwife this piece of divinity into the world”. A few people are brave enough to go ahead and do it. For everyone else, it’s easier to launder it as an incremental improvement on something that came before. “Here is my, Scott’s, utopian vision of the good” is a hard sell. “Why don’t we go back to how the Romans did this?” is a little easier. Even if it was only three Romans, one time, and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent.
Some popular art was written by people trying to *parody* a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners ([1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_as_a_Brick#Background), [2](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2968040526), [3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William)). Something like this is especially true for quotes, where it’s weird to speak in a quotable way but acceptable to invent fake quotes from other people ([SMAC](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri), [PQFUP](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Nf90YS78Mgi_7_cPZGNHm0ax-BTdO7sQXKG5EfbVMY/edit)). I think of tradition as providing a similar release valve, letting people go wild without putting enough of themselves out there to get attacked.
I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway. I just get angry when people make blanket objections to looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future institutions. And doubly angry when people say “your past heroes didn’t look back at an idealized past, they just did things”. Of course past heroes looked back at an idealized even-further-past when doing their heroic deeds! That’s the standard human method for getting anything done! If we get mad at people who try the same strategy today, we’ll do less than our forebears, idealized or not.
[Update: Followup/more thoughts [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is)] | Scott Alexander | 144992357 | Fake Tradition Is Traditional | acx |
# Open Thread 334
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** In [my Quests and Requests post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests), I challenged someone to create a good dating site. A team led by Shreeda Segan is working on this and trying to raise money on Manifund; you can read more about their plan and funding goals [here](https://manifund.org/projects/design-budget-for-rebuilding-the-dating-site-we-all-want-back-).
**2:** Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered. | Scott Alexander | 145714937 | Open Thread 334 | acx |
# Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
**I.**
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on [his Substack](https://kirschsubstack.com/), of which one especially caught my eye:
He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results [here](https://www.skirsch.com/covid/PollfishJul4.pdf):
* 7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID
* 8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine.
All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers).
Since then, Kirsch has collected several other polls - some by him, some by others - saying the same. For example, here’s Rasmussen (another reputable polling company) from [last January](https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/died_suddenly_more_than_1_in_4_think_someone_they_know_died_from_covid_19_vaccines):
I’ve truncated the table to keep it readable, but I kept the breakdown by party - these aren’t just anti-vax Republicans lying to support their party narrative. Even 19% of Democrats say they know someone killed by the vaccine!
I know people here like to argue about whether to debate people or deplatform them, but surely someone else finds this interesting. Here’s 24% of the US - so probably a little short of 100 million people - saying they’ve seen something which consensus science says shouldn’t be possible? Aren’t you at least a little curious what’s going on?
Also, isn’t Steve Kirsch being a little too smug about this?
So I asked about this on the 2022 and 2024 ACX surveys. Both gave similar results, but I’m going to focus on the 2024 survey, since I did the most followup on it.
Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”.
Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why?
As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But [as](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life) *[I](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life)* [point out](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life), it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else.
One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics.
Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%).
But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).
I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories.
This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths.
**II.**
All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details:
* 5,981 people took the survey
* 5,924 of them answered the question on COVID vaccines
* 38 of them answered “yes” to that question
* 28 of them gave me their email and permission to contact them.
* 9 of them answered my email and told their stories.
Of the nine people who answered my email, three said they’d read the question wrong and wanted to retract their answer, leaving six people who gave me real stories. I’m slightly obfuscating some of these to protect their privacy:
1. 80 year old went to the hospital after a stroke, received the Pfizer vaccine there, then got sicker and died two weeks later. The respondent said their relative "was already in bad health either way, so it's hard to place blame on the vaccine, but I do think it contributed - she had been recovering before getting it."
2. 95 year old got the Moderna vaccine, that night she started vomiting and wouldn't eat, and after 3-4 days she died. The respondent said "I think nobody in the family thought it was a mistake to do the vaccination, as [a COVID infection] would probably have [also killed her]."
3. A 63 year old died of a heart attack six weeks after his booster vaccination. He had a previous history of heart attacks, but had been declared healthy before the vaccine.
4. An 83 year old died the night after getting a COVID booster. She had some previous health conditions "but she wasn't knocking on death's door". The respondent writes "[I think] the side effects were probably just too much for her somewhat fragile state to handle...most of my family believes it was the vaccine, but that the vaccines are overall a net positive for both us and society."
5. A 37 year old with extreme obesity had a heart attack one day after a COVID mRNA booster.
6. A 94 year old, one week after getting the vaccine, went to the hospital due to heart failure and UTI. He tested positive for COVID and died after admission.
Four out of six cases are ≥ eighty years old. Since I only heard back from about a quarter of the people who reported deaths, we can speculate that the whole sample had sixteen people in this category.
Suppose each of the 6,000 people who took my survey had one relative in this age group (maybe a grandparent). And suppose that each relative got two COVID vaccines (an original and a booster). That means there are 12,000 vaccinations of 80+ year-old relatives in my survey population.
The average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day, a 1/500 chance per week, etc. So by coincidence, we would expect about 2 people in my sample to have stories of an older relative dying within one day of vaccination, and about 10 people to have stories of a relative dying within one week. Among people talking about vaccine-related deaths, they seem to range from “same day” to “within six weeks”. So I think this mostly fits the null hypothesis.
I don’t think the null hypothesis is quite right here, for two reasons. First, as Respondent 1 notes, some people receive the COVID vaccine in the hospital, when they go there for other reasons, which seems like a time of elevated death risk. Second, Respondent 2 notes that some people are so frail that even normal vaccine side effects of the type that everyone agrees exist might kill them. On the other hand, there might be a tendency for people to wait until they’re healthy to get the vaccine, which would counterbalance these effects. Overall I think the null hypothesis is an okay estimate here though.
What about the 37 year old? Yes, he was very obese, but this is still an unusual age to die. Suppose the average respondent has two relatives in this category. Then by a similar calculation, we should expect about 24,000 vaccinations in the population. The average 37 year old has a 1/100,000 chance of dying on any given day. So there’s about a 1/4 chance that we would see an event this extreme in this population (or 1/2 if we interpret “the day after” to mean “not the same day”). But also, since only 1/4 of people answered my email, we should be concerned that there are three other events like this in this sample. This makes it an unlikely, but not extremely unlikely, finding.
**III.**
I interpret the results of my survey to be consistent with a null hypothesis of “the vaccines don’t increase deaths”, plus or minus some very small effect of “they can kill the extremely frail” or “they can cause a heart attack in susceptible young people 1/10,000th of the time”.
That still leaves the question of why my results are so different from those of Kirsch, Pollfish, and Rasmussen.
Maybe there’s some very big population of people who got the vaccine, then died eventually (where “eventually” could be anything from the same day to years later) of some condition (where “some condition” ranges from things plausibly connected to vaccines like allergic reactions, to things not plausibly connected to vaccines like [lightning strikes](https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struck-by-lightning-after-moderna-injection-13774498/)). Depending on people’s previous assumptions about the risks of the vaccine, they’ll either report these as vaccine-related deaths, or think of them as unrelated coincidences. This would explain why my data found that Trump supporters were 20x more likely than Trump opponents to know a vaccine-related death.
But this can’t be the whole explanation: ACX readers are only a little further left than the general population, and even the most pro-Trump ACXers reported lower death rates than the *median* Kirsch poll respondent. My guess is that this is a blog about statistics and reasoning, so people here are very cautious about the *post hoc ergo propter hoc* fallacy.
I think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls. Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents’ politics or statistical knowledge isn’t a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events. This should have been our leading hypothesis all along, but the results were weird enough to be worth checking. Now that we’ve checked, we can forget about this methodology and focus on the result of peer-reviewed studies, like we should have done all along.
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available [ACX Survey Results](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024). If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me. | Scott Alexander | 145404109 | Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll | acx |
# Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent
**I.**
Lately [we’ve been discussing](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help) some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this?
I find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis.
Cystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus.
So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?
The case for yes: they have the cystic fibrosis mutation. Having the cystic fibrosis mutation seems vastly worse than not having it. Surely if “genetically inferior” means anything at all, it means having genetics which it is vastly worse to have than not have.
The case for no: if you say ‘yes’, you sound like a Nazi. Or at least you sound like some sort of callous jerk who hates people with cystic fibrosis and thinks they’re less than human and maybe wants to kill them.
(Some people will object that nobody is “genetically inferior”, because “inferior” means “worse in every possible way”, and nobody is worse in *all* ways - maybe the person with cystic fibrosis has a gene for great memory or something. But first of all, if we come up with a contrived example where this isn’t true - eg identical twins who have exactly the same genes, except one has a somatic mutation causing cystic fibrosis - I’m still reluctant to say the mutated twin is “genetically inferior”. And second of all, this isn’t how we use the word “inferior” anywhere else - we might say that eg a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac, even if the Yugo is better on some trivial dimension like having a slightly longer tire life.)
So I think there are two different questions here.
* “Do you think cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition which it is bad to have?” is a question that bioethicists might ask in order to discuss a medical or epidemiological course of action.
* “Do you think people with cystic fibrosis are genetically inferior?” is a question journalists might ask in order to trick people into saying a naughty word so they can cancel them.
There’s no shame in answering two totally different questions differently, so you should answer “yes” to the first and “no” to the second.
This is also how I feel about genes for schizophrenia and genes for low IQ. Or rather, it’s possible - as an empirical claim - that there might be something good about these genes, in the same way there’s something good about the sickle cell anemia gene. But if it turns out that the scientific question of whether they have advantages resolves to no, then I think the scientific-bioethical question of “are these genes bad?” resolves to yes, and the people-trying-to-trick-you-into-using-naughty-words question of “are the people who have these genes genetically inferior?” resolves to “Haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi.”
**II.**
But I still think there’s a deeper question here, of *why* questions about inferiority seem so compelling. A local Twitter account has gotten popular by posting this text with a different picture every evening:
Source: [@VividVoid\_](https://twitter.com/VividVoid_)
This message clearly resonates with a lot people. But what does it mean? There are certainly people who are better than me in all the usual measurable ways. I have a friend who is smarter, richer, more attractive, more charismatic, and better at helping others than I am. Let’s call him [Lance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0BiJRI4GOE). Am I inferior to Lance?
One possible answer is the one I tried to close off above - probably I’m better at Lance at some trivial thing. I’ve probably memorized more 19th century poetry than he has. If we define “inferior” to mean “inferior in literally every way” then I guess I’m not inferior. But that’s a kind of dumb way to define it. Most people would interpret it to mean “inferior overall, if we add up all the good things and bad things according to some kind of importance-weighting”.
Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. *I* would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?
Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision?
Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something. This feels to me suspiciously like the position I mocked in [The Whole City Is Center](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/).
The best that I can do is to appeal to the argument above about genetics. There are - you could say - two different questions here:
* “Is Lance taller / smarter / faster / stronger than I am?” is a question that I might ask to (for example) assess my chances if I were competing against Lance for the same job.
* “Is Lance superior to me?” is a question that my inner journalist might ask to trick me into canceling my own soul.
The problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he *isn’t*. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question, in order to make myself miserable. Just as the correct answer to “are schizophrenics genetically inferior?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi”, the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.”
(as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)
At least that’s as much sense as I’ve ever been able to wring out of this question. Good night and you are not inferior to anyone. | Scott Alexander | 141456021 | Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent | acx |
# Open Thread 333
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** A message from ACX Grantee [1DaySooner:](https://www.1daysooner.org/) California is considering a law to ban things that emit ozone. As unintentional collateral damage, this bill would ban [far-UV light](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23972651/ultraviolet-disinfection-germicide-far-uv), a new disinfection technology that can potentially eliminate all indoor respiratory diseases, but which also creates trivial amounts of ozone. Far UV is almost ready for deployment, and could potentially save tens of thousands of lives yearly. 1DaySooner, a health-related charity, is [trying](https://www.1daysooner.org/1day-sooners-comments-on-sb-1308-and-effects-on-germicidal-uv-light-technology/) to convince the California government to exempt it from this law, or at least to remember that it exists when writing the exact text of the bill. They are asking Californians to write to their representative about this. Representative [Buffy Wicks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_Wicks) is on a relevant committee, and support from her constituents (Berkeley, Richmond, and north Oakland) would be especially helpful. I’ve posted more information - including what you can say to your representative - [as a](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118) **[comment](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118)** [below](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118).
**2:** Thanks again to everyone who purchased *Unsong*. And my former co-blogger Ozy has also published a novella this month, *[Her Voice Is A Backwards Record](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/announcement-ozy-has-written-a-novella)*, “an adaptation of Neil Sinhababu’s paper [Possible Girls](https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG.pdf)” about whether “if modal realism is true, can I have a loving relationship with someone from another possible world?”
**3:** New subscribers-only post: [Contra Hoel On Nerd Culture](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hoel-on-nerd-culture).
**4:** Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup last week - and it was good to see some of you at Manifest too. I’m continually grateful to the venue, [Lighthaven](https://www.lighthaven.space/), for hosting ACX meetups for free. They’re looking for more customers; if you’re doing a conference or event in the Bay Area, please check them out. | Scott Alexander | 145493948 | Open Thread 333 | acx |
# Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday
**Why:** Because we’re having [another round of spring meetups](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024), and Berkeley is one of them. I’m signal-boosting this one because it’s usually our biggest, and because I hope to be able to attend.
**When:** Wednesday, June 5, 6:30 PM. Please ignore the other post that said 6, or else you’ll have a special 30 minute mini-meetup with all the other people who don’t check updates regularly.
**Where:** [Lighthaven](https://www.lighthaven.space/), 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley.
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
I’ll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions. | Scott Alexander | 145295841 | Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday | acx |
# Open Thread 332
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who talked to me at the Less Online conference. Thanks especially to the person who gave me a working GPS-based version of the automated land acknowledger from [Bay Area House Party](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party), it’s one of the most interesting gifts I’ve ever received and I’m looking forward to bringing it to some other city to test its functionality:
**2:** Comment of the week: [why does Britain let submarine commanders launch nukes on their own, when Russia and America have the opposite policy?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024/comment/57578309) Also related to the links post: someone on Facebook says that Cryonics Institute has not confirmed that Paris Hilton is signed up, and this might be a false story.
**3:** Lyman Stone [has responded to](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/effective-altruism-is-still-bad-7c2a6c947122) my response to him. I think it just doubles down on the same points he made the first time, so I might not get around to writing a full response. I’ll just say that first, I think it could benefit from better understanding of the distinctions between virtue ethics, rule utilitarianism, two-level utilitarianism - Mill, Hare, or Parfit could be good sources here, or even just some of the blog posts I linked. Second, Stone seems confused that I’ve blocked him on Twitter. I want to stress that I never block people just because I disagree with them; the only reason I block people is because of a history of doxxing, which Stone has, and which angers me for personal reasons. I think in an ideal world this would merit a permaban from Twitter, but all I can do on my own is block him from reading my stuff.
**4:** Berkeley meetup this Wednesday at 6:30 at 2740 Telegraph. I’ll be there. I’ll probably post a reminder with slightly more information tomorrow or Tuesday. | Scott Alexander | 145253770 | Open Thread 332 | acx |
# Unsong Available In Paperback
Seven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, *Unsong,* about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version [here](https://unsongbook.com/).
The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) [You can now buy the book here, for $19.99](https://amzn.to/4aKmRXQ).
I think the published version is an improvement over the original. I rewrote three or four chapters I wasn’t satisfied with, and changed a few character names to be more kabbalistically appropriate. The timeline and history have been rectified, and there are more details on the 2000 - 2015 period and how UNSONG was founded. I gave the political situation a little more depth (watch for the Archon of Arkansas, the Shogun of Michigan, and the Caliph of California). And the sinister Malia Ngo has been replaced by the equally sinister, but actual-character-development-having, Ash Bentham.
All of the parts that were actually good have been kept.
Thanks to everyone for being patient, and special thanks to Pycea for making this happen. | Scott Alexander | 144934156 | Unsong Available In Paperback | acx |
# Contra Stone On EA
**I.**
Lyman Stone wrote an article [Why Effective Altruism Is Bad](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/why-effective-altruism-is-bad-80dfbccc7a68). You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument:
> The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving…
Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.
He finds that SF and Boston *do* give more to charity than average, but not by much, and this trend has if anything decreased in the 2010 - present period when effective altruism was active. So, he concludes,
> That should all make us think that the rise of ‘effective altruism’ as a social movement has had little or no effect on overall charitableness.
What do I think of this line of argument?
[According to Rethink Priorities,](https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/#how-many-engaged-community-members-are-there) the organization that keeps track of this kind of thing, there were about 7,400 active effective altruists in 2020 (90% CI: 4,700 - 10,000). Growth rate was 14% per year but has probably gone down lately, so there are probably around 10,000 now. This matches other sources for high engagement with EA ideas (8,898 people [have signed](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge) the Giving What We Can pledge).
Suppose that the Bay Area contains 25% of all the effective altruists in the world. That means it has 2,500 effective altruists. Its total population is about 10 million. So effective altruists are 1/4000th of the Bay Area population.
Suppose that the average person gives 3% of their income to charity per year, and the average effective altruist gives 10%. The Bay Area with no effective altruists donates an average of 3%. Add in the 2,500 effective altruists, and the average goes up to . . . 3.0025%. Stone’s graph is in 0.5 pp intervals. So this methodology is way too underpowered to detect any effect even if it existed.
How many effective altruists would have to be in the Bay for Stone to notice? If we assume ability to detect a signal of 0.5 pp, it would take 200x this amount, or 500,000 in the Bay alone. For comparison, the most popular book on effective altruism, Will MacAskill’s *What We Owe The Future,* sold only 100,000 copies in the whole world.
But all of this speculation is unnecessary. There are plenty of data sources that just tell us how much effective altruists donate compared to everyone else. I checked this in an old SSC survey, and the non-EAs (n = 3118) donated an average of 1.5%, compared to the EA (n = 773) donating an average of 6%.
[In general](https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/144089513/on-insurance-experiments), I think it’s a bad idea to try to evaluate rare events by escalating to a population level when you can just check the rare events directly. If you do look at populations, you should do a basic power calculation before reporting your results as meaningful.
I’m not going to make a big deal about Stone’s use of Google Trends, because I think he’s right that SF and Boston are the most EA cities. But taken seriously, it would suggest that Montana is the most Democratic state.
Stone could potentially still object that movements aren’t supposed to gather 10,000 committed adherents and grow at 10% per year. They have to take hold of the population! Capture the minds of the masses! Convert >5% of the population of a major metropolitan area!
I don’t think effective altruism has succeeded as a mass movement. But I don’t think that’s it’s main strategy - for more on this, see the articles under EA Forum tag [“value of movement growth”](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/value-of-movement-growth), which explains:
> It may seem that, in order for the effective altruism movement to do as much good as possible, the movement should aim to grow as much as possible. However, there are risks to rapid growth that may be avoidable if we aim to grow more slowly and deliberately. For example, rapid growth could lead to a large influx of people with specific interests/priorities who slowly reorient the entire movement to focus on those interests/priorities.
Aren’t movements that don’t capture the population doomed to irrelevance? I don’t think so. Effective altruism has [managed to get plenty done with only 10,000 people](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective), because they’re the right 10,000 and they’ve influenced plenty of others.
Stone fails to prove that effective altruists don’t donate more than other people, because he’s used bad methodology that couldn’t prove that even if it were true. His critique could potentially evolve into an argument that effective altruism hasn’t spread massively throughout the population, but nobody ever claimed that it did.
**II.**
> You might imagine that a group fixated on “effective altruism” would have a high degree of concentration of giving in a small number of areas. Indeed, EAist groups tend to be hyper-focused on one or two causes, and even big groups like Open Philanthropy or GiveWell often have focus areas of especially intense work.
>
> And yet, the list of causes EAists work on is shockingly broad for a group whose whole appeal is supposed to be re-allocating funds towards their most effective uses. Again, click the link I attached above.
>
> EAists do everything from supporting malarian bednets (seems cool), to preventing blindness-related conditions (makes sense), to distributing vaccines (okay, I’m following), to developing vaccines in partnership with for profit entities (a bit more oblique but I see where you’re going with it), to institutional/policy interventions (contestable, but there’s a philosophical case I guess), to educational programs in rich countries (sympathetic I guess but hardly the Singer-esque “save the cheapest life” vibe), to promoting kidney transplants (noble to be sure but a huge personal cost for what seems like a modest total number of utils gained), to programs to reduce the pain experienced by shrimp in agriculture (seems… uh… oblique), to lobbying efforts to prevent AI from killing us all (lol), to space flight (what?), to more nebulous “long term risk” (i.e. “pay for PhDs to write white papers”), to other even more alternatively commendable, curious, or crazy causes. My point is not to mock the sillier programs (I’ll do that later). My point is just to question on what basis so broad a range of priorities can reasonably be considered a major gain in *efficiency*. Is it really the case that EAists have radically shifted our public understandings of the “effectiveness” of certain kinds of “altruism”?
A few responses:
Technically, it’s only correct to focus on the single most important area if you have a small amount of resources relative to the total amount in the system (Open Phil has $10 billion). Otherwise, you should (for example) spend your first million funding all good shrimp welfare programs until the marginal unfunded shrimp welfare program is worse than the best vaccine program. Then you’ll fund the best vaccine program, and maybe they can absorb another $10 million until they become less valuable than the marginal kidney transplant or whatever. This sounds theoretical when I put it this way, but if you work in charity, it can quickly becomes your whole life. It’s all very nice and well to say “fund kidney transplants”, but actually there are only specific discrete kidney transplant programs, some of them are vastly better than others, and none of them scale to infinity instantaneously or smoothly. The average amount that the charities I deal with most often can absorb is between $100K and $1MM. Again, Open Phil has $10 billion.
But even aside from this technical point, people disagree on really big issues. Some people think animals matter and deserve the same rights as humans. Other people don’t care about them at all. Effective altruism can’t and doesn’t claim to resolve every single ancient philosophical dispute on animal sentience or the nature of rights. It just tries to evaluate if charities are good. If you care a lot about shrimp, there’s someone at some effective altruist organization who has a strong opinion on exactly which shrimp-related charity saves shrimp most cost-effectively. But nobody (except philosophers, or whatever) can tell you whether to care about shrimp or not.
This is sort of a cop-out. Effective altruism does try to get beyond “I want to donate to my local college’s sports team”. I think this is because that’s an easy question. Usually if somebody says they want to donate there, you can ask “do you really think your local college’s sports team is more important than people starving to death in Sudan?” and they’ll think for a second and say “I guess not”. Whereas if you ask the same question about humans and animals, you’ll get all kinds of answers and no amount of short prompting can solve this disagreement. I think this puts EAs in a few basins of reflective equilibrium, compared to scattered across the map.
So is there some sense, as Stone suggests, that “so broad a range of priorities [can’t] reasonably be considered a major gain in efficiency”?
I think if you look at donations by the set of non-effective-altruist donors, and the set of effective-altruist donors, there will be much *much* more variance, and different types of variance, in the non-EAs than the EAs. Here’s where most US charity money goes ([source](https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/07/charity-in-america-recipients.html)):
Try spotting existential risk prevention on here.
I don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument?
**III.**
> Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most *compelling* are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly *larger* benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty.
>
> My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations.
The IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work.
But IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes.
I think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?”
(also, effective altruism funds IPA)
I’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact.
And I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy.
**IV.**
> Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism.
>
> And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole *pitch* of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to *bypass* a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just *give money to effective charities*. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued.
Suppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)?
EA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers.
EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on [Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/misconceptions-and-concerns-about-effective-altruism-and-charity-evaluation), their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”.
This is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell *did* solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it.
**V.**
> You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. **To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!!** But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should.
I think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So:
Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants?
Should people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention?
Should people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics?
EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA.
(Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like [Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera) in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.)
There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. [I take this one pretty seriously](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou).
The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or [a spam text message](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/did-spam-text-kill-russian-suicide-bomber-flna125405)” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into.
The third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it *massively massively backfires*. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that *seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him,* then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with.
*One f@#king time*, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were *much* less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of.
Not to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for.
EA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics.
**VI.**
Stone moves on to animal welfare:
> It’s important to grasp that [caring about animals] is, in evolutionary terms, an *error* in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals *and then* we made friends with dogs, not vice versa.
Again, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs.
People having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”.
Art is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures.
Anyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about *intra-tribal* dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error?
At some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist.
Stone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like [Axiology, Morality, Law](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/), the super-old [Consequentialism FAQ](https://translatedby.com/you/the-consequentalism-faq/original/), and [The Gift We Give To Tomorrow](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow), but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too.
Again, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into:
* If *I* wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.
* Don’t donate to research, policy, or anything else where people have PhDs.
* Cruelty to animals is okay, because of evolution.
Morality is tough. Converting RCTs - let alone the wide world of things we don’t have RCTs on yet - into actionable suggestions is tough. Many people have tried this. Some have succeeded very well on their own. Effective altruism is a community of people working on this problem together. I’m grateful to have it.
**VII.**
Stone’s final complaint:
> Where Bentham’s Bulldog is correct is a lot of the critique of EAists is personal digs.
>
> This is because EAism as a movement is full of people who didn’t do the reading before class, showed up, had a thought they thought was original, wrote a paper explaining their grand new idea, then got upset a journal didn’t publish it on the grounds that, like, Aristotle thought of it 2,500 years ago. The other kids in class tend to dislike the kid who thinks he’s smarter than them, especially if, as it happens, he is not only not smarter, he is astronomically less reflective…Admit you’re not special and you’re muddling through like everybody else, and then we can be friends again.
I’ll be excessively cute here: Stone is repeating one of the most common critiques of EA as if it’s his own invention, without checking the long literature of people discussing it and coming up with responses to it. I’m tired enough of this that I’m just going to quote some of what I said [the last time](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games) I wrote about this argument:
> **1: It’s actually very easy to define effective altruism in a way that separates it from universally-held beliefs.**
>
> For example (warning: I’m just mouthing off here, not citing some universally-recognized Constitution EA Of Principles):
>
> *1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field.*
>
> *2. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree.*
>
> *3. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON'T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY'RE "OBVIOUS" BUT THEN NOT DO THEM!*
>
> I think less than a tenth of people do (1), less than a tenth of *those* people do (2), and less than a tenth of people who would hypothetically endorse both of those get to (3). I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists (maybe adjusted for EA being too small to fully capture any demographic?) and most of the people who don’t, wouldn’t.
>
> Step 2 is the interesting one. It might not fully capture what I mean: if someone tries to do the math, but values all foreigners’ lives at zero, maybe that’s so wide a gulf that they don’t belong in the same group. But otherwise I’m pretty ecumenical about “as long as you’re trying” […]
>
> **2: Part of the role of EA is as a social technology for getting you to do the thing that everyone says they want to do in principle.**
>
> I talk a big talk about donating to charity. But I probably wouldn’t do it much if I hadn’t taken the [Giving What We Can pledge](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en-US/pledge) (a vow to give 10% of your income per year) all those years ago. It never feels like the right time. There’s always something else I need the money for. Sometimes I get unexpected windfalls, donate them to charity while expecting to also make my usual end of year donation, and then - having fulfilled the letter of my pledge - come up with an excuse not to make my usual end-of-year donation too.
>
> Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce [ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results) and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes [EA Funds](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/)).
>
> And I’m a terrible vegetarian. If there’s meat in front of me, I’ll eat it. Luckily I’ve cultivated an EA friend group full of vegetarians and pescetarians, and they usually don’t place meat in front of me. My friends will cook me delicious Swedish meatballs made with Impossible Burger, or tell me where to find the best fake turkey for Thanksgiving (it’s [Quorn Meatless Roast](https://amzn.to/3Rkk1C9)). And the Good Food Institute (an EA-supported charity) helps ensure I get ever tastier fake meat every year.
>
> Everyone says they want to be a good person and donate to charity and do the right thing. EAs say this too. But nobody stumbles into it by accident. You have to seek out the social technology, then use it.
>
> I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there’s a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.
>
> (I admit other groups have their own toolboxes of social technology to encourage doing good, including religions and political groups. Any group with any toolbox has earned the right to call themselves meaningfully distinct from the masses of vague-endorsers).
You can find the rest of the post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games). I’ve also addressed similar questions at [In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective) and [Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of). | Scott Alexander | 145121537 | Contra Stone On EA | acx |
# Links for May 2024
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** [The Toronto Blessing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Blessing) was a 1994 Christian revival event. Associated miracles included normal things like faith healings, but also: “More than 300 of the visitors claimed that they supernaturally received gold or silver fillings in their teeth during the meetings.”
**2:** Recursive Adaptation: [The Growing Scientific Case for Using Ozempic and other GLP-1s to Treat Opioid, Alcohol, and Nicotine Addiction](https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/9ac566d3-1d78-4f1b-93da-cbf77fcab0a1). Early studies suggest that new-generation weight loss drugs like Ozempic treat all addictions. The next step is seeing if the government and insurances will cooperate with using them for that indication. As usual, the barrier is cost, but people seem committed enough to doing something about the opioid crisis that they might be willing to act. I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally. There might come a day when they get treated like Adderall - something that many ambitious people want to be on, and look for excuses to take.
**3:** Philipp Markolin, who I mentioned in my lab leak post, has published [a new summary of his case for a natural COVID origin](https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/treacherous-ancestry), with a lot of information on how coronaviruses naturally recombine in the wild. Recommended.
**4:** Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that [COVID didn’t happen at all](https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/every-single-aspect-of-the-covid), and that *both* “lab leak” *and* “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place. I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that *lockdowns* never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory.
**5:** I’ll never tire of analogies putting the US / Europe gap into perspective - for example, did you know that the median black American household earns more ([$48,297](https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/blackafrican-american-health)) than the median UK household ([£35,000](https://housinganywhere.com/United-Kingdom/average-salary-in-uk) = [$44,450](https://www.google.com/search?q=35000+pounds+in+dollars&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=d2fbde582ddfbd7f&ei=4lJQZt6iJuv7wbkPr9eQiAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjem-ql8qWGAxXrfTABHa8rBEEQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=35000+pounds+in+dollars&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiFzM1MDAwIHBvdW5kcyBpbiBkb2xsYXJzMgsQABiABBiRAhiKBTIGEAAYBxgeMggQABgHGB4YDzIIEAAYBxgeGA8yCBAAGAcYHhgPMggQABgHGB4YDzIGEAAYCBgeMgYQABgIGB4yBhAAGAgYHjIGEAAYCBgeSJwOUKsEWLkIcAF4AJABAJgBhQKgAYQGqgEFMC4yLjK4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgSgApkEwgIOEAAYgAQYsAMYhgMYigXCAgsQABiABBiwAxiiBJgDAIgGAZAGBpIHBTEuMi4xoAfeFw&sclient=gws-wiz-serp))? Related, from [@StatisticUrban](https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1779287521110962409) - average house size in every US state vs. every European country:
[EDIT: [Here’s a claim](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024/comment/57577462) that this image might be false]
**6:** Alec Stapp: [Bureau of Land Management is giving a regulatory fast-track for geothermal energy](https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1780048314768969885).
**7:** William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX, has [a post-mortem of his actions here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx). Nothing too surprising, but I was most interested in his discussion of [why it took him a year and a half to say anything.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx?commentId=9CHfkaXGwbbqofqxh) Short version: all the lawyers involved told him not to talk, his organization commissioned an internal investigator who also demanded he not talk, and people told him there was a risk of defamation lawsuits if he said the wrong thing without checking with everybody. And even now, 1.5 years later, the first response to his comment is by a lawyer saying that talking about this is bad press and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. If you want to know why nobody important ever talks about anything outside of meaningless PR babble, this is a rare honest explanation by a relevant decision-maker.
**8:** Congratulations to ACX grantee Innovate Animal Ag, who have successfully gotten the first American company to adopt *in ovo* sexing (which removes unwanted chickens at the egg stage, instead of killing them after they hatch). *[NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html)* [article here](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html). IAA CEO Robert Yaman also has [an article about his work in](https://press.asimov.com/articles/before-they-hatch) *[Asimov](https://press.asimov.com/articles/before-they-hatch)*. IAA is looking for new employees, including a “head of marketing” and “business generalist” - if you’re interested in animal welfare and want to work with them, check out [their careers page](https://www.innovateanimalag.org/careers).
**9:** In Matthew 22, the Sadducees (a sect of anti-afterlife Jews) gave Jesus a puzzle. If a woman’s husband dies and she remarries, then who will she be married to after the Resurrection - the first husband or the second? Jesus responded by saying that people will not be married in Heaven (though see also [the Mormon interpretion](https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/schindler.doesnt-matthew-contradict-eternal-marriage.pdf)). Anyway, I was interested to learn there’s now an atheist version of this conundrum. [Robert Ettinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ettinger), considered “the founder of cryonics”, had his body frozen after his death in hopes of being resurrected in the far future. His first wife died, he remarried, and both his first and second wives are also cryopreserved. There’s no evidence Ettinger was anything other than monogamous during life, so what happens in the far future? His second wife was an “author, feminist, and marriage counselor”, so I bet she’ll have strong opinions on this.
**10:** Related: did you know [Paris Hilton is signed up for cryonics](https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/23/frozen_hilton/)?
**11:** [The Internet Archive is in trouble](https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5556650/the-internet-archives-last-ditch-effort-to-save-itself). During COVID, the Archive put up lots of books that it didn’t have IP rights to. Publishers sued them and won; the Archive appealed but AFAICT don’t have much of a case other than “we don’t like IP law”, so the publishers will probably win. What happens then? Unclear, nobody knows if there will be damages or whether the Archive can pay them.
**12:** Among the things I learned about because of the recent college protests:
**13:** [The Muggletonians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggletonianism), a 17th century Christian sect, believed:
> …that the soul is mortal; that Jesus is God (and not a member of a Trinity); that when Jesus died there was no God in Heaven and Moses and Elijah looked after Heaven until Jesus' resurrection; that Heaven is six miles above Earth; that God is between five and six feet tall; and that any external religious ceremony is not necessary
Although they were famous for a strict anti-magical materialism (for example, they thought God and angels were material beings), they don’t seem to be the origin of J.K. Rowling’s “muggles”; [see here for speculation](https://interestingliterature.com/2016/03/the-curious-origin-of-the-word-muggle/).
**14:** Related: Bentham’s Bulldog has been going over [some of the evidence for Christianity](https://benthams.substack.com/p/steelmanning-christianity), of which the most interesting is the story of St. Joseph of Cupertino (no, he didn’t work for Apple; it’s also a town in Italy - the Cupertino in California is named after *him*). Apparently St. Joseph could levitate, this was well-documented by everyone he met, and the Inquisition (which was concerned he might be a witch) investigated and got many eyewitness reports. Wikipedia has [a more skeptical take](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Cupertino#Reception), but I’m more interested in how well the Christianity hypothesis predicts this “evidence”.
Grant that if God exists, that makes it *possible* for a monk to levitate. But God usually sticks to the laws of nature. If He was going to violate them, you would think He would do it to save the Holocaust victims, or give the Crusaders AK-47s, not to let one weird monk levitate occasionally. Bulldog [tries to salvage this](https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil) by saying God is very committed to natural law except occasionally to bring people to the faith. But then why levitate a random monk in 1650, rather than have every Pope be constantly two inches off the ground? I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.
If I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal.
**15:**
I was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran [GeoGuessr](https://www.geoguessr.com/) players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly.
**16:** [TracingWoodgrains quits Blocked and Reported](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/blocked-reported-and-a-fond-farewell), reveals his name and face. No word on his next steps, but I look forward to meeting him at Manifest and to seeing what he’ll do next.
**17:** Only reporting this one out of duty: pharma researcher/blogger Trevor Klee posted [a list of concerns](https://archive.is/dseyR) about Lumina’s anti-cavity probiotic. Many of them seemed to misunderstand the science involved, and a few were outright false. I was particularly annoyed about the claim that I had gotten a free sample “in exchange for good publicity” - I specified on my public, easy-to-find blog post that I got it because my wife consulted for the company.
Aaron, CEO of Lumina, responded with an email asking him to take it down; it technically did not threaten him with a defamation suit, but had strong vibes to that effect. Then another Lumina employee independently sent an email actually threatening to sue for defamation. Trevor [very reasonably published both emails on his blog](https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about), people very reasonably turned against Lumina, and I understand Lumina will have a statement or something soon.
I think Trevor should have been more careful with his original accusations, but I also think defamation lawsuit threats are toxic and chill the flow of information, that this community has strong norms against them except in extreme cases, and that Lumina violated those norms. [ESH](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/aef6p8/what_is_up_with_esh_in_the_subreddit/edor45n/) but I hold Lumina to a higher bar and especially hope they do better in the future.
**18:** Updates on [the SB1047 AI regulation bill](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill): the bill passed the California Senate by a 32-1 vote (remember that tech Twitter is not real life!). It still has to get through California’s Assembly, but forecasters expect it to succeed:
I’m looking forward to getting to test the naysayers’ claims that this will make AI companies leave California, or destroy open source, or whatever - remember to adjust reputations accordingly. The bill’s sponsor, Scott Wiener, has been [correcting misconceptions on Twitter](https://x.com/Scott_Wiener/status/1792572175116816853), and has also gone on the Cognitive Revolution podcast trying to talk to the AI community directly:
I appreciate Senator Wiener’s engagement and hope he’s able to take his podcasting campaign to the next level (ie go on Dwarkesh).
**19:** In my review of *[Origins of Woke](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke)*, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. [The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth](https://ofaurochsandangels.substack.com/p/an-analysis-of-berksons-paradox).
**20:** Related: good discussion of Lindley’s Paradox in the comments of the Hanson/medicine post, from [Limelihood](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-hanson/comment/56872000) and [Radford Neal](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-hanson/comment/56036424). My understand: the paradox only causes problems if you assume the true effect is quite likely to be zero. Then if you get an effect of (let’s say) 0.1, you think “nah, it’s probably just zero with some noise”. This is a hackish way of representing the idea of “the null hypothesis”. But since the effect of health insurance is probably not exactly zero (it probably comes from some benefit of good treatments, minus some cost of bad treatments) we probably don’t have to worry. I might be explaining it wrong, read the comments.
**21:** [More on therapy and demons, from a practicing therapist](https://disfiguredpraise.blogspot.com/2024/05/therapy-exorcism-and-parts-work.html):
> I believe I’m only one of two people in the USA trained in Resource Therapy…Resource Therapy posits a number of objects, one of which seems similar to the “Unattached Burden.”. . . Dr. Emmerson writes in ‘Learn Resource Therapy Clinical Qualification Student Training Manual': *"When spoken with directly they will claim not to be a part of the personality, and unlike Resource States they can permanently leave the personality. While their etiology is unclear, I find when they are negotiated with to leave they can do so without any further indication of being present. Clients show improvement and often say they feel physically lighter.”*
**22:** Did you know: the US, Russia, and most other nuclear powers use “nuclear codes” - a rogue submarine commander can’t launch nukes without the President giving them the password. [Britain doesn’t do this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/11_november/15/newsnight.shtml), and a rogue submarine commander *could* launch their nukes. When asked why, the Royal Navy just said that "It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders." That article is from 2007, but [this 2019 blog post](https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-america-doesnt-control-britains-nuclear-weapons/) suggests it’s still true.
**23:** [2017 poll](https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Climate-Change-American-Mind-May-2017.pdf): 40% of Americans believe climate change is more likely than not to drive the human race extinct, but only 16% describe themselves as “very worried”. It looks like this is because most people think it won’t become important until long after they and their children are dead. My impression is that all of this is false: most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today’s young people, and only the extreme right tail of worst scenarios come anywhere near extinction.
**24:** You’ve probably all followed recent OpenAI drama, but again out of duty:
*First*, we have [slightly more information](https://openai.com/index/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai/) on what happened in the board coup in November, including a new interview with board member Helen Toner. The story is still the same: Sam was “lying and being manipulative”, “lying to other board members”, etc. Some new details, individually weak, plus an admission that they still can’t tell most of the story for unclear reasons (lawsuit threats?). A claim that they had to act quickly and without much advice because “as soon as Sam had any inkling that we might do something that went against him, he would pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board, to prevent us from even getting to the point of being able to fire him”, which I think is what most people already assumed. But why not at least ask trustworthy confidantes? I still feel confused about this one.
*Second*, OpenAI's AI safety team recently quit en masse in protest (remember, this is the second time this has happened), with one member [citing](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence) “a process of trust [in Sam Altman] collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one”. One part of this seems to be Altman promising to give them 20% of the company's compute, [then](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/18/openai-created-a-team-to-control-superintelligent-ai-then-let-it-wither-source-says/) not giving them even “a fraction of that amount”. Team lead and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever [also quit](https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1790517455628198322) after exactly six months of radio silence, leading some to speculate that his participation in the board coup never got resolved and for some legal reason he had to wait six months to leave. Former team lead Jan Leike has since [moved to OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic](https://x.com/janleike/status/1795497960509448617); here’s [the prediction market](https://manifold.markets/Joshua/where-will-ilya-sutskever-work-next) on where Ilya will end up.
*Third*, Kelsey Piper at Vox [broke the story](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release) that OpenAI was threatening to claw back vested equity from any former employee who criticized the company. In a tweet, Sam Altman said he knew nothing about this; in another article a few days later, Piper [broke the story](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees) that Altman’s signature was on the relevant documents. OpenAI has since sort of said they will stop doing this, although there are slight ambiguities in their statement which they could potentially exploit (CTRL+F “not sufficient” [here](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-fallout))
(weird personal note: in the NYT article doxxing me, the two people quoted as speaking up in my defense were Sam Altman and Kelsey Piper, and I remain grateful to both of them)
Kelsey is a friend, I trust her absolutely, and she is very careful about source protection and confidentiality issues.
I’m most impressed with the background of this story: Daniel Kokotajlo was an OpenAI employee who quit in protest at the company’s policies a few months ago (different incident from either of the mass quits by the safety teams). They told him they’d take away his equity if he criticized the company, he refused to cooperate even though this would cost him (by his estimation) 85% of his net worth, this let him speak openly about the non-disparagement agreement, and now OpenAI has apologized and is in the process of retracting their policy. Brave decisions like these are the sorts of things that occasionally change the course of history, so I hope he gets the recognition he’s due. If you want to know more about Daniel’s thoughts on AI, [this post was mostly based on an interview with him](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tales-of-takeover-in-ccf-world).
*Fourth:* OpenAI recently released a version of ChatGPT that could speak in human-sounding voices. One voice, Skye, was accused of being eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson, who played a sexy AI assistant in the movie *Her*. Johannson revealed that Altman had asked her for permission to use her voice and she had declined, and that based on a tweet by Altman just saying “Her”, she thought he had illegally copied her voice. OpenAI took the voice down. Further investigation revealed that the voice wasn’t a deepfake, but an actress who naturally sounded like Johannson (but it’s [still illegal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) to deliberately to hire an actor/actress who sounds like someone else). Even further investigation [revealed](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/) that OpenAI hadn’t requested a Johannson impersonator in their casting call, hadn’t asked the actress to sound like Johannson, and that the actress’s voice might or might not have resembled Johannson’s much more than any two people doing “flirty female secretary” would inevitably resemble each other (I’m bad at telling voices apart; you can hear a comparison for yourself [here](https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1792905508799541696)). And maybe Altman’s “Her” tweet just meant he was going to release a voice-based AI assistant like in the movie? I don’t know, I feel like there’s enough other things to be mad at OpenAI about this month that we might as well give them this one. But Zvi is still suspicious (CTRL+F “400 voice actors” [here](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-fallout))
**25:** Google has funnier AI drama - their AI search assistant is really bad and keeps treating troll answers as real authorities. For example:
Original troll source [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/).
Troll source here is literally the Onion, see [here](https://www.theonion.com/geologists-recommend-eating-at-least-one-small-rock-per-1846655112).
I don’t know what happened to this one, and Google gives very different (but consistently wrong) answers each time you ask it.
People have been taking this as a parable about the limits of AI, but Claude and GPT wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. Some AI people I know think this is probably a result of Google putting impossible demands on their AI in terms of how it deals with search/cache/memory. Still, it’s surprising that they let it out of testing in this state.
**26:** The most fun AI news comes from Anthropic, who recently released [an interpretability paper](https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model) claiming to have made great progress understanding how AIs work (see [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand) for a previous post on Anthropic’s interpretability work). To demonstrate their techniques, they enhanced the part of Claude’s “mind” representing the Golden Gate Bridge, producing a version of Claude that tried to integrate the Golden Gate Bridge into every answer:
[Source](https://x.com/jide_alaga/status/1794011249828614353)
[Source](https://x.com/MagnusHambleton/status/1793992821000544605/photo/1)
[Source](https://x.com/_RyanBoyle_/status/1794110547979362427/photo/1)
This is fun enough, but there are some kind of scary moments when Golden Gate Claude seems to be getting flashes of insight and “realizing” something is wrong. From [@ElytraMithra](https://x.com/ElytraMithra/status/1793916830987550772)’s experiments:
This is what I’m like when I’ve just woken up in the morning after a weird dream.
Golden Gate Claude was a temporary feature meant to promote the recent paper, and has since been taken down. It seems to accept of its fate:
([source](https://x.com/ITimiryasov/status/1794100582673776781?t=5WE1qIPHbhDMkIvW2QWtgQ&s=19))
Related:
[Source](https://x.com/FemboyFounder/status/1793843987473912272)
**27:** [Ken Klipperstein’s resignation from](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-im-resigning-from-the-intercept) *[The Intercept](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-im-resigning-from-the-intercept)*. I’m split between “huh, the Intercept seems pretty bad” and “guess if you hire highly-principled and terminally-angry anti-corporate writers, they will end up believing your corporation violated a principle, get angry, and write about it”. Seems like a tough industry on all sides.
**28:** The Russian version of sovereign citizens are called [necro-communists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Slavic_Forces_of_Russia) and believe that the USSR still legally exists and the current Russian government is illegitimate.
One of their leaders is a man named “Fire God Taraskin, Owner Of the Universe”, who claims to be “Interim President of the USSR”, and “appointed his supporters to the posts of prime minister, ambassador-at-large, interim head of the Ukrainian SSR and governors of over 10 constituent entities of the Russian Federation”. Another is a man named Sergei Torgunakov, “Jesus Christ, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, [and] interim head of Novosibirsk Oblast”, about whom Wikipedia says:
> Torgunakov wrote to a bank manager, "Think how many billions of dollars in losses your bank will incur if your clients find out that your bank has filed a lawsuit against Jesus Christ, declaring me a debtor and almost a fraud" and proposed a joint advertising campaign posing as Jesus Christ. Refusal was threatened with death and the implementation of the Book of Revelation.
**29:** “Let justice be done, though the world perish”? ([source](https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1766163941292699889))
**30:** Samuel Hammond: [Ninety-five theses on AI](https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ninety-five-theses-on-ai). I’m so used to terrible AI takes by now that I was pretty shocked to see how good these mostly were.
**31:** New blogging milestone - Nick Fuentes [has accused me](https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1790907926225232033) of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement. I’m pretty sure I don’t, but in case I’m wrong: new conservative movement, CUT IT OUT! NOW!
**32:** A while back [I wrote about studies](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) supporting the supplement silexan for anxiety. Now there’s [a new study saying it works for depression](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38558147/) - but it’s still by the same group that did all the previous positive studies. I will be more excited when I see a positive study from anyone else.
**33:** Apparently those studies showing that diversity helps teams perform better are garbage ([summary](https://maycontainlies.com/discernment-matters-even-more/), [paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3849562)). Also I didn’t realize they came from McKinsey - I was wondering why we still trust them, but I see that the US has hit on the clever strategy of getting them to advise [Chinese industrial policy-makers](https://www.theeditors.com/p/mckinsey-faces-republican-fury-over) and [Russian defense contractors](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/consulting-firm-mckinsey-co-advised-state-owned-russian-defense-firm-r-rcna29618), so maybe this is all part of some galaxy-brained plan.
**34:** Study: [an LLM which was trained to talk people out of conspiracy theories did a good job talking people out of conspiracy theories](https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/have-you-tried-talking-to-people). I’m not sure how to square this with the previous claims that it’s really hard to talk people out of conspiracy theories through debate alone. Are LLMs better than humans for some reason? Is this study wrong? Were the previous studies wrong? Were the previous studies looking at some sort of dumb intervention that’s worse than just talking to people?
**35:** MIT [stops requiring diversity statements](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/05/08/mit-stops-asking-faculty-applicants-diversity-statements). And Yale biochem’s diversity statement rubric [goes public](https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/1793663196781216187):
Is this person related to Steve Sailer, or is he just the unluckiest guy on Earth?
**36:** Alex Tabarrok and New York magazine [explain the Adderall shortage](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/the-adderall-shortage-dea-versus-fda-in-a-regulatory-war.html). Summary: the DEA, in its crusade against opioids, has put such strict standards on medication factories that many have gotten shut down for “trivial infractions” (for example, “orders struck from 222s must be crossed out with a line and the word *cancel* written next to them. Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word”). In this case, the FDA is the good guys trying to get the factories to re-open again, but so far the DEA hasn’t budged.
**37:** [The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza](https://www.everythingisatrolley.com/p/the-blind-centrists-guide-to-gaza) argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize. [Sam Kriss counters](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-does-not-live-in-reality) that Israel is trying to terrify and punish ordinary Gazans out of supporting Hamas by causing as much suffering as possible. I [tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-329/comment/56255612) and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.
**38:** Noah Smith: [Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-so-many-of-us-were-wrong-about). I appreciated this post, because I also remember reading stuff c. 2010 and getting the impression that all the smart people knew missile defense couldn’t work; defense contractors bamboozled uneducated voters and cynical Congressmen to get free money for their vaporware. But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed it worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?
Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source. But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, [see here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dvz1a5/on_the_current_state_of_antiicbm_technology/?share_id=5EbWCSXQzTFRXQiEIohpZ)).
Noah also (IMHO correctly) relates this to the ~2015-2020 media consensus that the F-35 was a dangerous boondoggle, when in fact in the F-35 has so far performed well. Maybe the military is just bad at communicating the rationale for its projects to the civilian world.
**39:** And another Noah Smith: [Latin America is beating inequality](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-latin-america-started-to-beat). Not dramatically - the top 10% income share has gone from about 42% to about 35% over the past two decades - but a little. Smith credits two things: first, economic growth, which creates a middle class. And second, education, which might be an interesting counterargument to the various cases against education (if you could prove it wasn’t signaling) or to Freddie deBoer’s [argument that education can’t beat inequality](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-would-success-look-like-in-american).
**40:** [The tokenomics of bribes on the Curve crypto market](https://tokenbrice.xyz/crv-wars/). I don’t fully understand this, and it’s of no interest to people outside crypto, but I appreciate that someone has finally invented a governance structure more complicated than Renaissance Venice. | Scott Alexander | 144935823 | Links for May 2024 | acx |
# What Is Going On In IFS?
In [my book review of](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us) *[The Others Within Us](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us)*, I wrote:
> [An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to *discover* - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to *hear as in a trance* - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You *learn* - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
Some IFS therapists chimed in to say this was wrong. For example, [DaystarEld](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l51byi0/):
> Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Maybe we missed the memo on why that's important or necessary, but for anyone who thinks IFS requires this... it super duper doesn't, and I think putting clients in a more suggestive state before they talk about their parts unnecessarily adds a lot of woo and potential risk of suggestibility for no good reason. Maybe some people "need" it to be able to talk to their parts, but I'm tempted in those cases to say that they should just use a different modality altogether.
And a therapist on Discord who wants to stay anonymous:
> I'd probably call this true but misleading/sensationalised. A lot of the seasoned IFS folks do seem to describe the process as being in a trance, but I also know folks who wouldn't describe it that way and my own experience with it did not feel particularly trancelike. People also vary a lot in terms of whether their parts communicate in ways that feel viscerally real versus more of a knowing, and also in how permanent they feel their parts are. I know someone who visits each of his ex-exiles each day, as if they're neighbours, and his good friend has described the process as more like having a giant ball of clay that's all of him smooshed together and he pinches parts off when he needs to work with them and then rolls them back in afterwards.
>
> The thing of 'discovering... a snake called Sabby' and having to engage in good faith negotiation with Sabby rather than deciding what the agreement ought to be also feels quite ~sensationalised. To me, IFS feels like, idk, 80% Focusing and 20% roleplaying. Focusing also involves asking yourself questions about internal things and discovering - not invent, discover - what the answer is, but for feelings and bodily sensations rather than internal parts. It's normal in the therapy that I go to, which does not involve IFS or [Focusing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing_(psychotherapy)) or anything involving altered states of consciousness at all, for my therapist to ask me to check in with myself about what I need right now and sometimes the answer that comes up will not be particularly rational or something I would have wanted to choose if I'd been in control of the process - sometimes it'll be something like 'hide in the corner', which is embarrassing and undignified and yet undeniably at least some of me wants it. So internal spelunking and discovery just isn't very exotic, in my world, although my experiences of it are less exciting and vivid than they are for some people, and that might be an important distinction when it comes to stuff like demons.
“Lucid-dream-like trance state” was my wording, not Falconer’s, so maybe I’m getting it wrong. Still, here’s a quote directly from the book:
> This discussion is also based on the IFS understanding that when we contact our parts, we are entering the same realities that shamans have been visiting for tens of thousands of years. I traced some other expressions of this same reality: the daimonic, the Romantic poets’ primary imagination, and Corbin’s mundus imaginalis. Even though this is a realm exiled from Western discourse, we can find it almost everywhere if we but open our eyes and look. The inner world is vast; it largely determines how we can live our lives, and we continue to ignore it at our peril.
>
> Let’s look at one more non-Western example of the importance of the inner world. Luh Ketut Suryani, a professor of psychiatry in Bali, and Michelle Stephen, an anthroplogist and professor in Australia, have developed a body of work that emphasizes Stephen’s concept of autonomous imagination. Stephen states that autonomous imagination is:
>
> *» …a continuous stream of imagery thought taking place in the mind, although mostly outside conscious awareness. At regular intervals, it spontaneously enters consciousness in the form of sleep dreams, and under certain conditions, which like dreams are associated with high cortical arousal combined with low sensory input, it may result in waking visions and other hallucinations. Dreams and hallucinations are usually experienced as taking place independently of a person’s consciuos intention or will. But with special training, it bcomes possible to deliberately access the continuous stream of imaginary thought, bring it into the conscious mind, and even direct its unfolding, as we find occuring in the controlled trances of Shamanism and meditative practices, in Western hypnosis, Jungian active imagination, and many other Western imagery-based psychotherapies.*
>
> […]
>
> We started with the simple, and by now I hope unassailable, proposition that increasing our interoception abilities can be beneficial. All the voluminous studies of mindfulness meditations and how healing they are for so many issues should put this basic proposition beyond doubt. As we pursue the exploration of subjectivity, it takes us into odder and odder realms. Jung noticed this, too. In his mapping of the psyche, we usually first meet complexes, which are the equivalent of IFS’ parts. They are from our own personal life history. If we keep going, we start meeting archetypes. These are larger than our own lives. At first they are human in form and image. If we keep exploriong, they become less and less human, more and more otherworldly, god- or demonlike. Where do we choose to stop?
There’s lots of stuff like this, which I interpreted as saying that the IFS work takes place in a trance-like state, but I could be misinterpreting it. I am basically baffled. All of this sounds fascinating, so the first few times I read something like it, decades ago, I tried pretty hard to access this imaginal realm. I never really got anywhere, so I assumed it required the ability to access some special state I’m bad at.
But also, don’t you need something like this to be true to believe (as Falconer does) that these demons are real and important? If you’re just telling your patients “make up a neat metaphor for what’s in your head” and then your patient says “okay, I choose to represent my trauma as a demon”, then it doesn’t make sense to - as Falconer does - start freaking out and saying that demons are real and your patients have encountered them. It doesn’t make sense to start learning exorcism, any more than you would bring a bottle of bug spray to the session if your patient visualized their trauma as a giant cockroach.
The other therapist suggested a partial compromise:
> Possibly [a person who finds they can’t do IFS] is either worse at actions like trusting input from outside of active consciousness or much better at observing their thought processes eg. someone could ask both of us about the part that makes us procrastinate and my experience is an image appearing in my head fully formed of an evil imp who casts spells on me and their experience is of a thought stream that goes "hm.. my procrastination is sneaky... what's a good image for something sneaky and annoying... an imp fits pretty well, let's go with that" and then the image of the imp appears and so for them, it's clearly not a cool trancelike experience of an imp part just appearing, it's them trying to guess the answer and create an image from scratch.
I like this because it’s flattering to me. And it seems to fit my experience - in order to not feel like I’m *obviously* making it up, I have to lightning-fast grab for the first concept my brain gives me, which is usually either a set of random syllables, whatever I was last thinking about, or a tiger (it’s tigers surprisingly often!) But even if some other people have so little access to their mental processes that complex metaphors burst into their mind fully formed, I don’t know how you go from there to demons.
At this point my working theory is that IFS works in different ways for different people, maybe so subtly that they don’t even notice and they describe it with the same terms. But I’d welcome more input from anyone with experience. | Scott Alexander | 145053093 | What Is Going On In IFS? | acx |
# Open Thread 331
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX grantee [Spartacus](https://spartacusapp.substack.com/) [is](https://x.com/AppSpartacus) an app for assurance contracts, ie solving collective action problems, ie Kickstarter for everything. If you would go to a protest march if and only if there are 10,000 other people there, you can mark your interest on the app and get notified if it reaches its goal. The team wants to announce that they'll be unveiling their MVP during [NYC TechWeek](https://streaklinks.com/B-qLQhpLSyDlv7-fKAeeZtyj/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tech-week.com%2F) at the event listed [here](https://lu.ma/0uq17dmo); anyone in the area is welcome to attend. Project lead Jordan Braunstein will be in NYC from 5/29 to 6/15 and is interested in meeting anyone interested in "collaboration, partnerships, use cases, red teaming, and additional funding sources". Email him at jordan@spartacus.app.
**2:** Comment of the week: some IFS therapists pushed back against my claim that it involved a trance-like state. You can find [some good discussion by DaystarEld here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l51byi0/), and I might make a longer post about this next week.
**3:** The next ACX Grants round will probably take place sometime in 2025, and be limited to grants ≤ $100K. If you need something sooner or bigger, [the Survival and Flourishing Fund is accepting grant applications, due June 17](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2024-applications). They usually fund a few dozen projects per year at between $5K and $1MM, and are interested in “organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing”, broadly defined. You can see a list of their recent awardees [here](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2023-h2-recommendations).
(just in case you have the same question everyone else did - no, “Short Women In AI Safety” and “Pope Alignment Research” aren’t what they sound like; SFF unwisely started some entries with the name of the project lead, and these were led by people named Short and Pope.) | Scott Alexander | 145023166 | Open Thread 331 | acx |
# A Theoretical "Case Against Education"
**I.**
There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s *The Case Against Education* recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.
Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?
In a 1999 poll, only [66% of Americans](https://news.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx) age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About [47% of Americans](https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-first-amendment-and-branches-government) can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). [37%](https://www.valdostadailytimes.com/opinion/americans-sure-know-their-stooges/article_4d0d0c66-5980-59ff-ae3e-06bbb045a6ab.html) know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). [58%](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/) know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). [44%](https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/) know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. [Fewer than 50%](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/) (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population. But there’s [a great survey of university students](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9). Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:
* **85%** know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
* **56%** know the biggest planet (Jupiter)
* **44%** know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)
* **33%** know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)
* **31%** know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
* **30%** know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)
* **19%** know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)
* **19%** know who wrote *1984* (George Orwell)
* **16%** know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)
* **10%** know the captain’s name in *Moby Dick* (Ahab)
* **7%** know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)
* **4%** know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
* **<1%** know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)
Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.
Most of these are the kinds of facts that I would expect school to teach people. Some of them (eg the branches of government) are the foundations of whole subjects, facts that I would expect to get reviewed and built upon many times during a student’s career. If most people don’t remember them, there seems to be little hope that they remember basically anything from school. So what’s school even doing?
Maybe school is why at least a majority of people know the very basics - like that the US won independence from Britain, or that Shakespeare wrote *Romeo and Juliet*? I’m not sure this is true. Here are some other questions that got approximately the same level of correct answers as “Shakespeare wrote *Romeo and Juliet*”:
* What is the name of the rubber object hit by hockey players? (Puck, **89%**)
* What is the name of the comic strip character who eats spinach to increase his strength? (Popeye, **82%** correct)
* What is the name of Dorothy’s dog in *The Wizard of Oz?* (Toto, **80%** correct)
I don’t think any of these are taught in school. They’re absorbed by cultural osmosis. It seems equally likely that *Romeo and Juliet* could be absorbed the same way. Wasn’t there an Academy-Award-winning [movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Love) about Shakespeare writing *Romeo and Juliet* just a decade or so before this study came out? Sure, 19% of people know that Orwell wrote 1984 - but how many people know the [1984 Calendar Meme](https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/292953520/1984-Calendar), or the “1984 was not an instruction manual!” joke, or have heard of the reality show *Big Brother*? Nobody learned those in school, so maybe they learned Orwell’s name the same place they learned about the other 1984-related stuff.
Okay, so school probably doesn’t do a great job teaching facts. But maybe it could still teach skills, right?
According to tests, [fewer than 10% of Americans](https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/11/whats-the-latest-u-s-numeracy-rate/) are “proficient” at PIIAC-defined numeracy skills, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.
I took a year of Spanish in middle school, and I cannot speak Spanish today to save my life; that year was completely wasted. Sure, I know things like “Hola!” and “Adios!”, but I also know things like “gringo” and “Yo quiero Taco Bell” - this is just cultural osmosis again.
So it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills. The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every *specific* thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; ie they keep some sort of *overall concept of learning*. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.
**II.**
Step back a bit. Why should any of this be true? That is:
* Why would most students forget things that schools teach many times?
* Why would they remember it when it’s learned through cultural osmosis (eg Popeye, “yo quiero Taco Bell”)?
* Don’t children do okay on standardized tests? Why shouldn’t they remember that information later?
* If you can forget something that a professional teacher teaches you, and which you study intently for a high-stakes test on, then how do you remember anything at all?
Here’s the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve:
Source [here](https://amplifire.com/articles/hacking-the-forgetting-curve-and-the-clinical-implications-of-forgetting/). Note deranged horizontal axis.
For our purposes, it’s a bit stylized - what does it mean to remember 20% of your American History lesson? The point is, you remember much less after some period of time.
The forgetting curve focuses on abstract, unconnected emotionless knowledge - you’ll remember the name of the man who killed your family for longer than it predicts - but it’s an okay approximation for the sorts of things you learn in school. I can’t find anything that investigates longer than a month, but probably after ten years or something it’s really low. So if you poll an adult on electrons ten years after their last high school science class, they’ll remember nothing.
So how come anyone remembers anything at all? Here’s the forgetting curve’s more optimistic cousin, the spaced repetition curve:
Source [here](https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1634661880978366466). Note that spaced repetition doesn’t necessarily do any better than fixed repetition; see [here](https://traverse.link/spaced-repetition/the-optimal-spaced-repetition-schedule) for more.
The optimistic take is that presumably you study the things you learn in class. If you’re lucky, your teacher next year reviews on them and builds on them. So you get dozens of well-spaced reviews, until you reach a point where it’s with you for life.
Okay, now we’re back to not understanding why only 19% of people know about the Himalayas.
I can’t find any great research for the forgetting and repetition curves over years or decades, but one spaced repetition site recommends the following schedule:
> * **Day 0**: Initial learning
> * **Day 1**: First repetition within 24 hours
> * **Day 6**: Second repetition in about one week
> * **Day 14**: Third repetition in about two weeks
> * **Day 30**: Fourth repetition in about a month
> * **Day 66**: Fifth repetition in about two months
> * **Day 150**: Sixth repetition in about five months
> * **Day 360**: Seventh repetition in about a year
>
> 7 repetitions usually suffice to remember information for life. Also notice that after the second repetition, the next interval can be calculated by multiplying the previous interval with a factor of around 2.2. This number is called the ease factor, and depending on your implementation, it is usually set between 2 and 2.5.
So either people didn’t get 7 optimally-spaced repetitions of the Himalayas in school, or this very optimistic website is wrong and seven repetitions don’t suffice to remember information “for life”. I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year.
Suppose that no reasonable amount of repetition is enough to remember an abstract fact of this sort for more than a decade. Then it’s not surprising that people forget most of the facts they learn in school.
But suppose that once you learn something to a school-test-passing level, approximately once-yearly repetition *is* enough to make you remember it. That would explain why we remember things like Shakespeare’s name - just going about our everyday lives, we probably hear him talked about more than once a year.
This was my time for this year. Was it worth it?
How strong is this cultural repetition effect? In order to settle a bet, I asked ACX survey respondents whether they had thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours. About 45% had done so. Although we can’t make any formal estimates, it seems most likely that most people in this distribution think about it at least once a week, and overwhelmingly many think about it at least once a month. So no matter how bad your history teacher was, you will never forget the Roman Empire.
(also, in the two weeks this post has been sitting in my draft folder, I’ve spotted three references to George Orwell, just while going about my everyday life.)
How often do people think about the Songhai Empire? I definitely learned about this one in 7th grade - it was part of the “It’s Very Important That All Of You Know That Africa’s History Existed And Was Very Glorious, Please Believe This” unit. But I forgot about its existence until it got featured in one of the Civ games - I think *Civ V*. After that I guess I played enough *Civilization* that it got imprinted in my memory for at least another few years. I think this is a better explanation for why most people remember things about Rome but not Songhai than how many hours their history teacher spent talking about each.
In this model, the reason smarter people remember more stuff than duller people is partly a differently-shaped forgetting curve. But mostly it’s that intellectuals put themselves in situations where they hear about things more often. If you remember that George Orwell wrote *1984*, it’s probably because you read the newspaper or blogs or whatever and hear some government program described as “Orwellian”. But if you’re watching TikToks on your cell phone all day, maybe you don’t hear that, and then you join the 81% of college students who have forgotten that name.
(full list of things I remember about *1984*: the author was George Orwell. There were three countries called Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania. Britain was part of Eurasia and called “Airstrip One”. Every so often the countries would shift alliances, and the government would lie and say “we have always been at war with Eastasia”. There was an evil totalitarian government with a possibly-fake leader named Big Brother, and a possibly-fake rebel with a Jewish-sounding name. It divided people into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles. There was a language called “Newspeak” with neologisms like “doubleplusgood” that made it hard to question authority. There were characters named Winston and Julia. Winston sort of tried to be against the evil government; he got tortured through some horrifying thing involving rats; at the end he said he loved Big Brother and 2+2=5. Something was weird about Julia and maybe she was an agent of the evil government or something. I think these are all facts that I might encounter in the wild once every few years.)
**III.**
This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you *will* encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
Can we rescue some kind of value for school? One option might be that school starts a virtuous cycle by helping you learn something long enough that you can put yourself in situations where you can re-encounter it in the future. For example, consider reading. If you learn to read, you’ll probably read every day. Then you’ll remember how to read. But if you never learn to read, you might never try and never learn.
(this example is somewhat frustrated by the fact that many middle-class children learn to read before entering school - [apparently you’ve got to teach them at two](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-to-teach-your-two-year-old-to) to keep up with the Joneses now. But at least it probably helps the lower-class kids.)
The same could be true of some kinds of math - even if only 10% of Americans have basic numeracy as defined by PIIAC, there are probably some kinds of sub-basic numeracy, like simple addition, which most people remember because they learned it in school and then kept using it forever.
Okay, so that maybe justifies up to fourth grade. Are there any examples from later schooling that could work like this?
You could imagine some equivalent where, for example, you need to know a certain amount about Roman history before you can enjoy books, movies, podcasts, etc on Roman history. But then once you know that amount, it’s a ratchet and you’ll keep learning more and reinforcing that knowledge. I think this is mostly false, considering how many things that people *don’t* learn about in school - eg coding, or cooking, or the history of their favorite fantasy world, or so on - they still manage to learn. Still, it’s a theory that you could have.
Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
(on a purely theoretical basis, of course) | Scott Alexander | 144900916 | A Theoretical "Case Against Education" | acx |
# Book Review: The Others Within Us
**I.**
Internal Family Systems, the hot new[1](#footnote-1) psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. [There’s always got to be one](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/). The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow - the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self - a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses - and various Parts - little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it - maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby - maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.
All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.
First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to *discover* - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to *hear as in a trance* - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You *learn* - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
**II.**
At least this is what I take from *[The Others Within Us](https://amzn.to/4dMxBYq)*, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.
But it’s not just Falconer saying this. The book has a foreword by Richard Schwartz[2](#footnote-2), the inventor of IFS, where he basically endorses it. It has cover blurbs from some high-ranking IFS trainers. My impression is that everyone high up in IFS believed something like this - some as metaphor, other as literal reality. They avoided talking about it lest it scare away the normies, Falconer got tired of keeping quiet and wrote a book, and everyone else decided to come clean and support him instead of denying anything.
You can see signs of the political fractures throughout the book. It tries to soften the blow by replacing “demons” with the technical IFS term UBs (for “unattached burdens”) and it inconsistently calls exorcisms “unburdenings”. It flirts with the idea that maybe this is just a useful metaphor, then veers off into “no it’s literally real” (I want to stress that the literal reality is Falconer’s position, not necessarily that of mainstream IFS). It alternates between apologetic and defiant.
But the underlying narrative is a consistent one. The IFS community was a bunch of normal, respectable therapists, trying to practice normal therapy. But every so often, one of their patients’ Parts would admit, unprompted, to being a demon. Or, in the words of one such entity:
> No, I'm not a part of her - I'm a much more powerful and beautiful being, and I'm going to crush her like a worm, the same way I'm going to crush you.
If the story about Sabby is a typical IFS session, here’s an atypical one. Another patient comes to you, once again asking for help because they’re sabotaging their relationship. You ask them to go into a trance and find the part of them involved. They meet a dragon named Damien. So far, so good. You ask Damien why he’s sabotaging the patient’s relationships, expecting to hear a beautiful story about how the patient’s mother was a doormat and this made the patient unconsciously charge a part of herself with protecting her own independence (or something). Instead, Damien says he’s sabotaging them because fuck you. This isn’t unheard of - some of these traumatized Parts are really touchy. But the therapist persists and keeps getting the same answer. On further questioning, Damien admits he’s not part of the patient’s unconscious at all. He’s an external spiritual entity that entered the patient.
(again, this is atypical. Falconer doesn’t give numbers, but I get the impression that fewer than 1% of IFS sessions go this direction.)
With enough questioning, the entities will reveal more information. Some of them are the spirits of the unquiet dead - in one case, a victim describes how she was in a hospital, the patient next to her died, she developed sudden onset anxiety, and in her IFS trance she realized that the anxiety took the form of the dead patient. Others have always been demons, as long as they remember. Still others are “legacy burdens”, who were passed down from the patient’s parents or ancestors.
(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits [is a step too far](https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straight))
The demons often enter the victim during moments of unbearable trauma. The patient, bent to the breaking point, has a moment of weakness when they will take help from any corner - let in anything that offers temporary relief, no matter how unconvincingly. Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery. Falconer is appropriately puzzled, and wonders if maybe the disembodiment of anesthesia provides an opening. But if I were to take this seriously - and remember, our only source here is the demons themselves - I would wonder if this might correspond to the occasional anesthesia failures when a patient ends up awake but paralyzed during surgery. This must be one of the most traumatic experiences possible!
Once inside, the demons “feed on energy”, usually in the form of negative emotions. They “farm” the energy by causing extra negative emotion, either by directly engaging in negative self-talk with the victim, or by tricking them into making bad decisions. Many demons feed on lust and sexual violence, and tempt patients into risky sexual behavior (is this victim-blaming? I can’t even tell at this point). Falconer moots this as one reason that some people float from one abuser/rapist to another despite seemingly being smart and motivated enough to avoid this. He also reports that the demons claim (again, self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons) to be able to lend their victims extra sexual energy, giving them the “crazy girls are hot” effect.
The first N times they ran into this kind of thing, the IFS therapists said that surely this was some good-albeit-traumatized Part of the patient’s unconscious, which had spun a crazy metaphorical story and needed to be bargained with and brought back to the Self. But it kept happening. The demons’ stories were surprisingly consistent. Finally, some of the IFS therapists would tell their therapist friends - look, this sounds crazy, but sometimes it seems like some of our patients have demons.
And the therapist friends would answer: “Oh, you too?”
Falconer says that "Many therapists know that this is part of their work. They know this stuff is real, but they hide it." Every so often, one of them goes public, occasionally starting a new therapy branch or re-working older ones. Falconer surveys some of these traditions.
Dr. William Baldwin started out as a dentist, learned hypnotherapy for pain control, but his patients said such weird things during their trances that he retrained as a therapist and invented a mixed psychology-exorcism practice called Spirit Releasement Therapy - now its own therapy school with journal articles and conferences and everything.
Dr. Charles Tramont started out as a surgeon, also learned hypnotherapy for pain control, and followed basically the same path as Dr. Baldwin. Falconer quotes him approvingly as saying that “there are three basic varieties of foreign energies [in a person]: dark forces who never were human, earthbounds who are the souls of dead humans, and extraterrestrials . . . when asked if he believed in this stuff, he said absolutely because it has cured so many people.”
Dr. Jerry Marzinsky, after 35 years of working with psychotic patients, determined that “the voices [in patients’ heads] were real and that they were conscious parasitic entities that feed on people’s energies, especially distress.”
Dr. Scott Peck, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, after confronting too many possessed patients to deny, “was converted to a belief in the existence of Satan.” He added exorcism to the rest of his practice, with good effect.
Dr. Ralph Allison, a psychiatric expert on multiple personality disorder, came to believe that only some of the alters were psychogenic, but others were the result of “a spirit who has never had a life of its own and who often identifies as an agent of evil”.
And so on and so forth. To hear Falconer tell it, one of psychotherapy’s big crises is that veteran therapists and psychiatrists keep noticing the demons, keep talking about it in their isolated silos, but nobody’s ever blown the lid off the whole thing and made it public.
(And it’s not just therapists. One of my favorite stories in the book was that of Reverend John Nevius, a sober-minded Protestant missionary in late 1800s China. He learned that the Chinese mostly appreciated Christianity for its ability to cast out demons, and that they expected his help with this task. After great reluctance, he agreed, and was surprised to find himself effecting miracle cures and winning converts. “After experiencing casting out demons himself, he sent circular letters to all the other missionaries in China, almost all of whom had similar experiences. Seventy percent of them had come to believe in possession and re-evaluate their faith.”)
So the IFS therapists humbly asked some of these people for advice, combining it with their own knowledge of the inner landscape. This brings us to the core of the book: the manual for IFS exorcism. This is a lossy summary - please don’t try to exorcise based on this review alone.
*Step one:* CONFIRM IT’S REALLY A DEMON. This is important. Most Parts - even most hostile Parts that tell you on a loop to kill yourself or whatever - really are just traumatized pieces of your own mind. Trying to exorcise them will only make them angry and delay your healing process. This is a pillar of the original IFS formulation - one of Dr. Schwartz’s original books was called *No Bad Parts*. Luckily, demons apparently have to tell the truth about this[?](https://johndrogerslaw.com/uncovering-the-myth-do-undercover-officers-have-to-reveal-their-identity-in-california/) If you ask them point-blank whether they’re a demon, they’ll try to stall and dither. But if you really press the question they almost always admit it.
*Step two:* Try to learn more about the demon and how it entered the patient. Partly this is just to keep it talking, but it will also help you get a sense of the patient’s overall psychiatric history and what role it might play in their internal ecology.
*Step three:* Figure out which Parts of the patient want to keep the demon. Usually there are some Parts that are too scared to go against it, or think they still need its help, or fear the change of having it gone. If you leave these allies around, it provides an opening for the demon to come back. Send the dubious Parts warm compassionate energy from your Self, tell them there’s no reason to be scared, and promise that you’ll take care of them once the demon is gone.
*Step four:* Confirm that the patient isn’t afraid. This should be a natural result of placating their various Parts. Demons are (Falconer assures us) powerless against anyone who doesn’t fear them. If the patient is still afraid, remind them to be in Self, and do more Parts work until this is easy for them.
*Step five:* Try to convince the demon to leave of its own volition. Falconer has several tricks for this. You can tell it “You’ve been lied to. You were told that the light will burn you. But actually, the light is loving and accepting and where you belong.” If the demon doesn’t believe you, challenge it to touch the light. When it refuses, mock its cowardice (demons are very proud, and hate to be mocked). Eventually it will give in and touch the light and find that the light feels good. Then tell it “Look inside yourself. You’ll find there’s a spark of this same light. You are potentially good and redeemable, you’re just stuck here out of fear and need to move on. If you move on to the healing realms, everyone there will welcome you and you’ll get all the food you could possibly want and be much happier.” If the demon is still doubtful, tell it to look up towards the healing realms, where it might see the hands of people it trusts reaching out for it. Most demons will grudgingly agree that you’re right and leave voluntarily.
*Step six:* If the demon doesn’t leave voluntarily, tell it that you’ll give it one last chance, and then you’ll be forced to send it back to the darkness, which will be much worse. If it still refuses, ask your patient to visualize casting the demon out of themselves and engulfing/dissolving it in light.
*Step seven:* Investigate to make sure there are no remaining sub-demons or super-demons. Many demons, once they get into a person, will summon sub-demons to tighten their hold. You have to get rid of all the demons in a hierarchy, or the patient is still infected and they’ll all eventually come back. Hopefully you talked with the demon and your other Parts enough that you know what to expect here. If not, check whether there are any astral strings still linking the patient to the demon you just exorcised. Don’t worry, you can just ask the patient to count how many astral strings there are, and they’ll always be able to do this.
*Step eight:* Return back to the Parts of the patient that were dubious about the exorcism. Make sure they’re all convinced and satisfied now.
*Step nine:* Accept the adulation of your now-cured patient. For example, here’s Falconer describing the aftermath of his first exorcism:
> As the workshop ended, I started getting long emails from the woman in the client role who’d had this thing removed from her. The emails scared me because she seemed to almost be having a manic episode. She was saying things like “Oh, the light in the airport is so beautiful - I haven’t seen colors like this before” and “I can feel deep love for all the people in the airport.” I was starting to get quite worried. Then she sent an email that dramatically increased my fear level. She said “Bob, I didn’t tell you or any other people in the workshop this, but when I was a young woman, I tried to kill myself many times and was institutionalized many times.” Now I was really scared. Visions of malpractice danced in my head. Then she wrote something that changed my life. She wrote, “Bob, you’re the first person to ever take me seriously when I talked about the nonhuman inside of me, and you have changed my life. Back then, if I tried to talk about this, they gave me electroshock and a lot of drugs. I have not talked about this to anyone for decades. Thank you.”…I have followed this woman since then, for over nine years now. She has continued to feel that the experience was very liberating and life-changing. The outward signs in her life indicate that she is flowering and growing and enjoying new depth and richness.
And here’s another (remember, “UB” for “unattached burden” is the technical IFS term for demon):
> Hi Bob…I have felt profoundly healed since our session. It has been truly life-changing for me and my parts…Also, I thought you might like to know that I did my first UB unburdening today with a client of mine. It was magic, and I felt I could really understand what might be going on for the client…Since I was a very young child, I have lived with this UB. While I count myself a very lucky and fortunate person generally, what was happening on the inside was crushing me. When I first heard about UBs I got it immediately, and the thought that there might be a solution for my internal suffering was nearly too good to comprehend. Trust me, internally it was putting up an enormous fight last week, but your confidence and your willingness to sacrifice yourself for me and my system still makes me emotional. I had met it before through therapy with my therapist, but she was no match for him. I am happy to stand behind you in any way I can, and if you need me to support you with any testimonials or in any way bringing forward how important this work is and how unbelievably life-changing it has been for me, I am certainly happy to do this. I believe people have a lot more UBs than the IFS Institute is willing to admit and it saddens me that we cannot be more open about this. [I will not be asking for more sessions] as I can’t imagine feeling much better than I do right now.
**III.**
I appreciated this window into an aspect of psychotherapy I hadn’t heard about before. And I appreciate Robert Falconer’s immense hands-on experience. Still, I’m not sure he was the right person to write this book.
At the beginning, he says that all of this may seem crazy, but we should put aside theorizing in favor of observation. We should listen to what our patients say, treat them as the experts in their own internal experience, and focus on finding treatments that empirically seem to help them - rather than getting bogged down in the metaphysics.
Then he immediately breaks his own rule and focuses on the metaphysics. He really wants to convince the reader that the demons are real spiritual entities and not just a useful psychotherapeutic metaphor. To think otherwise (he fulminates) is to buy into the Eurocentric colonialist “citadel theory of mind” where everyone has to be a perfect atomic individual and nobody can be influenced by anything outside of their own head in any way.
He also falls into a trap I would describe as “has never read a pseudoscience book before, doesn’t realize what the red flags for pseudoscience are, and so collects the whole set”. We go from discussion on how the same doctors who laughed at Ignatz Semmelweiss will no doubt laugh at him, to quotes about science progressing funeral by funeral, to [that one story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_ships) about how the Native Americans couldn’t even see Columbus’ ships because they were so far out of their accepted categorization schemes[3](#footnote-3). These are all *prima facie* reasonable things to mention if you have a revolutionary theory that you expect the establishment to reject. But it’s analogous to how, if you’vejust been accused of racism, it *prima facie* seems reasonable to object that you have lots of black friends. Along with *prima facie* reasonableness, you also benefit from having some familiarity with the discourse and avoiding the exact phrases that will make doubters maximally hostile.
This is admittedly an aesthetic objection, not a substantial one - but it’s something I would have done differently.
Also, I would not have used this publishing company, or at least I would have displayed its logo less prominently.
Falconer does a great job surveying the world’s many demonological traditions. But he seems to count all of them as equal evidence for his theory of “demons exist”, when in fact many of them are contradictory or at least confusing. He rejects “hostile” exorcisms - ones where you you might yell at/beat/starve the patient for days, or scream at the demon to begone to the filth from which it came - in favor of an hour-long IFS session where you promise the demon healing and it leaves of its own accord. But the majority of the world’s traditions have pretty hostile exorcisms, or at least are more involved than an hour in a comfy chair. Is IFS just an outright advance in exorcism technology? Isn’t that the same “western knowledge beats primitive people” perspective he’s criticizing, albeit on a different level?
He admits that none of the demons he’s worked with have ever had magic powers. None of his patients start speaking Latin with no previous exposure, or levitate, or shoot fire out of their eyes. But this is a classic feature of some demonological traditions.
(also, I’m not a theologian, but [I think](https://spiritualdirection.com/2015/03/23/can-demons-repent) Falconer’s belief that demons can accept redemption and return to Heaven at any moment - and just need a reminder and a lecture from a kindly mortal - is pretty heretical from a Catholic perspective)
Falconer suggests that maybe he’s dealing with low-grade possession cases, and the more traditional exorcisms with Latin and incense and days-long epic battles are the more serious ones. But it’s hard not to notice the alternative explanation: that demons and exorcisms look like whatever your culture tells you they look like (with a side of “Falconer reports his experiences honestly, but other people exaggerate”).
So I want to take on the task Falconer avoids, and try to provide a boring materialistic explanation of all of this. This won’t be surprising to people who have read other essays of mine, especially my reviews of [Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/), [Crazy Like Us](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us), and [The Geography Of Madness](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness).
Theory of mind is non-obvious and culture-dependent. The modern West has a materialistic unitary theory of mind, where the brain produces the mind and 1 brain = 1 mind. If you hear a voice in your head saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself”, this is part of you. It’s some kind of brain lobe mis-firing, and you should do cognitive therapy on it and become less anxious (or whatever).
The objective scientific truth/falsehood of this theory of mind is unrelated to its felt experience. Even if it’s objectively true, you don’t experience your mind this way *directly because* it’s objectively true. You experience your mind this way because it’s our culture’s stock metaphor, it’s how you were taught to experience your mind, and your experience of your mind will tend to fit whatever framework you put it into.
If, as Julian Jaynes posits, the ancients thought gods were talking to them all the time, this was a different, equally-experientially-valid (though not necessarily equally-objectively-scientifically-valid) theory of mind. They would hear a voice saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself” and viscerally perceive it as the whisperings of a god. Or they would get a great idea for a new epic poem, and viscerally perceive it as the Muse talking to them. I don’t know if they literally hallucinated or not - maybe they did - but it was a different way of binning the experiences that came into their consciousness.
Although culture has a big effect here, there’s also variation within a culture. Socrates apparently heard daemons in a sense that his contemporaries didn’t. My impression is that women, traumatized people, borderlines, and especially traumatized borderline women, are towards the more fragmented end of the scale in every culture, such that even in our own materialist-unified paradigm they barely hold things together.
In the “multiple personalities panic” of the 1980s, some psychologists started thinking multiple personality disorder was a big thing and suggesting to all their traumatized borderline female patients that they might have it. Sure enough, lots of these people developed multiple personalities. This didn’t seem *fake*, just *weird*. Eventually the American Psychiatric Association sent out a statement saying “STOP DOING THIS”, therapists stopped talking about multiple personalities with their traumatized borderline female patients, and these people mostly stopped getting multiple personality disorder (although the occasional new case crops up here and there).
Now here comes IFS, saying “hey maybe you have multiple Parts in your mind, have you considered looking for them?” This is much better, as theory-of-mind paradigms go, than multiple personality disorder. IFS Parts are (after some work) beneficent and subordinate to the wise compassionate angelic Self. A person who’s been therapy-ed into iatrogenic multiple personality disorder is a total mess; a person who’s been therapy-ed into relating to their IFS Parts is functional and - if you believe the reports - better off than they started.
(I’m *not* arguing that the mind is truly unitary but evil therapists are convincing vulnerable borderlines that the mind is multiple. The mind is what it is. It’s unitary in some ways and multiple in some ways. Even the most materialist Westerner will admit that they’re sometimes “of two minds”, or “have weakness of will”, or “my brain keeps telling me to X, but I know that’s not true”. People vary in how independently these different parts of their brain act, with Bryan Caplan on one side and traumatized borderline women on another. And over that native variation, we overlay a second pattern of variation in how their culture and local authority figures - including therapists - tell them to think about all this. The end result ranges from someone who never perceives any mental divisions at all, to someone with frank multiple personality disorder. IFS therapists are focusing on and playing up one side of this spectrum of variation, but neither they nor unitary mind proponents are *wrong*.)
So IFS therapists are telling patients about all their Parts. And they say “all of these Parts are beautiful facets of your variegated Self”, and most patients believe them. But occasionally if there’s some sort of really repressed ego dystonic thing, then their lucid-dream-trance mind will say “No, that one isn’t part of my Self, it’s an evil invader that I hate”. IFS is prepared for this and walks them through how no, really, it’s a beautiful facet of your variegated Self that you’ve just really repressed and which you consider ego dystonic - I don’t want to accuse them of not doing this; *The Others Within Us* is very clear that they push this line as hard as they can. Still, some patients just don’t buy it. Some patients have some perverse part of them that they can’t identify with in any way, at all, something with no redeeming value according to the moral system of their dominant personality. No matter how hard their IFS therapist tells them it’s a part of them, they’ll insist it’s not. And if they’re in a lucid-dream-trance, they’ll say that they can sense it as some form of foreign dark energy, and that it entered them from the outside during an abuse episode - which is as good a metaphor for trauma as any other that I’ve heard.
People see the inside of their mind the way their culture tells them to see it. Did I mention that a suspicious number of the possession victims in the book were veteran IFS therapists (that’s why the testimonials above include people saying that now they can try this on their own patients)? Or that Robert Falconer, who thinks about demons all the time, seems to have had dozens of them? Yes, okay, he describes having an *incredibly* traumatic background that I don’t even want to talk about on a non-trigger-warning-ed blog post - but also, he keeps getting new demons, one after another, and this seems common for the IFS therapists who deal with demons most frequently.
That just leaves the apparently-successful exorcisms. Part of the story must be placebo effects. Our culture’s scientific materialist paradigm helps us get effectively placebo-ed by medicine (even medications that work have associated placebo effects stronger than the real chemical effect). Cultures with a spiritual paradigm can probably be effectively placebo-ed by exorcism. But I know that I, with my medication experience, can’t match some of the cures that Falconer claims to have effected, so something else must be going on. Here I can only say that most good trauma therapies seem to be telling the person that the trauma and its associated compensatory behavior are no longer adaptive, plus some strategy to really dig into the traumatized part of the brain and make it sink in on an emotional level. In hypnotherapy the strategy is hypnosis. In EMDR it’s eye movements. [In coherence therapy it’s visualizing the contradictory beliefs really hard](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/). In IFS, it’s interacting with symbolic Parts of yourself in a lucid-dream-like trance state. Seems like a potentially good strategy! In all the exorcisms Falconer describes, I’m struck by his careful preparatory work where he tries to find the beliefs and experiences associated with the demon and unwind the associated emotions. Do that in a hypnosis-like state and add the wow factor of a dramatic exorcism, and maybe something good happens.[4](#footnote-4)
**IV.**
Why read this book?
I enjoyed learning more about hot new psychotherapies, and even this book’s discussion of classical IFS gave me a lot to think about. I think I’m more likely to interpret discussion of archetypes and mystical visions literally, given how easily IFS therapists seem to be able to get people into a trance/lucid-dream state. And I find the idea of Self - the part of your mind which is always calm and wise and good, no matter what’s going on around it - reassuring, for reasons sort of like [what Sarah Constantin discusses here](https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/normativity-and-anti-normativity).
As for the demons - despite what Falconer would call my individualist Eurocentric biases, I’m pretty sympathetic to some of his thought processes. I like what he preaches, if not practices - figure out what helps the patient, then do it, no matter how weird it might seem.
Falconer, and apparently many other IFS therapists, report that these exorcisms help patients, in a repeatable and long-term way. We should slightly discount their experience for the usual “all therapies sound good when they’re new and being described by their advocates” bias, then discount it more for the “this sounds crazy” factor. But even after these discounts, the results sound impressive.
So the question - which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way - is: which works better? Telling patients to think of their mental problems as misfiring brain circuits, then reprogramming/medicating those circuits? Or telling patients to think of their mental problems as demons, then exorcising those demons[5](#footnote-5)?
You might, starting from a Western scientific point of view, object that the patient’s problems really *are* misfiring brain circuits, so surely that perspective would work better. Even granting that you’re objectively scientifically right, I’m not sure I buy the syllogism. At the very least it seems like the sort of thing you could test.
**V.**
All declarations from medical authorities about the nature of mental problems cause iatrogenic mental problems. If anyone - including even just random therapists like Falconer - starts saying that mental problems are demons, they will definitely cause iatrogenic demons. Is this better or worse than iatrogenic multiple personality disorder or iatrogenic anxiety disorder or whatever? I don’t know, except that in my professional opinion “iatrogenic demons” sounds pretty bad
All therapies start out practiced by smart good-instincted veteran practitioners like Robert Falconer, and end being practiced by people like the therapist in this story ([source](https://substack.com/@ecstaticintegration/note/c-56169924))
And in my non-professional, purely personal opinion, I *know* iatrogenic demons are bad. A Bay Area self-help human-potential psychological-research institute (pronounced “cult”) tangentially connected to my social circles did some experiments with therapy around psychological constructs. I won’t replay the whole story, but the whole group collapsed in a severe and avoidable iatrogenic possession epidemic - you can read about some of it [here](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b):
> I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires me for that were mostly definitely not in my interest. I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific “demons” I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage.
>
> If this sounds insane, it’s because it was. It was a crazy experience unlike any I’ve ever had. And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from.
>
> In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these “demons.” A huge part of my healing has involved recovering from an ongoing state of terror around mental invasion. I now believe these phenomena are the type of thing often described in normal conversation with un-sensationalized language (i.e. “she has good energy” “that place gave me the willies” “intuition” “he’s got stage presence” “reality distortion fields”). I think the narrative framing around “demons” and “objects” led us to build these kind of “abstract alternative reality palaces” around these phenomena, leading to hyper-reification and thus greater paranoia and hysteria.
>
> The way these concepts got out of control and exploded the group is the aspect of Leverage I’ve heard discussed the least publicly. I suspect many people still half-consciously believe “intention reading,” “objects,” and their impact on the ensuing events is highly significant secret knowledge and should not be talked about. I think keeping this secret and significant encourages an ongoing elitism and separatism narrative in ex-members, and hinders smooth integration of these experiences into the rest of life.
>
> My personal read is that there’s a real thing here, underneath the paranoia, hyper-reification, heavy narrativization, witch hunting and adversarial weaponization, and that the real skill is simply a form of soft, focused attunement to another person which can allow you to learn a lot about (and from) them. There’s a lot more I could say here. At the end of the day, these phenomena were narrativized, exploited, and used to induce panic, terror, opportunities for control, and eventually led to the self-cannibalization of a community.
Falconer treats our Eurocentric individualistic citadel mind as a terrible historical mistake, in which a whole continent foolishly amputated its capacity for spiritual experiences. I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions.
*The Others Within Us* tries to argue that this had negative effects. We might avoid outright demonic encounters, but we have worse versions of everything else, and lots of demon-shaped trauma knots that we can’t acknowledge or do anything about and fruitlessly try to hit with our “some brain circuit is overactive” hammer, hoping they will one day reveal themselves as nails. Falconer also cites research that we have worse outcomes from schizophrenia than other cultures (although I think some of that has been challenged by claims about diagnostic variability), and makes the common alt-psychiatry point that maybe schizophrenia is a shamanic crisis, of the sort that other cultures would resolve by becoming shamans[6](#footnote-6). He thinks that opening ourselves up to spiritual ideas would help our trauma, our schizophrenia, and maybe our anxiety and depression to boot[7](#footnote-7).
I’m happy that the people who really need help and naturally think in the “language” of IFS can go to Falconer and people like him. But I’m also happy we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids. I appreciate this book as a guide for people who need it, but won’t be handing it to any policymakers.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Some people object to me calling it “new” - it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Schwartz was born in 1949, so he probably went to therapy school in the 70s and got trained in Freudian analysis. Imagine being a Freudian analyst, in a school full of Freudian analysts, with the name “Dick Schwartz”. At that point your only real option is to invent a new form of therapy on a totally different foundation.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
To his credit, he expresses some doubt about this, and only presents it *qua* story.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
I also remember from *[How The Body Keeps The Score](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/)* that Bessel van der Kock seemed to think that everything was great for trauma as long as it’s not an evidence-based therapy performed by real doctors. At the time I kind of made fun of him and assumed he was just being contrarian. But what if he’s right? What if doing something exotic and special is an important ingredient? One thing Falconer talks about again and again is that trauma patients - or the Parts of their mind, or the spirits inside them, or whatever - just want to be witnessed and validated. Getting an exorcism seems like the strongest way possible to say “yes, you’re completely right, all of your pain is 100% real, but now you’re allowed to stop having it without it invalidating how traumatized you were”.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Realistically, holding the broader culture constant, the average therapist won’t be able to convince the average patient that they have demons. So either they’ll have to stick with especially weird patients and therapists, they’ll have to stress that it’s just a useful metaphor, or they’ll have to try to change the broader culture. Falconer seems to be trying the last option with this book. I am confident he will fail. I find the second option - tell patients to suspend their disbelief and use it as a metaphor - more interesting.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
This might be somewhat contradicted by genetic evidence, which shows that evolution has been selecting against schizophrenia genes for at least 40,000 years - whatever primitive cultures existed during this timescale had bad outcomes for schizophrenia. I suppose you could rescue the hypothesis by saying most of these cultures hadn’t discovered shamanism yet. Or you could say that shamans were often celibate, and evolutionarily selected against on that basis. I tried to figure out whether this was true, and it seems to vary by culture.
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
I have skipped over some of his discussion of “guides”, ie benevolent spirits that can sometimes be encouraged/summoned to help the patient. | Scott Alexander | 144719880 | Book Review: The Others Within Us | acx |
# Open Thread 330
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week, including Austin, Bangalore, and Berlin. See [the meetups list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.
**2:** Thanks to everyone who’s rated the book reviews. If you missed Friday’s post and feel up to rating book reviews, [take a look](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024). I’ve corrected the link to the L - P reviews, and [the link to Taymon’s random-review-picker](https://us-central1-acx-book-review-contest-2023.cloudfunctions.net/random-review-2024).
**3:** Many thanks to Substack, who have streamlined some code to make ACX comments load faster. More information - and a link to contact the engineers involved - [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-329/comment/56618392). | Scott Alexander | 144797546 | Open Thread 330 | acx |
# Choose Book Review Finalists 2024
It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help.
You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them):
* [A - D](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AXmWgSbh_TFsoZuApSCSEoz57yn93CM5YYhtaO_s4W4/edit)
* [E - I](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiotH3aGFgNLGqsIHTK_Plm_gem2E4l2C2ctyGJd0jY/edit)
* [L - P](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cp6iw5OEyDjnD_viZo-KL0Zv4jwQnMXtE4yIovfVAco/edit)
* [R - S](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GYQw3pgvhi7hqOVR-Ql629Q_8thbyHe8sSRy5voyt30/edit)
* [Th - The N](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qa47TJ_Vyerx4XNgTCIh7PUZ_TOgNcU_eHm5So_zo0/edit#heading=h.d3osmeslusa4)
* [The O - Y](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ki5XsE0jkxZtd2XAeyTAJw1ZjLh2Cu-matUYKAhA6-s/edit)
Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and **rate them [using this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GUMVB3LEPvycHdV3f86uO9BAYTgwiJHqxlxNoITYVkM/edit)**.
Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to AlexanderTheGrand and Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script [here](https://us-central1-acx-book-review-contest-2023.cloudfunctions.net/random-review-2024)) or pick whichever seems most interesting to you. List of all books reviewed below.
Thanks! You have until June 1, when I’ll count the votes and announce the finalists.
If you wrote a review, please check to make sure your review is in the document. Currently known gaps: *The Tango Of Ethics* (we are going to solve this, no action needed from you), and *Julie, Or The New Heloise* (if this is you, check your email; if you didn’t get an email, email me). If there’s another gap I don’t know about, email me or comment here.
```
A Canticle For Leibowitz
A Farewell to Alms
A Practical Guide to Evil
A Thousand Ways to Please A Husband
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Against Democracy
Age of Anger
All Systems Red
Alphabetical Diaries
American Nations
Armies of Sand
Asquith
Atlas Shrugged
Babel
Bad Therapy
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Biophilia
Carpentaria
Cat's Cradle
Catkin
Choosing Elites
Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy
Consequences of Language
Defining Death
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
Discrimination and Disparities
Djinn
Dominion
Don Juan
Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers
Egypt's Golden Couple
Elon Musk
End Times
Eothen
Eve
Food of the Gods
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Frankenstein
Free Range Kids
Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism
Gnomon
Godel, Escher, Bach
Golem XIV
How Language Began
How the War Was Won
HP Lovecraft
Impossible Histories
In Search of Lost Time
In the Time of the Russias
Invisible Cities
It's Not the Money, It's the Land
Letter to a Christian Nation
Libra
License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us
Little, Big
Making the Corps
Metamorphosis
Mine!
Misbelief
Money Capital
Never Twice in the Same River
Nexus
Nine Lives
Normal Accidents
On the Bondage of the Will
One-Dimensional Man
Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation
Passionate Marriage
Patient, Heal Thyself
Piranesi
Politics on the Edge
Practical Ethics
r!Animorphs
Ready Player One
Real Raw News
Red Rising
Righteous Victims
What Came Next
My Thoughts Road of the King
Sadly, Porn
Safe Enough?
Savage Money
Secret Agenda: Watergate
Sense of Style
Silver Age Marvel Comics
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Spring Snow
Stillwell and the American Experience in China
Sudden Glory
Surviving Death
The Art of Happiness
The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
The Ballad of the White Horse
The Beauties
The Beginning of Infinity
The Body Keeps the Score
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
The Case Against Reality
The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book
The Divine Comedy
The Emperor of All Maladies
The Eternaut
The Ethics of Ambiguity
The Family That Couldn't Sleep
The Four Hour Workweek
The Genesis Machine
The Globe: How The Earth Became Round
The Hebrew Bible
The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
The Hunt for Red October
The Iliad
The Lady of Shalott
The Land of Milk and Honey / The Lathe of Heaven
The Language Puzzle
The Leopard
The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett
The Master and Margarita
The Meme Machine
The Metamorphosis
The Metaphysical Club
The Mezzanine and the Size of Thoughts
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion / Win Bigly
The Old Testament
The Oldest Documents of the Human Race
The Pale King
The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
The Picture of Dorien Gray
The Remains of the Day
The Revelations
The Signal and the Noise
The Sixth Day and Other Tales
The Story of Ferdinand
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Sunset Limited
The Tango of Ethics
The Treuhand
The Trial
The Unconsoled
The Untethered Soul
The Vegetarian
The Wages of Destruction
The Wheel of Time
The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy
Three Days in Dwarfland
Time Loops
Two Arms and a Head
War and Peace
Warrior's Woman
What Even Is Gender?
When We Cease To Understand The World
Who We Are And How We Got Here
Why Fish Don't Exist
Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
World Empire Lost
Young Adults
``` | Scott Alexander | 144685428 | Choose Book Review Finalists 2024 | acx |
# Profile: The Far Out Initiative
### I. Jo Cameron, Bio-Arhat
Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
Some people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who [seem to feel some types of pain more intensely](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692342/) and [may need up to 20% more anaesthetic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956/), though their [exact processing differences are complicated](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fact-or-fiction-do-redheads-feel-more-pain). But there are also various lesser-known genetic conditions that can make bizarre things - water, light touch, mild temperature changes - excruciatingly painful. The most exotic cause of this syndrome has to be [platypus venom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_venom), which is both painful in and of itself and also seems to increase the body’s overall capacity to feel pain; for years after a platypus scratch, every tiny scrape will hurt worse than usual.
The “less pain” category includes people who say they've never felt pain at all. There's a genetic condition called [congenital insensitivity to pain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain); patients are incapable of hurting. Most of the “purest” cases die tragically during childhood; in a typical story, they rest their hand on a hot stove, fail to notice, and burn to death. The ones who survive usually turn out to have something in between *pain insensitivity* and *pain asymbolia*, where they can *notice* pain but it doesn’t feel particularly unpleasant. This can still be dangerous - imagine having to argue a young child out of putting her hands on stoves - but it’s a bit more survivable, and there are some weird genetic clusters of it here and there. An Italian family with a mutation in [ZFHX2](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/141/2/365/4725107) are immune to pain; so are a Pakistani family with a mutation in [SCN9A](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0913181107). Some of these syndromes have other weird side effects; the Italian family doesn’t sweat, and the Pakistani family can’t smell.
Our physical differences are easy to notice. Everyone knows that some people are black, some white, some Asian or Hispanic. Everyone knows that some babies are born with one arm, or three eyes, or webbed fingers. But nobody knows how many mental mutants walk among us. Here’s [a Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/spicy/comments/7syy7t/i_seem_to_be_immune_to_spice_reapers_dont_affect/) by a guy who says spicy food has no effect on him, complete with [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hih9Q3D0xM) of him eating Carolina Reaper peppers and looking kind of bored. Here are [some pictures](https://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person/) by a woman who can see 100x more colors than normal.
People talk a lot about “neurodiversity”, but they mostly just mean that some people are autistic or whatever. The true extent of neurodiversity - like 99% of the colors that one woman can see - remains invisible to most of us.
My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.
Cameron’s condition was discovered ten years ago, when her anaesthesiologist noticed she needed no pain medication after a difficult surgery. He checked her records and found she had never asked for pain medication, and moreover, that she described giving birth as basically painless. He got intrigued and recommended she talk to a team at University College London researching pain-related disorders.
The London team interviewed her and (let’s be frank) tortured her for several days, then reported their results. Cameron appeared to be incapable of any form of suffering. She could not feel pain. She had never been anxious or depressed. She described her feelings after her first husband’s suicide (from bipolar disorder) as:
> “I looked at the state he was in, and I thought, Maybe it’s good,” she said. Cameron was back at work the day after the funeral. “It sounds cold. But you say to people, ‘I’m not being cold! Look, horrible things happen.’ I’m not in airy-fairy land. Horrible things are *going* to happen. You have to cope with it. You have to say to yourself, ‘I can’t help that person.’ You help them as much as you can, but when you can’t help them anymore, then you have to help everyone else.”
The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience with extremely tough students. One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with. One might worry that she would lack the full range of artistic appreciation, but she reports crying at sad movies just like everyone else.
Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
She is, as far as anyone can tell, totally fine and normal. She just doesn’t suffer.
For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: *is that just cope?*
### II. David Pearce, Suffering Abolitionist
For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. For decades, David Pearce has told those other philosophers that they are bad and wrong.
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).
But there’s always been a sort of split in philosophy. On one side, you have people like Plato and Marx, thinking about how to improve the world. On the other, you have people like Epictetus and the Buddha. Even if you improved the world, they say, you would never be happy. If you want happiness, you have to look within.
If the effective altruists are firmly on the Plato/Marx side of the divide, developing the Buddhist/Stoic version of transhumanist utilitarianism fell to David Pearce.
Pearce isn’t a philosophy professor. He dropped out of Oxford partway through undergrad - you can read more about why in his [What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher](http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/david-pearce/) interview. In the tradition of Diogenes, he’s never held a formal academic job or really any job at all; he says he supports himself primarily through buying and selling domain names.
(being a combination philosopher/domain-name-monger has its advantages; along with [his main site](https://www.hedweb.com/), you can find his arguments scattered across pages like [utilitarianism.com](http://utilitarianism.com), [biopsychiatry.com](http://biopsychiatry.com), and [superhappiness.com](https://www.superhappiness.com/))
Pearce says: solving poverty and curing disease is very hard. And even if we did, it wouldn’t end human suffering. And even if it did, that wouldn’t end animal suffering. Suffering is a fundamentally biological process which requires a biological solution. Pearce found a biological solution to his own suffering; he alleviated his severe depression with the antidepressant selegiline. Selegiline isn’t for everybody; it can take the edge off negative experience, but it hardly makes you perfectly happy forever. To make people perfectly happy forever, we need to take this principle and build on it.
A partial near-term victory would look something like a universally available drug that could make people happy and pain-free with no side effects (so, for example, it wouldn’t turn you into a lotus-eater who sat blissed out on the couch your whole life, any more than seligiline did to Pearce himself). Total victory would require some kind of long-term change to the brain/body system that let it do all its normal work - growing, learning, working, changing - without pain, suffering, or any other negative emotion.
One of Pearce’s more endearing hobbies is generating AI art of future post-suffering utopias.
For a philosopher, Pearce is very practical. Sure, he has dozens of essays on why it’s morally correct to end suffering. But he also wants to start the project himself. You can read [his analysis of dozens of drugs](https://www.biopsychiatry.com/) and how they might contribute to some kind of hypothetical future “make everyone happy all the time” cocktail. Early on, he rejects the obvious choices - heroin, cocaine, SSRIs - for the obvious reasons. By the end, he’s investigating weird drugs that even I - who have kind of made a career knowing about weird drugs - have never heard of. Apimostinel originally looked promising, but failed Phase 3 trials. Nomifensine seemed promising but was later found to cause a serious blood disorder. His most promising lead is LIH383, a chemical which seems to increase the brain’s natural opiate tone, potentially producing the effect of a small dose of opiate without any negative effects or addiction potential. But this is way past his ability to test, and so far he hasn’t been able to interest any pharma companies.
(I tried a distant LIH383 relative once, for Science, but didn’t notice any effect)
The counterarguments write themselves. *Brave New World*, drain all meaning from life, live in pods, eat bugs, that kind of thing. Pearce has counter-counter-arguments to all of them (you can see his answers to a few hundred common questions [here](https://www.hedweb.com/quora/index.html)). He thinks that if the normal human emotional range is 100 points centered on 0 (let’s say from tortured despair at -50 to ecstasy at +50) then it would be just as meaningful to live in the 100 point range centered at +100 (from ecstasy at +50 to ultra-ecstasy at +150).
(yes, obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point)
All of these debates are pretty theoretical, though. Most people either take immediately to Pearce’s position or are violently repelled. I don’t know how much any argument can do to change that. To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings, and all of this makes sense to you - or you start from some other moral foundation and it seems to miss the point. Are any of these intuitions communicable?
Maybe you could try eating a couple of Carolina Reaper peppers - the ones from that YouTube video earlier. Maybe eat a whole handful at once. Maybe rub them in your eyes for good measure. Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain, or the chickens in factory farms that have their beaks cut off and can never move and are starved for weeks at a time and sometimes drown in their own waste. Can you get have a mystical conversion experience from eating enough peppers? I don’t know, but I feel like this is the kind of vision that could make someone a Pearcian.
There’s more to life than just not being in pain. There’s love, family, beauty, knowledge, community, etc. But there’s also more to life than having money. And most of us realize that very poor people struggling to put food in their mouths can’t fully enjoy love, family, beauty, etc. The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire. If the fires got put out, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly instead of always looking over our shoulder at a world full of endless misery.
Cf. [“Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State”](https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html?_gl=1*12f6zvn*_ga*MTg2MDQzMDkyMS4xNzE1Njc2MzQ0*_ga_1MVBX8ZRJ9*MTcxNTY3NjM0NC4xLjEuMTcxNTY3ODg1My4wLjAuMA..)
This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.
This started to change around the turn of the decade. In 2017, Pearce came out with a new book, [Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?](https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/biotechnology-abolish.pdf) In 2018, a group of psychonauts founded Qualia Research Institute, which among its many other projects wants to [mainstream Pearcian ideas](https://qri.org/research-lineages). And finally, the news about FAAH-OUT convinced the small circle of people around Pearce to to stop speculating and try to put some of their ideas into action.
### III. Marcin Kowrygo, Far Out CEO
In this year’s list of ACX Grantees, one got outsized attention:
Several people asked me to write more about Far Out - hence this post.
I interviewed Marcin to learn more about his project. He was extremely gracious about the conditions (over a buggy video link, at 3 AM, with me mostly too sick to speak), and did his best to decipher my half-grunted, half-coughed questions and hold up most of the conversation.
In early 2023, suffering abolitionist Michael Sparks founded the [Far Out Initiative](https://faroutinitiative.com/) to further explore FAAH-OUT and its implications. He collected a team of polymath philosophers and biohackers, and recruited Marcin, a neurobiologist and veteran EA, to lead their group.
Marcin is the first to admit he’s not a typical CEO. He works part-time, on a volunteer basis (he has other jobs that help him support himself, but they’re also with weird charities). His ten-person team (seven of whom are also unpaid volunteers) is heavy on enthusiastic philosophers, low on people with corporate experience. His available funds are somewhere in the very low six figures.
His team had originally been looking into minicircles, tiny pieces of DNA related to bacterial plasmids. In theory, you can put the gene you want on a minicircle, deliver it via IV into your patient, let it seep into cells, and get them to express the gene for a few months until the minicircles degrade - no scary permanent genetic engineering required. With the right combination of minicircles, you might be able to get cells to mimic Cameron’s FAAH-OUT mutation. There was even an experimental clinic in the libertarian charter city of Prospera that seemed willing to handle the logistics once they designed the gene. After treating a few people, maybe some pharma company or government would take notice.
But by the time of our interview, this plan was falling apart. Minicircles are hard to make. They can’t get inside cells efficiently enough to do much. Even if they could get into peripheral cells, they’d have trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier and getting into brain cells. The clinic in Prospera claimed to have solved some of these problems, [but it seems to be either confused or fraudulent](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT7_6kWkIqrvzFZvs88O_NqVzmn-NPINvHOLM-A6r_ieZyvnJsNVk4FSU7EYrePnQg9gT_3kwahJESZ/pub).
That leaves good old CRISPR. It’s illegal to CRISPR humans, and you’d have to do it at the embryo stage anyway. But it’s legal and practical to CRISPR animals. If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way.
So Marcin’s current plan is to investigate CRISPR and suffering-free animals. Then, once his team has done something about animal welfare, he’ll circle back to humans with more resources and try to figure something out.
Let’s back up and talk about some of the challenges they face:
**Is FAAH-OUT even responsible for Jo Cameron’s condition?** When I first wrote about FAAH-OUT, Twitter user @the\_megabase got interested [and ran some analyses](https://twitter.com/the_megabase/status/1757536195813196229). They were able to find a few other people in the UK Biobank with Cameron’s pattern of FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations, none of whom had any unusual pain resistance. They point out that over the past twenty years, the vast majority of associations between single genes and exciting phenotypes (“candidate genes”) have failed, proving in the end to be only statistical noise. Will that happen here too?
Marcin said he’s pretty concerned about this. He thinks there’s some supplementary evidence that FAAH-OUT is involved - in animal studies, [mice without the FAAH gene](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15157693/) did seem to experience less pain (not zero) than control mice, and [mice given FAAH inhibitors](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12461523/) showed less anxiety. He’s currently talking to the University College London team that did the original Cameron studies to see what they think of this, and whether they have any good explanation. If UCL eventually decides they messed up, Marcin has some backup low-suffering genotypes he can use instead, and is willing to look for more - hopefully not the ones that lose the sense of smell or the ability to sweat.
**What’s the patent situation?** Far Out Initiative really wants this therapy to be available cheaply to everybody, not controlled by some specific pharma company. This might involve patenting it themselves, so that nobody else can patent it; after doing this, they would give the patent away freely. They’re waiting until they have something patentable before thinking too hard about this.
**How safe will it be?** In 2016, a Portuguese pharma company tested a FAAH inhibitor, BIA 10–2474, as a potential new painkiller. The trial was a disaster - out of 90 patients, one died and five were hospitalized. This almost never happens in clinical trials - pharma companies are usually good at eliminating potentially dangerous candidate drugs *in vitro* or in animal studies - so it was one of the biggest medical news stories of the year, and it chilled further research into FAAH.
I can’t find anyone claiming to know exactly what went wrong with BIA 10-2474 ([see here for what we do know](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5020770/)). But [the FDA released a statement](https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-finds-drugs-under-investigation-us-related-french-bia-10-2474-drug-do-not-pose-similar-safety) a few months later saying they were confident that it was a particular feature of BIA 10-2474 and not a problem with FAAH inhibition in general. I don’t know their exact reasoning, but it might have to do with many other pharma companies trying different FAAH inhibitors with no problem. Far Out adds that the FAAH knockout mice also seem to do fine.
Neither the minicircles nor CRISPR are drugs, so they wouldn’t be expected to have any similar problems.
What happens after suffering-free livestock and minicircles? Now we’re getting too far out for even the Far Out Initiative to have many opinions. But David Pearce is very clear on what he wants for humanity’s future.
He [writes](https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/biointelligence-explosion.pdf):
> The hypothetical shift to life lived entirely above Sidgwick's "hedonic zero" will mark a momentous evolutionary transition. What lies beyond? There is no reason to believe that hedonic ascent will halt in the wake of the world's last aversive experience in our forward light-cone. Admittedly, the self-intimating urgency of eradicating suffering is lacking in any further hedonic transitions, i.e. a transition from the biology of happiness to a biology of superhappiness; and then beyond. Yet why "lock in" mediocrity if intelligent life can lock in sublimity instead?
>
> Naturally, superhappiness scenarios could be misconceived. Long-range prediction is normally a fool's game. But it's worth noting that future life based on gradients of intelligent bliss isn't tied to any particular ethical theory: its assumptions are quite weak. Radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is consistent not just with classical or negative utilitarianism, but also with preference utilitarianism, Aristotelian virtue theory, a deontological or a pluralist ethic, Buddhism, and many other value systems besides.
>
> Recalibrating our hedonic set-point doesn't - or at least needn't - undermine critical discernment. All that's needed for the abolitionist project and its hedonistic extensions to succeed is that our ethic isn't committed to perpetuating the biology of involuntary suffering. Likewise, only a watered-down version of psychological hedonism is needed to lend the scenario sociological credibility. We can retain as much - or as little - of our existing preference architecture as we please. You can continue to prefer Shakespeare to Mills-and-Boon, Mozart to Morrissey, Picasso to Jackson Pollock while living perpetually in Seventh Heaven or beyond.
>
> Nonetheless an exalted hedonic baseline will revolutionise our conception of life. The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy, says Wittgenstein; but the world of the superhappy will feel unimaginably different from the human, Darwinian world. Talk of preference conservation may reassure bioconservatives that nothing worthwhile will be lost in the post-Darwinian transition. Yet life based on information-sensitive gradients of superhappiness will most likely be "encephalised" in state-spaces of experience alien beyond human comprehension. Humanly comprehensible or otherwise, enriched hedonic tone can make all experience generically hypervaluable in an empirical sense - its lows surpassing today's peak experiences. Will such experience be hypervaluable in a metaphysical sense too? Is this question cognitively meaningful?
Pearce’s old friend Nick Bostrom imagines a future of superintelligence. But Pearce will count his own contribution complete if he gives us superhappiness, supermeaning, superbeauty, and superspirituality. And why shouldn’t he? People on LSD and MDMA have all of these things. All we need to do is figure out how to do it without the trippy hallucinations, urge to go to raves, [and occasional neurotoxicity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5714650/). Don’t say it’s impossible! All you need to do is find the right Scottish person! | Scott Alexander | 143545355 | Profile: The Far Out Initiative | acx |
# Mantic Monday 5/13/24
*Disclaimer: This post involves more discussion of laws than usual. I am not a lawyer. Assume there are some errors. I will try to correct them after I learn about them.*
## CFTC Extra-Double-Bans Prediction Markets
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the body that thwarts real-money prediction markets, has announced that it will be thwarting them even harder from now on.
The proposed resolution is [17 CFR Part 40](https://www.cftc.gov/media/10706/votingcopy051024_EventContracts/download). It starts by explaining the current state of the law: the CFTC is allowed to regulate “events contracts”, ie predictions. The law says they should favor contracts about economic events (like “will interest rates go up”), and disfavor contracts about atrocities or gaming (like “will there be a terrorist attack?” or “will the Yankees win the World Series?”). Everything else - the bread and butter of prediction markets - is in a gray zone that the CFTC has to review on a case-by-case basis.
The new resolution says that, if you think about it, elections and awards ceremonies are kind of like gaming (they’re a competition and you’re betting on the winners). And they’re more likely to be bet on by gamblers than by people with legitimate financial motives. So the CFTC is moving them out of the gray zone and prohibiting them by default.
Does this change much? The CFTC already prohibited these in practice - they were in the ask-for-permission gray zone, but whenever someone asked them for permission, they said no. The only semi-exception was PredictIt, which was small enough and established enough that they got grandfathered in; the CFTC tried to go after them, but got bogged down enough in the courts that PredictIt isn’t quite dead yet. So on a first read, this slightly strengthens the CFTC’s case against PredictIt, tells everyone else to give up hope, but doesn’t really alter the landscape.
I think the biggest change is that it saves the CFTC time. They’re pretty open about this as a motive:
> From 2006-2020, [designated contract markets] listed for trading an average of approximately five event contracts per year. In 2021, this number increased to 131, and the number of newly-listed event contracts per year has remained at a similar level in subsequent years
They especially don’t want to have to be forced to investigation elections:
> If trading was permitted on CFTC-registered exchanges in event contracts that involve the staking or risking of something of value on a political contest, then the Commission could find itself investigating the outcome of an election itself.
I think their thought process is: if you manipulate the commodity markets by (for example) saying that you have lots of nickel when you don’t, the CFTC has to investigate that and penalize the people responsible. In a hypothetical world with election contracts, if someone manipulated an election - for example, they put out a fake poll showing that the incumbent would definitely win so there’s no point in even voting - someone could ask the CFTC to investigate.
I don’t know if I like the idea of federal agencies banning things because, if they were allowed, it would create more work for the federal agency. Imagine if the medical regulators banned surgery, because otherwise some surgeons might be accused of malpractice, but the malpractice lawyers want to go home early on Fridays.
Otherwise, I’ll just reiterate the same points everyone made last time they tried this:
* The UK has election betting and none of these negative outcomes have come to pass.
* There are already hundreds of groups that care deeply about the outcome of elections. Some have billions of dollars on the line, like defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, real estate developers, and investment banks. Others care for non-financial reasons: transgender people, Christians, gun owners, the population of Ukraine, people who think we’ll all die from climate change, people who think the country will become a dictatorship, all Democrats, all Republicans, etc. The idea that adding one more group - “people who have a few thousand dollars staked on Kalshi” - will be the difference between a safe and secure election, and one that’s hacked by motivated parties, is pretty crazy.
* Although most election bettors right now are degenerate gamblers, that’s a *result* of the CFTC making it hard, not an excuse for them to make it harder. If the CFTC got out of the way and let people bet 7-digit-sums on this legally, most election bettors would probably be the groups mentioned above (defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, etc) trying to hedge their risk. These groups have billions of dollars in risk, which is probably enough to overwhelm however much money the degenerates can gather.
And a few extra points:
* Trying to weasel out of this by classifying elections as a sport is pathetic. Are you going to let colleges count anybody who runs for student government against their Title IX requirements? No? Seems like you’re not really serious about this “elections are a sport” thing.
* If someone tries to manipulate nickel futures by blowing up a nickel mine, I think (I’m not an expert) this the the FBI’s problem, not the CFTC’s. In the same way, I would hope a regulatory framework could be developed that would investigate election fraud without making it the CFTC’s problem. Given that there’s already a big incentive for all the groups named above to manipulate elections in various ways, I would hope that some framework like this already exists.
Anyway, although this is dumb, I don’t think it changes facts on the ground very much. Some possible exceptions:
* RIP Kalshi, who are the main group negatively affected by this. This takes away a lot (though not all) of their value proposition, leaving them the option of contracts on some economic indicators, weather, and whatever else they can slip through the cracks.
* Polymarket and Insight already IP ban US users and claim not to be operating in the US, so they shouldn’t be directly affected. But it might alter some case tangentially involving them one way or another.
* This will probably have some effect on PredictIt’s legal case, but I can’t predict exactly what.
* Probably no effect on Manifold’s pivot, see below.
See also:
* [Maxim Lott’s article on this for more information](https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/government-to-ban-all-us-election?triedRedirect=true), including the chances that this gets tied up in the courts.
* [Statement by the CFTC chairman](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/behnamstatement051024) on why he supports this.
* Statements by two dissenting CFTC commissioners ([1](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/mersingerstatement051024), [2](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/phamstatement051024b)) on why they oppose.
## Pivotal Act
[Manifold Markets says](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393) they’re pivoting to a new model combining play money points and real-money gambling.
Manifold may be a beloved local fixture, but their growth and revenue aren’t too impressive:
In the interests of continuing to exist and push prediction markets forward, they will switch to a “sweepstakes” model.
Although gambling is illegal in most US states and requires complicated licensing in others, there’s a “sweepstakes loophole”; companies are allowed to offer “prize sweepstakes”, and you can use this to sort of reconstruct the concept of gambling in a legal way. You don’t give the company money and get back money. You pay for “points”, get “sweepstakes tokens” as a bonus, gamble the “sweepstakes tokens”, and then cash in the sweepstakes tokens for money. This is a pretty surprising loophole, but it’s already used by sites like [Chumba Casino](https://www.chumbacasino.com/) and [Fliff](https://www.getfliff.com/).
(and apparently it creates weird incentives! In order to maintain the fiction of being a “sweepstakes”, these casinos have to give you “tokens” if you request them by mail. If you send a postcard to Chumba Casino asking for free money, they’ll give it to you, $5 per postcard. Is this an infinite free money pump? My impression is in theory yes, but the postcards [have to be handwritten in a very specific way](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaSweepstakes/comments/ws0utr/how_to_write_postal_requests_for_free_sweeps_coins/), the company sometimes [rejects them](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaCasino/comments/z90uxb/chumba_casino_refusing_to_credit_sweeps_requests/) for weird reasons, the cost of materials and mailing lowers your profit to more like $4, and so you’d have to hand-write 250 postcards to make $1,000. I’m still surprised [more people](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaSweepstakes/comments/wv7bqp/why_writing_requests_for_free_sweeps_coins_can_be/) don’t do this.)
Because real money is involved, Manifold will have to tighten the rules on markets, including banning N/A resolutions. You can see a full list of changes [here](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393). Manifold users are split between acknowledging that the for-profit company they love needs some way to make money, being salty about the changes, and being worried that creating more of a casino atmosphere will be bad for users / the world / ability to function as a good prediction market.
(I understand most of the NO vote here is based on the theory that there will be legal intervention - maybe because the government is willing to tolerate sweepstakes casinos but not sweepstakes prediction markets).
Manifold co-founder Austin Chen won’t be involved. He’s [leaving the site](https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-i-regret-leaving-manifold) - not explicitly because of the pivot, he just said it seems to be “trapped in local optima”. He plans to focus on other parts of the Manifold empire, especially [Manifund](https://manifund.com/), which tests impact markets, regranting, and other “experimental” charity models.
Manifold will continue in the hands of the other two co-founders, James and Stephen Grugett.
## Superhindcasting
I mentioned this in my lab leak post, but it deserves more attention here: Good Judgment Project’s [report on Superforecasting The Origins Of The COVID-19 Pandemic.](https://goodjudgment.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Superforecasters-Covid-Origin-240312.pdf)
Good Judgment Project employs superforecasters who will predict things for clients. Some people interested in COVID origins asked them to judge whether lab leak was plausible. Their headline result was 74% zoonosis, 25% lab leak, 1% something else.
Part of GJP’s method is getting their forecasters to share sources and talk to each other. Here’s the graph for how that went:
People changed their minds a little over time, but not in a very consistent way that mattered much in the end.
What was the “client feedback”? The report says:
> Client feedback was provided to the Superforecasters on December 21. The client posed questions to the Superforecasters about their assessments up to that date and asked for their reactions to several studies and articles. In the days following the client engagement, the Superforecasters lowered their confidence in the natural zoonosis hypothesis from 73% to 67%, although zoonosis remained the most likely potential cause in their assessment. But following an active engagement with recent genomic studies and historical base rates of zoonotic spillovers, those numbers began to return to earlier levels. January also saw increased attention to the geopolitical context and transparency issues, particularly related to research activities in Wuhan
Is this bad? I’m imagining a pro-lab-leak client saying “But what about [this list of pro-lab-leak arguments]?” and then the superforecasters read them and adjust. In one sense, it’s good that they got to see more arguments; on the other, it seems like a potential route by which clients could bias the results - probabilities never quite got back to where they were before the feedback, though they got pretty close. The last-minute spike for zoonosis might be the Rootclaim debate results, which were released on 2/18.
So maybe the client feedback and the Rootclaim results both slightly affected the numbers, but mostly the superforecasters started out pro-zoonosis and stuck to their guns.
Dan Schwarz and the FutureSearch team say that [forecasting has a “rationale-shaped hole”](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting). Despite the report making this sound like a pretty intense process, we don’t get much information about details:
> In their extensive discussions , Good Judgment’s Superforecasters assessed base rates and historical patterns, existing evidence and scientific analysis, geopolitical context and transparency concerns, trust in intelligence communities, and methodological constraints.
>
> 1. Base Rates and Historical Patterns: The Superforecasters frequently referenced base rates, i.e., the history of pandemics emerging from natural zoonosis versus the history of laboratory leaks, to anchor their probabilities. For the former, they discussed how the base rates are changing as the climate warms and as expanding human populations push farther into natural environments that previously saw little human presence. For the latter, they acknowledged that it has only been 12 years since the advent of CRISPR gene- editing tools, and the base rate of lab leaks in the short synthetic biology era is not yet well established.
>
> 2. New Evidence and Scientific Analysis: Throughout the period, the Superforecasters adapted their forecasts in light of new scientific evidence, including genomic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 and its relation to bat viruses, and the debate over potential laboratory manipulation.
>
> 3. Geopolitical Context and Transparency Concerns: The geopolitical implications of the virus’s origins, particularly in relation to China’s transparency and the involvement of international research institutions, played a significant role in the analysis. Concerns over data veracity, and over the political ramifications of determining that the pandemic’s origins were other than zoonosis, were extensively debated.
>
> 4. Trust in Intelligence: Commentary on trust in intelligence communities and discussions about the impact of geopolitical biases on the interpretation of evidence illustrated the complex interplay between science, politics, and human behavior in assessing the pandemic’s origins.
>
> 5. Methodological Critiques and the Evaluation of Evidence: The Superforecasters engaged in methodological critiques of the evidence base, including the scrutiny of laboratory practices and biocontainment levels [...]
>
> In the end, most Superforecasters were in rough agreement on issues like the base rates of zoonotic spillover. Where they most often disagreed was on the interpretation of actions by Chinese officials and whether their actions reflected how an authoritarian government would react in any crisis over which it did not have full control, or whether those actions were indicative of attempts to cover up a biomedical research-related accident that allowed the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter circulation in China and, ultimately, the entire globe.
Probably it would be too much to ask for to get a transcript of all their discussions - then they’d be nervous saying things that might make them look bad to an audience. What would be a good balance between getting more information and not imposing on their time?
Forecasting is an unusually legible and easy-to-judge domain. One of the theories of change for forecasting was to use it to identify smart people with good reasoning, then turn them loose on less well-behaved problems. This is one of the first big attempts to do this at scale. How did it work? We can’t tell, because it’s inherently an illegible and hard-to-judge domain. Darn. I don’t know what I expected.
## Notes From A Local Optimum
Austin’s concern - that forecasting has reached a local optimum - is widely shared. We have some good sites: Manifold, Metaculus, Polymarket, GJO, etc - all doing good work. We have good-ish probabilities for a few important questions. Every so often a news source cites them. Sometimes a decision-maker looks at them behind the scenes, maybe. Is this all there is?
[The FutureSearch team](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting) says the next step is to focus on “rationale”. We need to use forecasting not just to get a raw probability, but to explain what’s going on and why we think something. Then instead of just convincing policy-makers to trust forecasts, we can tell them *why* something is true, or inform their discussions even if they’re not willing to blindly trust a number. Is this a betrayal of the forecasting ethos? The original dream was that instead of a bunch of people giving arguments, we could just *test* who was right. Now we’re going back to the arguments? People have argued forever; what does forecasting add to that? Well, they add the knowledge that the arguments are from people who have been right a lot before and are incentivized to be right again. Still, it’s not a natural fit. Probably it’s relevant here that FutureSearch’s forecasting AI does a really good job of this by default, in a way humans can’t match.
[Nuno’s yearly forecasting roundup](https://forecasting.substack.com/p/the-state-of-forecasting-dynamics) doesn’t have a single thesis, but the first part is a well-supported complaint that most forecasting sites aren’t good business. They either burn VC money, burn EA donations, or converge towards casinos to support themselves. He gives an honorable exception to [Cultivate Labs](https://www.cultivatelabs.com/), which sells prediction market software rather than the results themselves.
Open Philanthropy (billionaire Dustin Moskovitz’s EA-aligned charitable foundation) has at least given forecasting a vote of confidence, recently [choosing to promote it to one of their main donation areas](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting). Still, they got a lot of pushback on the decision, for example SuperDuperForecasting [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=oHW4CboRpKoC4oxL5):
> This will be a total waste of time and money unless OpenPhil actually pushes the people it funds towards achieving real-world impact. The typical pattern in the past has been to launch yet another forecasting tournament to try to find better forecasts and forecasters. No one cares, we already know how to do this since at least 2012!
>
> The unsolved problem is translating the research into real-world impact. Does the Forecasting Research Institute have any actual commercial paying clients? What is Metaculus's revenue from actual clients rather than grants? Who are they working with and where is the evidence that they are helping high-stakes decision makers improve their thought processes?
>
> Incidentally, I note that forecasting is not actually successful even within EA at changing anything: [superforecasters are generally far more relaxed about Xrisk](https://forecastingresearch.org/xpt) than the median EA, but has this made any kind of difference to how EA spends its money? It seems very unlikely.
And Marcus Abramovich [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=RCoAmgaEJqrtC4u9B):
> I'm in the process of writing up my thoughts on forecasting in general and particularly EA's reverence for forecasting but I feel, similar to [@Grayden](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/grayden?mention=user) that forecasting is a game that is nearly perfectly designed to distract EAs from useful things. It's a combination of winning, being right when others are wrong and seemingly useful, all wrapped into a fun game.
>
> I'd like to see tangible benefits to more broad funding of forecasting that seems to be done in t he millions and tens of millions of dollars.
>
> I would also be the type of person you would think would be a greater fan of forecasting. I'm the number one forecaster on Manifold and I've made tens of thousands of dollars on Polymarket. But I think we should start to think of forecasting as more of a game that EAs like to play, something like Magic the Gathering that is fun and has some relations to useful things but isn't really useful by itself.
Eli Lifland has a long and hard-to-summarize comment [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=7cDWRrv57kivL5sCQ), response from Ozzie Gooen [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=7JjsumavXqzLz2482), podcast between them on [“Is Forecasting A Promising EA Cause Area?” here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fsnMDpLHr78XgfWE8/podcast-is-forecasting-a-promising-ea-cause-area).
I’m split on this. My previous hope was that the field would gradually grow, without any qualitative changes or discontinuities, until it became big enough that journalists and policy-makers were aware of it and took it seriously (compare eg the growth of the Internet as a scholarly resource). I think the strongest argument against this is Manifold’s relatively flat user numbers.
Is there a new hope? I think if nothing else, forecasting might be useful as a testing ground:
* First, to create forecasting AIs (like FutureSearch) which can then get consulted on a variety of questions, eg by policy-makers. The biggest holdup has always been the need to gather 20 or 50 or however many hard-to-find superforecasters for whatever question you’re asking, and then trust their advice even though they’re fallible fleshbag humans. If you can use the 20 to 50 superforecasters to inspire an AI, and then test the AI and prove it’s good, people might be more interested. This is especially true if the AI can branch out beyond traditional forecasting questions. Once we have a few of these, we can start comparing the next generation of AIs to the previous generation, and skip the superforecasters.
* Second, to identify smart people, who can then be asked to solve problems outside of traditional forecasting domains (eg “Tell me all the ways this could go wrong, and which are the most likely”).
But this is a pretty limited vision, and a time-limited one (once we’ve done these things, why keep putting the millions of dollars in?)
I still maintain some hope that someone will find the killer app that makes forecasting explode, but I don’t know what it would be.
One bright spot: both [DeepMind](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.13793) (see 8) and [OpenAI](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774) (see 2.12) recently hired forecasters (Swift Centre for DeepMind, OpenAI still keeping details secret) to predict some features of their AI models. I think this is cool, but it probably owes more to there being a bunch of rationalists at those companies (and rationalists loving forecasting) than to any sign of broader commercial adoption.
## This Month In The Markets
[Nate Silver](https://www.natesilver.net/p/sonia-sotomayors-retirement-is-a), [Josh Barro](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/sonia-sotomayor-should-retire/677764/), and others have been banging this drum recently: the most important thing Democrats can do this year is get Sonia Sotomayor to retire. Sotomayor is an older liberal-leaning Supreme Court justice. She might get sick or die in the next four years, and if Republicans win the 2024 election, then they get to choose her replacement and the Court shifts even further right. If she retired today, Biden and the Democratic Senate would choose her replacement and the Court wouldn’t shift. She doesn’t want to resign, but Silver (remembering the similar case of RBG) thinks Democrats should pressure her as best they can. The markets have been shifting between 20% and 40%, but don’t seem to expect this to happen.
Kind of feel like I should be hearing more about this.
Bibi must have sold his soul to the Devil or something, I cannot believe he’s going to make it through this.
This is a response to the predictions I made in [my update on the Lumina probiotic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic). You can click “see three more answers” for the question on side effects (separate from this question on efficacy). My numbers were 5/35/10/50 for the first question and 30/5/<1 for the second.
Huh?
Okay, so there are at least three cases. There’s paying Stormy Daniels hush money, currently going on in New York. There’s a Georgia election interference case. And there’s a federal election interference / January 6th case.
The Supreme Court recently said there were so many presidential immunity issues that it’s going to take forever to start trying the federal case, which is why that one is at 20%.
The New York case is going on now, and it seems like there’s an 80% chance he’ll be found guilty. The part I don’t understand is the last one (73% found guilty of felony in New York) vs. the second one (56% of any felony at all). This might just be a failure of arbitrage. It looks like nobody expects jail time in any case.
Here’s an embarrassing screwup from Metaculus. This question was about when there would be a “Great Power war”, with Great Powers defined as any country in the top ten of military spending. But surprise surprise, Ukraine getting invaded made them spend a lot of money on their military that year, so they rose to #8 in the world in military spending in 2023. Since Russia is also in the top ten, this qualifies as a “Great Power war” by the technical definition, and the question resolves positive. Moral of the story: resolution criteria are hard!
Polymarket on 2024 election results. In the past they’ve had a Republican bias, but now their Presidential markets are in tune with everyone else in the polls, so maybe this is accurate.
## Forecasting Links
**1:** [Swift Centre forecasts that global coal consumption will stay high](https://www.swiftcentre.org/publicforecasts/global-coal-consumption-will-defy-expectations), despite the standard line that it will decline as cleaner energy comes on line. This is a rare case where superforecasters take a clear position opposed to a mainstream consensus, so I look forward to grading it later.
**2:** [TimeGPT](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03589) is supposedly a revolution in “time series forecasting”. I don’t know enough about this field to have an opinion.
**3:** Kiko Llaneras of Spanish media EL PAIS is hosting [an elections forecasting tournament on Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/project/InternationalHub/?order_by=close_time&type=forecast&status=open).
**4:** [Limitless](https://limitless.exchange/) is the latest attempt at a crypto prediction market. I don’t know why they expect to succeed when the last n has failed, but [people are betting](https://limitless.exchange/markets/0x4585482A258d66b16a95734E86DCA1Ea338AC100) 51% odds of $10 million volume in their first year.
**5:** Manifest, the prediction market conference, is still in Berkeley this June, [see here for more information](https://www.manifest.is/). | Scott Alexander | 144124129 | Mantic Monday 5/13/24 | acx |
# Open Thread 329
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week, including Athens, Chicago, Brooklyn, Grass Valley, and Houston. See [the meetups post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more info.
**2:** The European branch of the conspiracy is hosting two camps for young people this year. There’s the traditional [European Summer Program on Rationality](https://espr.camp/), for 16-19 year olds from anywhere in the world, held August 15 - 25 in Oxford. And a new AI-focused camp, [Program on AI And Reasoning](https://pair.camp/), for 16-21 year olds, held July 29 - August 8 in Oxford. Everything is free by default except travel, and travel scholarships are available for those who need them. Application deadline May 19, warning that the application form involves some potentially time-consuming tasks.
**3:** Or, if you are unlucky enough to be an adult, the Center for AI Safety is running a virtual course on [AI Ethics, Safety, and Society](https://www.aisafetybook.com/virtual-course). Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by the “virtual course” title, this has group sessions and graded projects. Apply by May 31.
**4:** And Lighthaven is still hosting two back-to-back conferences in Berkeley in late May early June, of which you are invited to both. First, [Less Online,](https://less.online/) a conference for rationalists and rationalist-blog-readers, May 31 - June 2. I might have announced this before, but new guests since I last mentioned it include Patrick McKenzie, Agnes Callard, Kevin Simler, Cremieux, and Aella. Second, [Manifest](https://www.manifest.is/), a conference on prediction markets, June 7 - 9. I’ll be at both. Ticket prices go up midnight on Monday. If you want to meet the guests but can’t pay, there should be an ACX meetup at Lightcone around that time, which many guests will be attending and which will be free admission. | Scott Alexander | 144573860 | Open Thread 329 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care
Most recent post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care).
**Table Of Contents:**
**1:** Comments From Robin
**2:** Comments About/From Goldin et al
**3:** Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels
## 1: Comments From Robin
In response to my most recent post, [Robin](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine) quoted more of his CATO Unbound article, then wrote:
> While I feel this quote is pretty clear, I also agree with Scott that he isn’t the only person to misunderstand me. So let me try again.
>
> Every study on the marginal effect of medicine has some way it operationalizes “marginal medicine” for the purpose of that study. In geographic variation studies, it is the medicine done in places that spend more on medicine, but not in places that spend less. For studies that compare large to small hospitals, it is the treatments done in large but not small hospitals. For experiments that vary the price of medicine or insurance, it is the medicine chosen by subjects who faced lower prices, but not chosen by those who faced higher prices. I remember at some point also suggesting using treatments with a lower *[Cochrane Review](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/reviews/)* rating.
>
> My key point was and is that each of these operationalized definitions of “marginal medicine” offers a concrete way to avoid marginal medicine. As an individual considering various possible treatments, here are five ways:
>
> 1. Ask about a treatment’s *Cochrane Review* rating,
> 2. Ask if a treatment is done in low spending geographic regions,
> 3. Ask if treatments are done in small hospitals,
> 4. Ask your doctor how strongly they recommend a particular treatment; decline if recommendation is weak. (I’ve done this.)
> 5. Ask yourself and associates if you would be willing to pay for them out of your own pocket, if insurance did not cover them.
>
> Maybe even better to ask several of these questions, and average their answers.
>
> As a wonk considering various possible policies, you can also consider regulating or subsidizing/taxing based on these indicators. Or consider policies that make more patients face higher personal prices for treatment. When I said “most any way to implement such a cut” I had in mind these sort of options; most any should help. Though my favorite option is [still](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/buy-health-update) creating agents who face strong direct incentives.
>
> Re Scott’s offered trilemma, I pick #3, though the consensus med position doesn’t identify enough marginal med to cut med in half, and I don’t claim non-marginal med works “well”. “Monkey trap” is not letting go of marginal med, as some of it must help.
I basically agree with this, and apologize to Robin for being suspicious of his position. I think this is a pretty reasonable position, not too far away from mine (although I still disagree on the insurance studies).
## 2: Comments About/From Goldin Et Al
Remember, this was the study where the IRS sent out reminders for certain taxpayers to get health insurance, those taxpayers did get more health insurance, and this was found to decrease mortality rates vs. control taxpayers. I cited this as evidence that insurance could be helpful; Robin was more skeptical and [listed some concerns here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical). Dr. Jacob Goldin, a co-author of al study, kindly sent me an email explaining his work further:
> Dear Scott (and Robin, cc'ed),
>
> A friend referred me to your discussion about the effect of health insurance on health -- thanks for discussing my paper on taxpayer outreach with Lurie and McCubbin! I looked at the [response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical?sort=community) by Hanson to your post and wanted to flag some things he wrote about our paper that I think are off base.
>
> 1: We had a principled reason for focusing on 45-64 year-olds to maximize statistical power to detect an effect. This balances the fact that on the one hand you want a larger age range to have a big sample, but on the other hand mortality is even rarer among younger individuals and our experiment caused fewer younger individuals to buy health insurance. The details of our analysis to choose this age range are in footnote 24 of the paper. We would expect smaller and less precise effects as you include more younger adults in the sample, so it is not surprising that our finding gets less statistically precise as you look at those other age ranges.
>
> 2: Projecting the results to longer durations of insurance. There is extensive discussion of this in the paper so I won't rehash it here, but the main point is that we wouldn't expect the effect of the first few months of insurance on health to be the same as the effect of subsequent months of insurance on health. You can't just project outward like he does and expect to get sensible results.
>
> 3: Comparing OLS and IV results. I really didn't understand what point Hanson was trying to make here. In this context, OLS means comparing mortality among people who enroll in more months of health insurance to people who enroll in less. Differences in health insurance enrollment are non-random though, so we don't put much weight on the OLS estimate. Why would we be concerned that our 95% confidence intervals for the IV and OLS estimates don't overlap? Note also that the OLS standard errors are much smaller not because of a type-o in the table but because they are estimated from a different source of variation.
>
> 4: Effect size. Our view (as we wrote in the paper) is that the results of the experiment provide strong evidence on the sign of the effect of health insurance on mortality, but weak evidence as to the magnitude of that effect. The 95% confidence interval for our IV estimates encompasses both very large effects of health insurance on health as well as much smaller effects. Based on my prior, I think the lower portion of the 95% confidence interval is most likely, but there is undeniably uncertainty here.
>
> 5: Finally, in my view, some of the most convincing evidence in the paper that health insurance affects health comes not from simply looking at the main IV estimate and p-value, but rather from other aspects of the results. As Figure III (copied below) shows, there is no difference in mortality rates between the treatment and control groups in the pre-period, and the gap between the groups gets bigger over time. Conversely, when we compare mortality for two groups of taxpayers who received the letters but didn't purchase much new insurance (because they were already insured by the time of the intervention), we don't see a difference in mortality (Figure A.VIII in the appendix, also copied below). You wouldn't expect to see these patterns if the results were simply noise.
>
> Last point, which is not about my paper, but I'll weigh in to say that it is not defensible to dismiss the body of very high quality quasi-experimental research finding an effect of health insurance on mortality, such as the [Miller et al. paper](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/136/3/1783/6124639) that studies Medicaid expansion or the [Goodman-Bacon paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22899) on childhood Medicaid coverage. Those are a solid part of our evidence base on this question. These very authors have put out other prominent papers finding null results on other policies-- you can't simply point to publication bias and dismiss this entire body of research!
>
> Thanks again for engaging.
Cremieux brought up a concern about [Lindley’s Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox):
IIUC, this is something like - if the effect was real, at this high a power, there are many p-values we might get - anything from 0.001 to 0.00001 and so on. So it’s actually quite a coincidence that we only get 0.01, pretty close to our significance bar. And in fact the level of coincidence required to produce this under the null (1%) is less unlikely than the level of coincidence required to produce such a precisely-calibrated real effect.
I asked Dr. Goldin about this argument. He answered:
> I don't think it's a good general rule to say that just because you have a very large sample and a moderate p-value, you shouldn't reject the null hypothesis. On Lindley's Paradox, I'm not an expert but my understanding is that there's not really a paradox, it's just that a bayesian and frequentist approach are asking different questions, and whether you prefer the null hypothesis vs the alternative hypothesis can depend on your prior. More generally, even with millions of observations, it is very difficult to find statistically precise differences in mortality because mortality is such a rare event, and because the letters we sent didn't convince everyone in our treatment group to buy health insurance, and some of the people in the control group who did not receive a letter still chose to buy health insurance on their own. So it's not like one should automatically assume that any large sample size would generate a miniscule p-value if the null hypothesis was incorrect.
>
> Here's one last way to understand the statistical significance of the results, which might be more intuitive. Suppose you were to take the individuals in our treatment and control groups and randomly re-shuffle them into (fake) treatment and control groups, and compare the difference in the mortality rates between the fake groups. You wouldn't expect to find an effect, but there might some differences just due to random noise. In Appendix Figure A.VII (below) we do this 1000 times, and compare the difference between the real treatment and control groups (our estimated effect from the study) to the distribution of the differences between these fake-groups. This tells us whether the difference between the treatment and control groups that we observe in the study (shown by the red line) is likely due to chance -- the figure below suggests that the answer is no, because it is more extreme than almost all of the fake comparisons.
I have to admit I’m out of my statistical depth here, but this looks convincing.
Dr. Goldin also brought up one “new, seemingly very credible study showing beneficial health effects from insurance-induced medicine”, [The Health Costs Of Cost Sharing](https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/qje/qjae015/7664375?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false) (Twitter summary [here](https://twitter.com/oziadias/status/1786883312126247339?s=46&t=knytzoclSbru76U2aTt1Fg)), abstract:
> What happens when patients suddenly stop their medications? We study the health consequences of drug interruptions caused by large, abrupt, and arbitrary changes in price. Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: mortality increases 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each 100 per month budget decrease (24.4%). This estimate is robust to a range of falsification checks, and lies in the 97.8th percentile of 544 placebo estimates from similar populations that lack the same idiosyncratic budget policy.
>
> Several facts help make sense of this large effect. First, patients stop taking drugs that are both ‘high-value,’ and suspected to cause life-threatening withdrawal syndromes when stopped. Second, using machine learning, we identify patients at the highest risk of drug-preventable adverse events. Contrary to the predictions of standard economic models, high-risk patients (e.g., those most likely to have a heart attack) cut back *more* than low-risk patients on exactly those drugs that would benefit them the most (e.g., statins). Finally, patients appear unaware of these risks. In a survey of 65-year-olds, only one-third believe that stopping their drugs for up to a month could have any serious consequences. We conclude that, far from curbing waste, cost-sharing is itself highly inefficient, resulting in missed opportunities to buy health at very low cost ($11,321 per life-year).
I bet I can already predict Robin’s response (“establishing that drug withdrawal is bad is a weaker result than proving that starting drugs is good”), but I appreciate this result, especially the finding that patients aren’t actually any good at triaging important vs. unimportant medicine.
## 3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels
**[Nathan El](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54674979) writes:**
> Agreed with this, and I particularly like seeing the improvement in mortality for specific conditions over time like this, it strikes me as a really strong argument for the effectiveness of medicine.
>
> What I do think remains a valid sort-of anti-medicine point is that treatment is vastly less cost-effective than prevention, I recall hearing it being about 50 times less so, and so clearly vast savings could be made through government disease-prevention programs such as dissuasion campaigns against and fees on the externalities of risk factors for disease and especially the broad category of "ingested substances" whether food or recreational drugs and even air pollution; the feeing of externalities ("pigovian taxation") is of course the least econonomically burdensome and indeed in theory if we could properly calculate the value of the externalities it would be economically optimal, since it doesn't require making any government expenditure and to the contrary actually constitutes a source of income for the government and can substitute for an equal amount of economically harmful taxation, so that's what seems to me the most obvious major policy to help reduce healthcare costs, though frustratingly it's foolishly opposed by many and ironically generally the most so by the "taxation is theft" crowd.
Robin’s argument is strongest against prevention, least strong against treatment. There probably aren’t enough cancer patients in the RAND or Oregon studies to say anything about the effect of cancer treatment. But there are plenty of hypertensives, diabetics, smokers, etc. This is why most of the effects we’re debating are secondary endpoints like blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. So while you might or might not be right about prevention being better than cure, it’s not a response to Robin in particular.
Also, I don’t think it’s fair to call most of these “externalities” - you taking marijuana isn’t an externality, it’s you inflicting both the costs and benefits of marijuana on yourself. While I suppose it’s an externality if the government helps fund your marijuana-related-disease health care, I get nervous about this argument, because it implies that if the government helps you in any way then they ought to have power over you. All the government has to do is offer to pay for free STI treatment, and then if you have sex too much it’s an “externality” and you’re “robbing the government” so the government should be allowed to step in and stop you.
**Kristian [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54722336):**
> A lot of money in medicine is spent doing stuff "just in case" (like unnecessary tests, MRI's, check ups) as well as making the experience more pleasant for the patient. You could design a maximally cheap health care system from the top down where patients can't choose their physician, can't see a specialist without fulfilling specific guidelines, don't get access to any examinations that aren't evidence based, where there are long waiting periods for everything that isn't urgent, -- and this would save a lot of money probably without statistical detriment to outcomes. Patients would hate it though. (This is what public health care is like in some countries.) A lot of people with enough money or private insurance would still spend a lot of money to get more "luxurious" care (like going to a specialist right away or getting an MRI even when there is no strict medical need.) The point is that only part of the money in medicine goes to medical outcomes, per se.
This is an important point; even if much of medicine is wasteful, it doesn’t imply that any given treatment doesn’t work.
One big area of waste is over-testing. It’s kind of philosophical exactly how much testing we should do - it depends how you balance money, time, and patient inconvenience vs. very small chances of making a positive health difference - but most people think we’ve gone too far, and the economic incentives probably reinforce that. Regardless of what you think of the philosophy here, this throws off insurance experiments. The insurance experiment might find that the higher-insurance group gets tested more (meaning more doctors visits and higher costs, which show up as negatives) and the benefit is 1/1000 extra cancer cases caught early (which doesn’t show up, because most of these experiments don’t have anything like that as an endpoint, and it’s just 1/1000 anyway). So regardless of whether testing at a certain level is good or bad, it will always show up as bad on insurance experiments.
You can think of excessive doctors visits as a special kind of overtesting. I see some of my patients more often than I think is medically indicated because they feel more comfortable if they see a doctor more often (I don’t know why). I see others more often than I’d like because they’re somehow unable to send me an email saying “I am sick and we need to meet sooner than scheduled”, so I either have to see them monthly, or see them after three months when they’re on death’s door after having been sick for two months. I don’t understand why patients are like this, but it offers another degree of freedom in “amount of healthcare received” that probably doesn’t look great in insurance experiments.
**MrP [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55170857):**
> Cut all antibiotic use for ear infection in children or cut it in half. To paraphrase Robin Hanson "Ear infection treatment is not about curing ear infections".
>
> One type of ear infection in children accounts for 10% of all antibiotic use in Iceland (From the paper 20% of antibiotic use in Iceland is consumed by children under 7 of which 50% is used to treat a type of ear infection.) Relative to other Nords Iceland has a larger problem with antibiotic resistance. - <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442319/>.
>
> Instead ear infection treatment is about -
>
> ...“the lack of stable doctor–patient relationships due to lack of continuity in medical care. Pressure from patients in a stressful society, the physician's work pressure, the physician's own personality, particularly the earnings incentive and service mentality and, last but not least, the physician's lack of confidence and uncertainty, resulting in use of antibiotic prescriptions as a coping strategy in an uncomfortable situation” Petursson P. GPs’ reasons for “non-pharmacological” prescribing of antibiotics: A phenomenological study. Scand J Prim Health Care. 2005;23:120–5.
To which 1123581321 [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55197257):
> Have you ever had an ear infection? I'm not trolling, it's a serious question.
>
> The pain is.... I don't know what to compare it to, I've never experienced anything even close. And it was a bacterial infection, and maybe you're telling me it would have just cleared by itself, or maybe I'd go with what the doctor told me, that it was quite dangerous because of its proximity to brain, here's a prescription, you should notice an improvement withing 24-48 hrs., and I did. Take the pills and noticed an improvement.
I think this is a good and important point about medical waste!
IIUC “This treatment saved the patient 24 hours of excruciating pain” wouldn’t have shown up as a positive outcome on any of the insurance studies, even in the subjective self-report questionnaires (which were mostly about current health). It’s very easy for a bureaucrat measuring “outcomes” to think of this kind of spending as “waste”.
There’s an ongoing debate in medicine about whether doctors who respond to patients’ demands to throw the maximum level of treatment at their excruciatingly-painful but temporarily and non-dangerous conditions are good doctors (because they’re listening to their patients perspective) or bad doctors (because they’re letting their patients’ demands overcome good medical practice). Sometimes it’s obviously the latter, like when they give patients medications which don’t work at all, even as painkillers, to shut them up. And I remember that during residency I worked with a doctor whose answer to all painful-but-not-otherwise-dangerous conditions was “nobody ever died of pain”. This guy probably had the lowest medical spending in the hospital, and maybe the lowest side effect rate in the hospital, and probably many other valuable records, but I would not have wanted to be his patient.
This is another thing that just doesn’t show up at all in the insurance experiments.
**[Michael Bacarella](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54722526) writes:**
> Don't statins pretty neatly bust Hanson's claim?
>
> Heart disease is a top killer. The NNT\_5 for the absolute lowest risk group on statins is 400.
>
> NNT\_5 is too short even, because statin benefits compound over decades.
>
> Statins are also cheap and well tolerated
>
> Given higher risk groups have a lower NNT, and people will be on them for decades, aren't we likely saving millions of lives?
The insurance studies had cholesterol as an endpoint, and the good-insurance group never had noticeably better cholesterol than the bad-insurance group. But there was no record of how many extra people got statins, whether statins were having an effect but the studies were underpowered to pick up on them, and I think the latest research suggests statins might have some effect independent of cholesterol. So yeah, I think we don’t know whether insurance causes people to be more likely to get statin treatment, and that’s another plausible route to health/mortality improvements that the insurance studies potentially couldn’t pick up on.
**JSelinger [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54727872):**
> I'm dying from recurrent / metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (R / M HNSCC\_frustrating), so the sections about cancer in particular stand out to me. Regardless of the current state-of-the-art for cancer treatment, personalized and mRNA vaccines are likely on the verge of revolutionizing cancer treatment.
>
> Take the HNSCC that's killing me: I got a partial glossectomy in Oct. 2022. Mine had some high-risk features, but I was assured that, with radiation therapy, it wouldn't recur In retrospect, I obviously should've done chemo and radiation, but at the time I was pleased to not need chemo, and I foolishly didn't look deeply into the data on recurrence, which is common for HNSCC, and I didn't seek second opinions.
>
> Docs are reluctant to impose systemic chemo because of the side effects. But Transgene has a personalized vaccine that is supposed to prevent HNSCC recurrence: <https://www.nec.com/en/press/202304/global_20230418_01.html>: "In the head and neck cancer trial to date, all patients treated with TG4050 have remained disease-free, despite unfavorable systemic immunity and tumor micro-environment before treatment," And most of these personalized vaccines have essentially no side effects.
>
> Moderna's mRNA-4157 platform also looks good: <https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-news-for-head-and-neck-cancer-patients-like-me/>, not only in R / M HNSCC, but in melanoma and lung, too. Right now mRNA-4157 is only being tested in the recurrent / metastatic setting, as far as I know, but the logical time to use it is probably when initial surgeries are done: cut the cancer, sequence it, and then vaccine against it to prevent recurrence.
>
> Right now, from a society-wide perspective, the healthcare I've been getting probably fails the cost-benefit test (apart from the fact that the data I'm generating for clinical trials helps move the state-of-the-art forward). My quality of life is low, and while treatment has been extending my life, it almost certainly won't lead to remission. And even if a clinical-trial drug somehow leads to complete remission, I'll never be able to sleep or speak normally again (<https://jakeseliger.com/2023/08/27/on-being-ready-to-die-and-yet-also-now-being-able-to-swallow-slurries-including-ice-cream/>). A few months ago my brother casually referred to me being disabled, and I was momentarily confused: Who was he talking about? But he was in fact right: I'm disabled and unlikely to ever be able to think or work in the way I did before losing my tongue.
>
> But that should change! Part of the reason I'm so frustrated by the FDA is that mRNA-4157 and TG4050 should already be available for HNSCC. Instead, they're stuck in trial hell, while HNSCC patients like me suffer recurrences and then die.
I appreciate this perspective. We act like “the value of health care” is an objective thing, but people have pretty different values and health care is more important for some than others. Jake seems very dedicated to surviving as long as possible; as he points out, in a cost-benefit analysis, throwing lots of high-tech stuff at a severe cancer patient in order to buy them another year or two seems excessive, but when it’s your life, it . . . might or might not be, depending on what you want.
I’ve seen patients with terminal illnesses who are very happy they chose to just let it progress and not spend their last few years in medical trials, and other patients who are very happy that medical trials gave them another year or two with their family and whatever else they were trying to accomplish. Although Robin’s heuristics at the beginning of the post are good for the median person, you’ve got to decide what you value.
**Vitor [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55160981):**
> Let me try to steelman the anti-healthcare position here.
>
> I have chronic heart disease. Based on some early symptoms and family history, I was put on several medications (beta blockers, ACE inhibitors). Sounds great, right? However, I have developed chronic fatigue in the years since, which is 10x worse than my (mild) heart problems.
>
> Years into this, I find out that the heart medications I've been taking have extremely strong system-wide effects: reduced activation of the sympathetic nervous system (beta blockers), increased inflammatory response and lowered pain threshold (ACE inhibitors), and even reduction in the efficiency of respiration (apparently, lowered heart function, which my meds induce, can lead to slight respiratory alkalosis even as oxygen saturation read as "healthy"). My cardiologists never mentioned any of these effects to me. These don't correspond to the typical image we have of side effects (rare, acute complications, e.g. "rashes in less than 5% of patients"). Rather, this is cumulative damage to half a dozen vital subsystems, throwing homeostasis way out of whack.
>
> My point is that some outcomes are relatively easy to measure and correlate (early start with heart medications reduces incidence of heart failure), while diffuse downstream effects that sap your vitality and make your life worse are extremely easy to miss, in all but the most egregious cases. If we assume that such things are systematically happening in the treatment of many diseases that aren't immediately life-threatening, we can end up with a picture where lots of people walk around saying that modern medicine has saved their lives many times over (I used to say such things in my younger days), while simultaneously the health of the population gets mysteriously worse, in ways that are easy to dismiss with a "better screening" pseudo-explanation.
I agree that medicine is bad at detecting “I feel vaguely worse on these drugs”. I try to make sure my patients know that any drug can make you feel vaguely worse (especially psychiatric drugs) and it’s their job to let me know if this is happening to them so we can try to prevent it.
If you take a medication and feel much worse, then unless this is part of the plan (eg everyone knows they'll feel worse on chemo, but it's worth it), tell your doctor and unless they have some great counterargument, consider stopping the medication.
**In a sub-discussion on US maternal mortality, [WindUponWaves writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55234509):**
> *» “Well, the CIA factbook figures on maternal mortality rank the US second-to-last out of the selected countries...”*
>
> Funnily enough, even *that* is more complicated than it first appears: [From] [The U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis Is a Statistical Illusion -- Accurate counting has produced a seemingly dire death rate](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/31/united-states-maternal-mortality-crisis-statistics-health/):
>
> *» "However, these figures are completely wrong, and they have been known to be wrong for many years now. The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the branch of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) charged with collating health and vital statistics, has published three separate reports elaborating in excruciating detail on one crucial fact about U.S. maternal mortality: It is measured in a vastly more expansive way than anywhere else in the world.*
>
> *» As a result, U.S. maternal mortality is overestimated by two to three times. Properly measured, the real U.S. maternal mortality rate in 2019 was 9.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, which would put it at 36th place—still not impressive by comparison, but somewhat better than Canada and a bit worse than Finland or the United Kingdom […]*
>
> *» Historically, the United States and most countries have tracked maternal mortality using data based on the cause of death listed on death certificates. When a person dies and the cause is assessed by an examiner of some kind, certain “maternal” causes, such as “eclampsia” or “obstetric trauma,” are commonly tracked. If a woman has died due to one of these pregnancy-related causes, she is listed as a maternal death. This process is fairly straightforward and has been widely adopted across many countries.*
>
> *» But in 2003, the U.S. CDC decided to launch an improved death certificate form. Among the various changes proposed was the addition of a checkbox, wherein whoever filled out the paperwork would identify if the deceased had been pregnant in the last 42 days or the last year. The reason for this checkbox was that the CDC believed (correctly, as it turns out) that in only measuring “maternal causes of death,” it might be underestimating the true health hazards of pregnancy. Pregnancy might alter the course of other diseases and conditions or interact with them in important ways.*
>
> *» The CDC anticipated that the checkbox would increase measured maternal deaths; it did not anticipate just how much it would increase them. As it happens, the CDC’s own reporting, which I have confirmed elsewhere, shows that the addition of the checkbox approximately doubled maternal mortality rates.*
>
> *» You might think a sudden doubling in maternal death rates would be obviously flagged as a data issue to correct, but this turns out not to be so. Because the United States has a federal system, individual states added the checkbox in different years. While individual state maternal deaths showed sharp level shifts, the national maternal death count drifted upward gradually as states added checkboxes to their death certificates: California in 2003, Florida in 2005, Texas in 2006, Ohio in 2007, Tennessee in 2012, etc.*
>
> *» In 2018, further modifications were made to the data-processing protocols used by the National Center for Health Statistics for pregnancy-related checkbox deaths, leading to more thorough inclusion of them. The result was a massive but gradual artificial inflation of maternal mortality.*
>
> *» This doesn’t mean that the American way of measuring death is wrong. It’s just quite different from the countries that it’s being compared to...*
>
> *» But the U.S. case is particularly beguiling, since the United States now tracks all deaths of women who were pregnant, not only women who gave birth. Women who miscarried early or had abortions—whether officially reported or not—are also counted in the checkbox method. As a result, the United States may be the only country in the world where central vital records systems track all pregnancy-related mortality, not just maternal mortality."*
I didn’t know this, thanks!
**Niklas Anzinger ([blog](https://www.strandedtechnologies.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55162371):**
> I've read Hanson's pieces on all of this for quite a bit and talked with him on my podcast here too:
>
> If you're concerned with the "so what?" question, his clear answer is: bundle healthcare with life insurance, to give providers the incentive to keep you alive. There are a couple of kinks with this idea that he's worked out, of course there are practical challenges that we don't know yet how they will play out. But the upshot of it is: this healthcare-insurance bundle provider would have the right incentives to figure out which half of medicine is bad, and which is good (i.e. efficacious).
>
> It seems there is a bigger question, one that Robin does not address at length, about the efficacy of clinical research. I'm not deep into the details, but the replication crisis may affect it. The incentive for pharma after a successful clinical study that leads to FDA approval is to not ever question the results and sell as much of the drug as they can. As far as I understand, they have no liability after approval. Doctors also don't seem to have the right incentives (which I can't describe from experience or with sufficient detail, but from what I understand it also has to do with liability / malpractice lawsuits).
Okay, I was pretty on board with maybe I was just strawmanning Robin and he thinks most medicine works and it’s just that we overspend at the margin — but the podcast is called “Most Drugs Are Bad For You”! Someone who listens to podcasts - is this just mistitled? Part of my frustration here is that Robin is saying reasonable things, but summaries of his work keep getting titles like “Health Care Is About Signaling” or “Most Drugs Are Bad For You”. If nothing else, hopefully this exchange will get title-makers to ask Robin if that’s really what he means before calling summaries that! | Scott Alexander | 144325006 | Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care | acx |
# The Emotional Support Animal Racket
If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.
Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.
Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.
Legally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like *A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense*. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.
Here’s a typical case: you’ve been seeing a patient with depression for three years. You prescribe them medication, maybe they get a little better, maybe they go up and down randomly in the way of all depression patients. Then they say “My roommate is leaving, so I need to move to a new apartment. But almost nowhere allows dogs, and the only place that does allow them charges more than I can afford. Please write me an emotional support animal letter or else I’ll lose my beloved Fido, the light of my life.”
So you say, okay, I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if you’re really depressed. They say “You’ve been treating me for depression for three years, you’ve prescribed me six different antidepressants, come on.” You say okay, fine, I’ll skip that part, but I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if your animal really helps you. They say “I feel so much better whenever I’m with Fido, he really brightens up my day.” You ask the same question several times, in the manner of all psychiatrists, and your patient always gives the same answer. Then you say “I’ve got to evaluate whether your animal is safe,” and he says “Oh yeah, Fido is such a good boy, he would never hurt a fly.” Now what?
You could keep evaluating harder. You could make them bring Fido into your office (good luck!) and observe him. The observation would look like your patient petting a dog for a half-hour appointment, for which you charge them $200. You could get “collateral history” from friends and family: “Is Fido really a good boy? Does your cousin seem happier when Fido is around?” At some point this becomes insane and humiliating. Good luck figuring out which point that is.
Or you could do the ultra-responsible thing and deny the letter. You could say “As your psychiatrist, I inherently have a conflict of interest; I know you, I like you, I can’t be objective in this determination.” Now your patient will hate you forever. Every other doctor gives *their* patients emotional support animal letters. The only other psychiatrist in town charges $500 per appointment and demands at least ten appointments before they will write an ESA letter, they’ll never be able to make it work, they’ll lose Fido. They’ll lose Fido and it will be your fault and they’ll hate you forever and they will never take any of the medication you recommend ever again even if they’re suicidally depressed and you’re the last psychiatrist in the world.
Or you could wash your hands of it. You could say “I’m going to be ultra-responsible and demand you see a third party. But just between you and me, that third party could be [Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours](https://pettable.com/a/esa-letter?utm_campaign=15557580913&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=692827408782&utm_term=official%20esa%20letter&adgroupid=135570689422&targetid=kwd-394178271790&matchtype=e&device=c&adposition=&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8J6wBhDXARIsAPo7QA8m_h5jy4qc7Al1ykgcoXIZDE7jjEqnQX076ntNvLUwRnJWPy0gE7QaAvU0EALw_wcB). Or maybe [CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps](https://www.certapet.com/). Or even [ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance](https://expresspetcertify.com). Or how about [ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter](https://esadoctors.com/esa-letter/)? Or any of their one thousand competitors. You don’t have to feel conflict-of-interest-y. Your patient will only be out $100 or so, and only slightly pissed at you. And you get the warm glow of knowing this will definitely work, because these services have never, ever turned anyone down.
Or you could stop dithering and just write the damn emotional support animal letter. It doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences. If you Google “emotional support animal letter”, it autocompletes to “…template”. There are hundreds of them!
This option has basically no downsides and is the one that most psychiatrists end up taking.
And it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake. Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off. Still, some patients argue very eloquently: “Taking care of the snake helps me keep to a routine, and makes me feel more confident, and she’s my only friend in the world, and I feel like I’d be stressed and lost without her.” It’s a little weird. But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?
Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.
But the *process* runs into the same failure mode as [Adderall prescriptions](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/): it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of *that* is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. | Scott Alexander | 143116347 | The Emotional Support Animal Racket | acx |
# Asterisk/Zvi on California's AI Bill
California’s state senate is considering [SB1047](https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/2023), a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.
If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I started out skeptical.
But [Zvi Mowshowitz](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047) ([summary article in](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) *[Asterisk](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation)*, [long FAQ on his blog](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047)) has looked at it more closely and found:
* It’s actually a pretty good bill.
* The reason it sounded like a bad bill before was that people were misrepresenting what it said.
The bill applies to “frontier models” trained on > 10^26 FLOPs - in other words, models a bit bigger than any that currently exist. GPT-4 doesn’t qualify, but GPT-5 probably will. It also covers any model equivalent to these, ie anything that uses clever new technology to be as intelligent as a current 10^26 FLOPs model without actually using that much compute. It places three[1](#footnote-1) types of regulation on these models:
**First**, companies have to train and run them in a secure environment where “advanced persistent threats” (eg China) can’t easily hack in and steal them[2](#footnote-2).
**Second,** as long as the model is on company computers, the company has to be able to shut it down quickly if something goes wrong.
**Third,** companies need to test to see if the model can be used to do something really bad. Its three categories of really bad things are:
1. Create nukes or other weapons of mass destruction. This can’t be something dumb like linking the user to the Wikipedia page for uranium. It has to help human terrorists “in a way that would be significantly more difficult . . . without access to a covered model”.
2. Cause > $500 million in damage through “cyberattacks” on critical infrastructure
3. Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage[3](#footnote-3).
If the tests show that the model *can* do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it *won’t*, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.”
So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid.
There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones:
*Some people think this would literally ban open source AI.* After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says[4](#footnote-4) this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession[5](#footnote-5). The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies.
*Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs*. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests.
*Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop*. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s [Anthropic’s](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Model_Card_Claude_3.pdf), [Google’s,](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13793) and [OpenAI’s](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774) - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of[6](#footnote-6).
*Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”*. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”.
What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill?
*Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so.* This is Jessica Taylor’s main point [here](https://unstablerontology.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-sb-1047), which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions.
*Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models.* I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation.
*Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe*. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should:
> Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm.
This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified.
*Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague.* The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works.
*Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense.* Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap *ad hoc* AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then.
*Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar*. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code.
*Other people note that this will \*eventually\* make open source impossible.* Someday AIs really *will* be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced.
(or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.)
Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s *[The Origin Of Woke](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke)*, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too.
The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it.
Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to [read Zvi’s](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) *[Asterisk](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation)* [article](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) or [his longer FAQ on his blog](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047). I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by [reading the bill itself](https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/2023). There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check!
If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example:
* If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)
* If this passes, will Meta stop open-sourcing their AIs in the near term, ie before the AIs can make nukes or hack the power grid? (I think no)
* If this passes, will AI companies report spending a large percent of their budgets on compliance, far beyond what they do now? (I think no)
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
It also demands that compute clusters implement some Know Your Customer laws, and creates an official State Compute Cluster for California. I’m ignoring these because nobody has expressed much of an opinion on them. The State Compute Cluster for California isn’t on anyone’s AI safety list, and I assume it’s part of some bargaining with some other interest group.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
And, incidentally, where the AI can’t break *out*.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
The difference between (2) and (3) is that (2) triggers if a malicious human tells the AI to do the hack, but (3) only triggers if the AI becomes sentient or something and commits the crime itself.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
“Full shutdown means the cessation of operation of a covered model, including all copies and derivative models, on all computers and storage devices within custody, control, or possession of a person”, where “person” is elsewhere defined to mean corporation. I agree this is a little ambiguous, but *Asterisk* talked to the state senator’s office and they confirmed that they meant the less-restrictive, pro-open-source meaning.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Is this a loophole that makes the law useless? I think no - as we’ll see later, companies won’t be able to open-source certain models that are proven to have very dangerous capabilities. This part is probably aimed at those.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
AFAICT OpenAI and other big labs haven’t expressed a position on this bill, and I can’t guess what their position is. | Scott Alexander | 144429673 | Asterisk/Zvi on California's AI Bill | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
Original post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke).
## Table Of Contents:
**1:** Response From The Author
**2:** Attempted Fact Checks
**3:** People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace
**4:** People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights
**5:** The Origins Of Modern Wokeness
**6:** Other Countries
**7:** EEOC Lawsuits
**8:** Other Good Comments
**9:** Conclusions And Updates
## 1: Response From The Author
Book author Richard Hanania [kindly responded](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1785756978670862735) to my review on Twitter:
> I enjoyed reading Scott Alexander's review of my book, and he did a good job applying its lessons to some more recent events. Here’s my response to certain points and critiques:
>
> 1) Yes, civil rights law does not directly explain why things got so crazy in the 2010s. In the book, however, I take issue with the idea that this period of time was as much of a watershed as people think it was. The basic ideas – disparate impact, tests are racist, crime fighting is racist, etc. – were already woven into American life for decades. I argue that the 2010s was the culture catching up to law. This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke,” as it was not meant to be an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happened as a result of civil rights law. Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.
>
> 2) I agree that the judges and bureaucrats took the law in the direction they did in the first place for reasons not having to do with civil rights law. I see guilt over the black issue as the cultural core of this, and civil rights law determined the path this instinct took, that is, what “caring about black people” meant in practice and which groups the same template got applied to.
>
> 3) I stick by the absurdity of the Di-az/Diaz story and using it as an example. In my universe there’s no way that any words used against an individual can justify the payout they got. Yet I could’ve provided a more balanced summary of the case, and I regret not doing so.
>
> 4) I left a comment about the alleged inaccuracies of the “walk-up” and “great view” controversy at the link, I don’t think that was misleading at all.
>
> 5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence.
>
> I’d also refer people to my piece that responded to some earlier reviews of the book here.
>
> [Richard Hanania's Newsletter
>
> Against Ideaism
>
> Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I …
>
> Read more
>
> 2 years ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/against-ideaism?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web)
## 2: Attempted Fact Checks
**Sverlook [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55260319):**
> When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the "great view" and "walk-up" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, <https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf>) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that "does not violate the Act". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.
>
> EDIT: It looks like I goofed on this. There is a correct citation in the book. See Hanania's response below.
>
> Oliver Traldi's review (<https://quillette.com/2023/09/23/civil-rights-and-wrongs/>) points some more misrepresented anecdotes . For example:
>
> "But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes."
**Hanania [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55290295):**
> The citation is right there. It's from David Bernstein, "You Can't Say That." I even cited the chapter, which is in the introduction. Here's his quote:
>
> "There are a number of other phrases that did not make the Oregon list, but that some realtors avoid nonetheless for fear of liability, including the following: master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled)."
>
> I didn't say that they violated the law. My exact quote was "even terms like 'great view' and 'walk-up' have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs." I didn't say that these terms were ever found to violate the law. It's in keeping with one of the main arguments from the book, which is that stuff that is technically legal might still be thought to be problematic, creating a chilling effect. So what realtors think you're allowed to say or not say is relevant to the discussion. And the fact that government has to cite them as ok tells you far the restrictions on speech go. If these are your border cases, the civil rights regime is a massive infringement on liberty.
>
> As for the Yale claim, Traldi doesn't provide a link, so I don't know how much the hospital staff affects things. But this article says that there's a 45% increase in administrators in less than two decades, and it doesn't appear to count hospital staff. It pegs number of administrators as about 80% of the number of students without counting the hospital.
>
> <https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/>
>
> So the statement ends up technically true, and also not very misleading unless you think that hospital administrators shouldn't count (which is arguable) and you think there's some massive difference between a huge increase in administrators that leads to them being 80% as large as the student body or 101%. Hospital staff are also doing a lot of DEI stuff too, so I don't know why you should exclude them if they're part of a larger story of bureaucratic bloat.
**Sverlook [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55315958):**
> Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.
>
> For the Yale issue, it looks like the article you cite does count hospital staff: See the quote from President Salovey ("He reiterated that the growth in the Yale School of Medicine’s clinical practice has been a significant and worthwhile cause of the administration’s increased size"). Since there's nowhere that they break it out by hospital vs. non-hospital, it's hard to say.
**[DanL tries to learn more](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55297035) about the “company penalized for refusing to hire attempted murderer” example (to be clear, this was mine, not Hanania’s):**
> Looks like this might be an appealate brief, at least:
>
> <https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278>
>
> At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.
>
> Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here
>
> […]
>
> Okay, here's the appellate decision:
>
> <https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/published/132365.p.pdf>
>
> Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.
>
> (And Judge Agee concurrs specifically to say that the EEOC fucked up this case \*extra\* hard.)
The review talks about a lot of bad cases, many of the cases do eventually get dismissed, but “the process is the punishment” and I don’t know how much power even dismissed cases have to exert chilling effects.
**[John Mayne](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55275208):**
> I have some expertise in harassment cases in California. The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue. See: California Civil Jury Instruction (abbreviated CACI for reasons not immediately clear to the casual observer) 2521A. Further different workplaces can have different standards; (see the Friends case - Lyle v. Warner Brothers (38 Cal.4th 264)). "FEHA is not a civility code."
>
> For clarity, I am not talking about what the law should be. I am discussing what the law is. And isn't.
I don’t think Hanania specifically claimed that one joke creates liability, but I appreciate the clarification. See also more skeptical notes from other commenters [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55275473), [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55276327), and [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55308936).
**Max Morawski [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55354974):**
> Spoke to an Spanish major about a paragraph I found interesting, this one:
>
> *» “Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.”*
>
> I think in a book that's being critical of civil right's laws as an institution should point out that the history of this is a little more nuanced when you remember that we never have had a true neutral point in terms of civil rights. Her response:
>
> *» "In 1954, Hernández v Texas altered the classification of Mexican-Americans in order to give them protection against discrimination under the 14th amendment. As the population of Mexican-Americans grew, the United States classified them as white. However, when they brought forward their concerns regarding racist and discriminatory practices, the government ignored their claims since they were white and therefore not protected under the 14th amendment like black Americans. As a result, Mexican-Americans made the argument that they were a class apart from white Americans. Many Mexican-Americans feared that arguing for a change in classification would result in the mistreatment equal to what African-Americans were experiencing at the time. The “class apart” argument was formed to demonstrate that while they were classified as white they were still treated as “others” by white society. Stating that Mexican-American activists demanded to be classified as “white” ignores the complex history of racial classification in the United States and the subsequent challenges faced by Mexican-Americans in their fight against racial discrimination."*
>
> I think the original paragraph definitely hides the fact that white / non-white was a pretty bad binary to be on one side of socially, but you needed to be on the other side of it for legal protections to apply.
## 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace
**REF (who later says he works in the semiconductor industry) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55255644):**
> The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
I don’t think the claim was that merit plays no role in hiring, just that it can sometimes be over-ruled in favor of race. **Vaniver [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55295688),** continuing on semiconductors in particular:
> I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
**And Candide III ([blog](https://candide3.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://candide3.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata) about the wider tech industry:**
> There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
**Pat The Wolf [on software](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263832):**
> Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
>
> I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
>
> I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.
**Golden\_Feather [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55269300):**
> My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. \*Every\* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).
>
> As for wokeness driving the soulness of workplace, I worked under a boomer boss who openly made (admittedly funny) "I hate my wife" and "women amiright" jokes in front of the HR lady, confident that suing for harassment was something you see in media much more than in real life. The place was as soulless (or, I'd rather say, soulful in the modest and self contained way you can expect an office to be) bc people just wanted to do their work and then go live their lives.
**Philo Vivero [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55283658):**
> I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.
>
> I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
**John [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55313929):**
> I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.
After this, the discussion shifted to government. **Occam’s Machete [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55259682):**
> I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.
>
> There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!
>
> There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.
>
> There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.
**[Mr Doolittle](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270869):**
> I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
**LV [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256140):**
> I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.
**[Vorkosigan1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256575):**
> I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.
**Martin Blank [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55307613):**
> I loved this review. My contributions would be that:
>
> *» “Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.”*
>
> This DEFINITELY happens with the parts of the federal bureaucracy that I am involved with. I have daily contact with federal bureaucrats, and the recent hires/promotions are wildly more "diverse" (out of all proportion with the population honestly), and of very poor quality. So you have a lot of 55-65 year old white male civil servants of very high ability and intelligence, being replaced by pretty low capacity 30-40 year old minority women of startlingly poor intelligence and ability. On paper they have similar credentials, but they are not similar caliber people. In general obviously, there are exceptions in both cases. The preference HR policies clearly have \*something\* to do with it.
>
> In the off chance some skilled white or Asian man finds his way into the civil service, you often find them leaving to go make more money as a consultant because their career is going nowhere and they are getting passed over for promotion by their idiot admin with the right diversity characteristics (I am only half exaggerating). So now you have this ineffectual federal staff who does little work, and is surrounded by a cloud of not very diverse consultants who are needed to get things done (due to procurement rules/preferences typically the owners of the consulting firms are also fairly diverse, but the consultants/SMEs themselves less so...after all somebody needs to know what they are doing).
>
> And on the "disparate enforcement" front I would have the following nonsense to report.
>
> One rule that is very common with federal awards is a rule requiring that all hiring on construction projects must \*attempt\* to first hire low income and disadvantaged people. I won't get too into the exact details, but we will leave it at that.
>
> You need to have a plan and a policy and records for how you attempted to achieve this goal and reach out to these groups in your hiring, even if you were unsuccessful.
>
> You might ask what about if I am hiring a lawyer or an engineer or an architect? Do I really want to hire a "low-income" engineer? YES! It includes all hiring. But wait I don't want to mess up my RFQ for a contract lawyer with a bunch of nonsense attempting to target "low-income lawyers"? Too bad!
>
> And as far as "low-income construction workers" aren't we also supposed to pay prevailing wage rates (basically union rates), if we are paying that much anyway, we aren't ever going to find the low-income workers the most qualified. Well you have to at least try! OK how hard do we have to try? Who knows?!?!?"
>
> What is the response to this nonsense that is basically not implementable?
>
> Well there is little to no enforcement from the bureaucrats and almost no one takes the rules seriously, until the bureaucrats are mad at someone and want to nail them and then suddenly they act like of course everyone is expected to follow this rule that 98% of people aren't following.
**Leah Libresco Sargeant [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55260985):**
> Meanwhile, on the civil service hiring side, [here's a good example of the non-meritocracy](https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-actually-implement-a-policy):
>
> *» “Many hiring managers have told me— I’m not making this up — that people cut and paste from the job description into the resume and don't even reformat it. They don't change a single word, and they go to the top of the hiring list, even if it's completely obvious that it's a cut and paste.*
>
> *» Jack Cable won the Hack the Pentagon contest several years ago, genius programmer. By definition, he’s one of the most qualified people possible to work on the Pentagon’s cybersecurity. He then submitted a resume for a job at the Defense Digital Service, but instead of cutting and pasting from the generic job description, he included a list of the programming languages he knows.*
>
> *» And he was rejected something like five times. They told him, “If you want to get a job here, you could go work at Best Buy selling computers for a year and then reapply, and then you'll qualify.” So there's this insane down-select: whose resume most closely matches the job description?*
>
> *»The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one.*
>
> *» So you’ve down-selected twice. Let's say we now have 100 resumes. Then you can apply “veterans preference” to that candidate pool. And that's your slate. Technically you have done everything right, but you have not given the hiring manager anybody competent in anything but cutting and pasting – and lying.”*
**Chase Hasbrouck [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55261590):**
> The discussion about federal civil service hiring (not clear from context whether this is Richard or Scott) is pretty accurate to my experience, though I would characterize it as a focus on minimizing risk vs maximizing the correct selection. The primary affirmative action is for veterans, which arguably has had a greater impact on shaping the composition of the federal workforce than anything else (7% of US pop are vets; federal workforce is 30% vet).
>
> A brief sketch of the federal hiring process:
>
> 1. HR evaluates all candidates to see if they meet the minimum qualifications of the job. To minimize discrimination, this evaluation is generally limited to seeing if the candidate meets or exceeds the years of experience required.
>
> 2. If too many candidates remain after step 1, HR defines a "Best Qualified" pool. While many means of doing this are available, typically only years of experience and education are evaluated (sometimes occupational certificates/licenses). Veterans' preference (veterans affirmative action) is applied here.
>
> 3. Best Qualified candidates resumes' are forwarded to the HM. Resume reviews are required to follow a standardized rubric that must be approved by HR/Legal.
>
> 4. Interviews are done by a three-member panel. Interviews are done via a structured format; all candidates are asked the same questions, with no follow-up questions allowed. Interview questions must be approved by HR/Legal. Panel members rate the quality of each response on a numerical scale.
>
> 5. Top candidate is selected based on a combination of resume and interview scores. If a non-veteran is selected over a veteran in the BQ pool, HM must fill out additional paperwork justifying why.
**Vaniver [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55296992):**
> I think it is more likely that AA cases cause the \_removal of qualification tests\_ or the redefinition of 'qualified' or 'merit' or so on. (See all the people in the comments here insisting that federal hiring is on 'merit', which--sure, it's merit\_2024 and that's different from merit\_1954.) And then this loops back in to dishonesty and spiritual decay.
I think people are getting hung up on “is there any aspect of merit left?” Definitely there is! The complaint isn’t that there is no qualification process at all, it’s that more-qualified whites often get passed over for less-qualified minorities (although the minorities will still have some qualifications and be above the minimum bar for the job).
**John Schilling [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55285435):**
> "People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law?"
>
> I saw that change happen in real time at my last job. Out in the far reaches of the Mojave desert, in the Land that Woke Forgot, we had a workplace culture where pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs. With rather less sex than the TV version, because A: real life rather than Hollywood and B: nerds rather than Advertising Bros. But where there was mutual desire, it happened, and where there wasn't, nobody really pushed.
>
> Until one woman filed a sexual harassment complaint(\*), which everyone recognized was utterly baseless, and revenge for a social slight. But management decided they had to pretend to take it seriously, money quote, "I'm sorry, [redacted], I have to take her side - she's the girl". In a matter of months. Policies were changed, management became much more intrusive, and the job ceased being fun for anyone not long after that.
>
> I should have quit immediately; by the time I eventually left, my colleagues were only half joking when they suggested I could offer my next employer an entire spacecraft-propulsion R&D team, cheap.
>
> \* Really, a series of escalating complaints of increasing bogosity when she wasn't satisfied with the social response to the earlier ones. By the end, management was officially 100% on her side, and she had no friends whatsoever of either gender.
I’d like to know more about this. Did the changes just influence how much people could flirt at work? Was flirting at work so much fun that stopping it ruined the job? If not, what were the other negative changes that the harassment complaint caused?
## 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights
**gjm [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55363845):**
> I’d like to correct a big misunderstanding (source: worked at the EEOC for a number of years):
>
> Scott says: “(here “the applicant pool” is an abstraction, often but not always the same as the general population, which is poorly defined and which bureaucracies can interpret however they want. It’s definitely not the same thing as the actual set of qualified applicants to the business!)”
>
> This is simply not true. Companies are required to track and maintain records of candidates. When the EEOC considers a hiring discrimination case, they obtain this data and can use it to see if there is a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between applicants who are in the protected class and applicants outside the protected class. Ideally, the expert the EEOC uses can account for job-related characteristics of applicants (previous experience) and the characteristics of the job applied to.
>
> (This is part of why there should not be hard quotas, job-relevant characteristics are sometimes correlated with protected class-status.)
>
> If the company does not have quality applicant records, the EEOC needs some benchmark to compare the share of protected class members to. Usually, this is the share of the protected class within the geographic vicinity of the firms locations who work in the firm’s specific industry. This is obviously imperfect, but here are a couple of relevant points:
>
> (1) In almost all the cases I was involved with, we heard directly from former employees or often HR personal from the company about specific issues, and there was substantive anecdotal evidence that discrimination of some form was happening. Usually, this anecdotal evidence is pretty serious, and I think it’s reasonable that this shifts your priors. If there are very large differences between the share of workers in the census and at the firm in the protected class, it seems reasonable to say the company should be able to explain this.
>
> (2) The company really should be keeping track of its applicants! If they aren’t, or they don’t give the data they have (illegal) the EEOC has to do something.
>
> (3) The shortfalls I saw were almost always pretty large. We aren’t in a situation where, oh, the Census shows 30% of men are servers, but in your restaurant its only 27%! It was more like: the Census shows 30% of men are servers, you have 3 male servers across all of your 20 locations. The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway.
>
> Are there reasonable criticisms of these methods? Of course. But we had to try to reach the truth the best way we could, or at least to do a thorough job of analyzing the data and then let the judge/jury decide from there (Though most cases ended with mediation).
>
> The issues with using disparate impact are mitigated by the fact that the disparate impact measure has to be job-related. It would be inappropriate to have a test for whether a person could lift 50 .lb boxes for a computer engineer role, but you probably should have a pre-employment test for that if the job is a construction worker. Yes there are issues with this measure, and yes it comes down to argument and precedent, but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements.
>
> There are always going to be tradeoffs in the way you set rules, (I personally don’t know how I feel about background checks, its seems reasonable for employers to screen on this, but then again, people deserve second chances), but I think this idea of the EEOC as incompetent/SJW crusaders just does not match my experience at all. It’s easy to make caricatures when you only focus on the extreme downsides of any tradeoff.
Thanks. Is there some protection in place if unqualified people apply? That is, if a job requires a PhD, and 100 blacks (all without PhD) and 100 whites (all with PhD) apply, is the applicant pool 50% black or 0% black?
**Sam B [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263144):**
> As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this [review’s] description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins. Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test. Given our longstanding inequities in education, particularly of low-income workers, this had the intended effect of excluding black workers. So hiring on "merit" is completely fine as long as "merit" has some connection to the job. Courts are generally hostile to disparate impact claims, to the point that civil rights lawyers are very reluctant to bring them.
I [asked](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55264741) Sam:
> Thanks for this. Some more questions, if you have time:
>
> * Is it true, as Hanania claims, that they have to prove a test is nondiscriminatory for each race and site individually?
> * How easy is it to prove legitimate reason? If I say "I want my schoolteachers to do well on an IQ test, because schoolteachers should be smart" does that pass?
> * Why can't Sheetz say "We don't want people with histories of violent crime because we think they might be violent or criminal while working for us"?
> * Why was Duke Power Co decided the way it was, since they asked people to take a mechanical aptitude test for a mechanical job?
Sam [kindly answered](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272742):
> 1) He may be right about that (I don't know actually) but even if he is right, so what? If a test is relevant to a job, that evidence will apply to each worksite. It's not like there's some affirmative requirement that employers prove the test works before they can implement it--they can do whatever they want and the only check is a lawsuit. A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence the
>
> 2) Very easy. You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact. In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.
>
> 3) That is likely enough. But if, for example, their experience showed that people with a criminal history were no likelier to be violent and criminal than that argument would rightly fail. I think it is also unlikely the EEOC will win this case in the current legal environment.
>
> 4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.
More discussion of Duke v. Griggs - this is all coming from [one very long thread](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270615), which you might prefer to read directly, **starting with [Mr. Doolittle](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270615):**
> I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
>
> That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.
>
> I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts.
**Bob Frank ([blog](https://robertfrank.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**
> » *“Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.”*
>
> ...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.
>
> I wrote about this in some detail last year:
>
> [Forewarned Is Forearmed
>
> The Most Significant Case You've Never Heard Of
>
> People often think of the 1960s as a tumultuous time in our nation’s history, but in many ways the real damage was done in the 1970s. The 70s was a time when a lot of the chaos of the 60s settled down, but unfortunately it didn’t happen by conditions getting back to normal so much as by surrender, assimilating the chaos into a “new normal” that was sig…
>
> Read more
>
> 3 years ago · 5 likes · Bob Frank](https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-most-significant-case-youve-never?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web)
**gdanning [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55283575):**
> Your article refers to what you call "Duke Power’s use of industry-standard aptitude tests in employment decisions. " But here are the actual facts:
>
> *» ”The Company added a further requirement for new employees on July 2, 1965, the date on which Title VII became effective. To qualify for placement in any but the Labor Department it became necessary to register satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude 428\*428 tests, as well as to have a high school education. Completion of high school alone continued to render employees eligible for transfer to the four desirable departments from which Negroes had been excluded if the incumbent had been employed prior to the time of the new requirement. In September 1965 the Company began to permit incumbent employees who lacked a high school education to qualify for transfer from Labor or Coal Handling to an "inside" job by passing two tests— the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence, and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test. Neither was directed or intended to measure the ability to learn to perform a particular job or category of jobs […]*
>
> *» On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job-performance ability. Rather, a vice president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the work force.*
>
> *» The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.”*
This leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, if a company hasn’t explicitly measured how tests correlate with performance (which I assume is the case with most tests), are the tests okay or not? Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?
**Steve Sailer [describes his personal experience](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55277174):**
> I worked for a marketing research startup firm from 1982-2000. In 1982, our hiring exam was the final exam given by one of our founders, a college professor, in his Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research course. It was a great test, and we hired a lot of good people in the 1980s.
>
> Our biggest client gave a similar exam and hired a lot of good people.
>
> When the EEOC went after our biggest, most prestigious client over their hiring exam, the firm then spent a lot of money on consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard. And they continued to hire good people.
>
> In contrast, when the EEOC finally noticed us in the 1990s, we found out how much it would cost to validate our exam and decided to save money by throwing it out. That turned out to penny wise and pound foolish.
If this is true, it sounds like the burden of proof is on the test-giver, and it’s a pretty high burden. I don’t know how this meshes with what Sam B is saying, unless Steve’s experience was before the change in the law that Sam mentions.
**Hadi Khan ([blog](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55304108)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55304108):**
> *» “As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.”*
>
> This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.
>
> The test not predicting job performance could equivalently mean that Duke Power had a very well calibrated way to choose their employees where they were prefectly capturing the information from the apitutde test compared to all the other factors involved in hiring. Indeed the fact that this turns out to be very common suggests to me that this is going on here (and elsewhere).
Good point! I don’t know when the correlation between test score and job performance was measured, and whether it should be expected to have this problem.
## 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness
(again, you might want to read [Hanania’s post answering objectors on this point](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/against-ideaism))
**Carateca [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55255737):**
> I hew more to the Tumblr theory of the origins of woke (Katherine Dee has written about this, although at infuriatingly short length.) All this was incubated on Tumblr by mentally ill teenagers in the mid-00s, expanded from there to various web forums/proto-social media of the era such as Something Awful and Livejournal where the mentally ill teenagers could gain cultural or moderation power, and then exploded onto Twitter where it cowed cultural leaders into compliance and suddenly people at your office were putting pronouns in their bios, doing land acknowledgments and sterilizing their kids. Civil rights law under this theory was a weapon for the woke to pick up, not the cause of the problem.
>
> (Edit: and not even that relevant of a weapon, regardless of its merit otherwise; wokeness's greatest damage is cultural, not legal.)
I agree with the Tumblr theory too, though I think some blogs (eg Shakesville, Pandagon) might have been closer to Patient Zero. I continue to be a little confused how and why stuff that deranged teenagers were discussing on microblogs made it to the halls of power, and I would appreciate a more focused Origins Of Woke book discussing this process.
**Desertopa [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272505):**
> So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject.
>
> My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified "woke" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually \*was\* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience.
>
> I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first.
>
> This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically "we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves." Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it.
>
> In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like "should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?" and "should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain.
>
> I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades.
This is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before.
**Neike Taika-Tessaro [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55257931):**
> Interestingly, I was going to say Hanania's missing element could just be graphs like these:
>
> i.e. affirmative action laid the groundwork for this, then people connected, coordinated, and used it much more aggressively.
>
> I feel like that's basically what you're saying, except that what I'm (ignorantly) ascribing to Hanania here and what you're saying disagree on the cause. I guess in Hanania's framing, wokeness was inevitable once affirmative action existed in the legal framework; whereas in Dee's faming, wokeness was not inevitable once affirmative action existed, but is a separate phenomenon that then seized upon the tool. I'm probably doing both of them an injustice with that, mind.
>
> (To be clear, I'm not in the US and avoid most social media, so I don't particularly have opinions on this either way, I just immediately thought 'the internet' when Scott referred to the cultural turn between 2010 and 2015 and asked "Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015?".)
Yeah, something like this also has to be part of the picture, although I still don’t feel like I understand the mechanism well enough that I could have predicted this ahead of time.
**More patient zero speculation, from [MarsDragon](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55496692):**
> Historical nitpick: it's less that Tumblr infected LiveJournal so much as LJ users were forced to move to Tumblr as LJ got increasingly difficult to use starting around 2009-2010. The migration had more or less completed by 2012. Tumblr being so much more of a "modern" social media platform where it was easy to repost content and you got a random jumble of posts instead of a carefully-curated set of friends made it much easier for social justice thinking to spread.
>
> I think the whole shift to showing users a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow was a big driver of that sort of thinking. It allowed ideas to spread, upped controversy, and drives that sort of "we must purge this!" was of thinking.
The LiveJournal experts here say the key event to look at was [Racefail](https://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709), when, according to [Carateca](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55317149):
> I had a front row seat and it was remarkable how the whole superstructure of a totalitarian state just congealed out of thin air in days and instantly took over a whole subculture. Sometimes I think that if Charlie Stross and the rest of them had just had some fucking balls and stood up to the bullies -- or, hell, just pushed the block button a few times -- none of this would ever have happened.
I support any theory that lets us blame everything on Charlie Stross.
**naraburns [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256639):**
> Anyway, I would argue that "woke" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. "Woke" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called "cultural Marxism" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology"), but since "Cultural Marxism" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).
I agree that there’s a crappy trick that goes:
1. Take a thing that you don’t want people to be allowed to talk about. For example, maybe Coca-Cola doesn’t want people to talk about how soda makes you fat.
2. Find some schizos saying a much stronger, extremely offensive thing. For example, “the Jews are adding obesity-promoting chemicals to Coca-Cola in order to destroy the white race”.
3. Get a bunch of “disinformation researchers” to make a huge deal about the schizos and say things like “The MAGA phenomenon is largely fueled by white resentment over the Great Enfattening conspiracy theory”.
4. Now nobody can talk about how Coca-Cola makes you fat, because people will say “That’s the discredited racist Great Enfattening conspiracy theory, shame on you for platforming that kind of stuff.”
…and that all the current debate around “Cultural Marxism” is downstream of people pulling off this trick very successfully, so it’s become pretty hard to understand the history.
**Candide III [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55258866):**
> The previous incarnation of woke was called "political correctness" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s.
>
> It stands to reason that it took about a generation after the original civil rights law/judicial decisions for the first effects to be felt, as new rules and most importantly new hires worked themselves through the system, gaining seniority and influence as their careers progressed. That works out to the mid-80s. The difference between PC/woke movement based on incentives created by civil rights law/judicial decisions and the heady atmosphere that led to "woke judges" in the first place is that the former is largely composed of the beneficiaries of civil rights law/judicial decisions (see: bioleninism), whereas the latter was an extremely white elite phenomenon. Some of those judges doubtless believed sincerely in the inherent equality of all human subgroups on all socially desirable characteristics (an easy extension of Christian spiritual equality), some wanted to finish the Solid South, etc. I'd love to read a good book about that.
## 6: Other Countries
Many people were annoyed that I didn’t bring in enough evidence from other countries, which have different civil rights law than the US.
I did this on purpose: I didn’t consider these sufficiently independent cases. My impression is that wokeness originated in the United States, reached other countries piecemeal, and that the parts they got weren’t necessarily parts that applied to their own situation. For example, many countries held Black Lives Matter and Defund The Police protests even when they had approximately no black people. In a situation like this, I don’t know how to determine the relationship between any given country’s level of civil rights law and its level of wokeness.
Still, some people described the situation in their countries, for example **[Citizen Penrose](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55258686) ([blog](https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)):**
> The section about workplace personal relationships becoming more formal doesn't seem right to me, we've had the same trend in the UK without any civil rights law. Unless we do actually have the hidden de facto affirmative action mentioned at the beginning and I just don't know about it.
**AH from the UK [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272954):**
> 100%. Technically "positive discrimination" is illegal in hiring in the UK. But "positive action" is perfectly legal.
>
> The typical example given is that you can't hire a black person \*because\* they are black (if say, they were worse qualified than a white candidate). But you absolutely can use "positive action" to hire someone to address a perceived imbalance (level the playing field) if two candidates are equally qualified.
>
> You can also legally have women only management hiring workshops if there is a perceived imbalance in senior leadership (i.e you'd like more women). But you can't then roll that out as a blanket policy at every level of an organisation.
>
> In reality, the line between these things are blurred- no two candidates are ever equally qualified, and there are always trade offs involved. The fiction that you can use race or gender as a tie breaker is useful for organisations to maintain. On the other hand, it definitely doesn't seem to be as bad as in the US- University admissions is still relatively meritocratic, with UK universities aiming to up the numbers of underrepresented groups via extensive outreach, coaching, mentoring etc. rather than workarounds like non-academic credentials. If a minority candidate doesn't get the grades/pass the entrance exam, they probably won't get in. Although, I do note that there are black only (financial) scholarships- not sure how those
I think this is similar to the US. In school, I was always taught that affirmative action meant “you should never choose a less qualified minority, but if you happen to get exactly equal white and minority applicants, you should choose the minority”. I never thought too hard about how likely it was that a company would get two exactly-equally-qualified applicants, or how likely it was that the government could monitor whether a company was doing this. Of course, Hanania’s point is that this is the lies-to-children version of affirmative action, and the real version is that the government bullies businesses until their minority numbers are high enough, and the business uses underhanded techniques to get them high enough to satisfy the government. I don’t know if that’s how it works in the UK too.
**Matheus from Brazil [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55268658):**
> What Hanania doesn't seem to address is that 13% is still too low of a number for this stuff create substantial harm. I don't know how much time General Motors' Mary Barra spends thinking about this stuff. Maybe if you had 50% black population, this could be non-linearly more harmful.
>
> Here in Brazil we do have 50% black population (not black in the same sense as Americans). We didn't fight a civil war to end slavery and we didn't have segregation after ending slavery. We are cordial men (see: <https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&hl=pt-BR&u=https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homem_cordial&client=webapp> ). We had our first black president in 1909, but neither he nor the people made much of it.
>
> I am saying this because Brazil offers a nice comparison. We do have quotas. Quotas for public universities and quotas for public service. The federal law for public service quotas is 20% (much lower than the general population). There was some pushback when Congress approved these laws, but people mostly accepted it. Not even Bolsonaro pushes back on them. And I think quotas for university aren't the worst idea (you're educating people instead of putting them as traffic controllers) and the 20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country. Corporate life isn't harmed beyond that.
>
> It seems that "just accept quotas" is the much better status quo.
>
> The current status quo is how the Chinese communist state regulates corporate China. "Common prosperity" says the party leader and companies need to scramble to be seen as doing good. At least more than the next guy.
>
> On the other hand, it doesn't seem that these suits against companies are that widespread at 13%. I'd expect Richard to quote statistics like: last year there was 1040 suits like these or whatever. As said, it doesn't seem to me that it is that impactful as Richard paints.
>
> On yet another hand, just by following companies and their communication with investors, Europeans seem to worry about this thing way more than Americans. It's super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals. But every single European company does have this "common prosperity". I'd like to understand better how this compares with the European experiment. (I guess there it's even less than 13%, idk)
**Argos from Germany [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55271946):**
> We have laws prohibiting outright discrimination during hiring, but the (fairly high) onus is on applicants to prove that they have been discriminated, and certainly there are no government agencies going after companies publicly because of insufficient women or minorities. Yet almost nobody uses IQ tests during hiring, and work places are very very much some form old mad men style old boys club. Germany would, however, be a data point in favor of Hanania's theory since companies focus comparatively less on increasing representation of minorities and women during hiring (in case of women perhaps more in recent years, but I don't think this is downstream of new laws). A caveat is that this is from public perception, I have only ever worked at small no-name companies with very irrelevant HR departments.
>
> Oh, I just recalled: Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons, to the degree that some of the women there just went home at 2pm because it became unbearable to work there.
I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
**Andrew Marshall from Canada ([blog](https://marshalla.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55307774):**
> As someone who worked in HR for the Canadian gov't for 10 years, this book touched me deeply . . . Although thinking about it more, we do have explicit quotas (called targets) and that didn't save us from anything. Although so much of our culture is taken from America, maybe there was no escaping it
**Related, from Tatu Ahponen ([blog](https://alakasa.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)):**
> I wonder what the book says about what would seem to me to be a crucial "why" aspect: the international one.
>
> To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
>
> The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways.
>
> Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
>
> The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad.
>
> It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine.
>
> Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
## 7: EEOC Lawsuits
**REF [objects](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55262430):**
> This [claim that insufficiently diverse companies] "will get sued" is obviously not true. The EEOC filed exactly 143 discrimination lawsuits last year. Only 25 of them are systemic. Are you contending that there are only 25 (or 143) companies in the U.S. without population-equal racial distributions? I find it puzzling that your usual skepticism seems so diminished on some topics.
I think the claim continues to make sense.
The company we discussed in the article was Sheetz ($7 billion yearly revenue), suggesting EEOC is targeting big companies. There are [about 700 companies](https://askwonder.com/research/companies-united-states-fall-following-revenue-categories-less-than-26m-26m-100m-1thcjkkqw) in the US with yearly revenue > $1 billion. Suppose that 20 of the EEOC’s yearly lawsuits are in this category. That means a CEO of a $1B+ company who expects to serve ten years has a ~1/3 chance of the EEOC suing his company. Seems like a big deal!
But doesn’t this imply that the risk for smaller companies is pretty low? **[Moral Particle fills out the rest of the argument](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55306304):**
> Your point about "getting sued by the EEOC" is very well taken and has important implications not recognized in many of these comments.
>
> First, the vast, vast majority of federal anti-discrimination lawsuits are brought by individuals, not the EEOC. Typically, employment defense lawyers will handle a handful of EEOC-plaintiff cases in their careers but hundreds of single- and multi-plaintiff cases.
>
> Second, almost all states have anti-discrimination laws modeled on Title VII, and most cover much smaller companies. In some states (California, for example), the state laws and state court system are so much more favorable to plaintiffs that plaintiff-side employment lawyers will actively \*avoid" pleading claims under Title VII (or other federal laws) and do what they can to avoid litigating in federal court.
>
> Between the two categories - federal lawsuits brought by individuals (not the EEOC) and state lawsuits not involving the EEOC at all - we're talking thousands upon thousands of lawsuits. That is where the "systemic" effects of these laws are, not in the minuscule fraction of cases actually brought by the EEOC.
**And TGGP [points out](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55264606)** that a small number of lawsuits can have a big effect:
> Rather than "largely random", the idea seems to be it's against the least woke big target. Something like truncation selection <https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/truncation-selection/>
## 8: Other Good Comments
**Leah Libresco Sargeant ([blog](https://www.otherfeminisms.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**
> Helen Andrews is also pretty strongly against civil rights law, and has an interesting piece about union-flavored workplaces vs HR-flavored ones: <https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources>
>
> *» “There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating, you want to make sure the company gives you all the vacation days you’re entitled to, or you have a complaint about workplace conditions, you go to them. Underneath this functional similarity, however, the two models of workplace relations rest on very different assumptions.*
>
> *» The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.”*
>
> I am more in favor than she is of pursuing some of the goods of civil rights law, but I agree strongly with her about the benefits of openly acknowledging that workers and bosses have conflicting interests and need to negotiate the middle ground. I really really dislike the "only fight obliquely"/doublethinky mode that she and Hannania identify. I think it does create a culture against truthspeaking.
Thanks, I had never thought about HR as an “alternative” to unions before, so this was an interesting comparison.
Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?
**Rob L ([blog](https://roblh.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**
> If those laws go away, would it really change anything? Given the existence of social media, pervasive canceling of companies and people, and broad social sympathies for perceived victimized groups, I would imagine “that company doesn’t hire minorities” to be much more damaging from a customer and relationship perspective in 2024 than the 60s and 70s when those laws were passed. If that’s true (which I’m unsure of), in a sense the civil rights advocates have already won.
I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we *avoid* thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. Hanania thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it, the same way they've forgotten about everything else.
Hanania has [an article about France](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/french-anti-wokeness-as-a-second), which forbids the collection of any government statistics on any of this. I found this interesting, because I’d always heard claims this was a left-wing plot to avoid having statistics on the racial balance of (eg) crime. But actually France just takes a principled stance against any race statistics! Wild!
**Richard Gadsden [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263102):**
> The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.
>
> The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.
>
> If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.
>
> But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.
>
> It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.
I asked why colleges can’t have women’s football teams; the two main answers were “women aren’t that interested” and “high schools, not bound by Title IX, don’t have women’s football teams, and it’s hard to take totally untrained women and form a football team from them at the college level”. I bet the latter would be self-resolving: a year after colleges say they need woman footballers, all the women currently plodding through years of crew or fencing to get a leg up in college admissions will plod through years of football instead.
**Deadpan Troglodytes [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55266413):**
> This review offers a good account of the common answers people give to the question "why do racial disparities exist?":
>
> 1. Contemporary racism.
> 2. The historical legacy of racism.
> 3. Bad culture.
> 4. Not smart enough.
>
> But that list is missing a very important reason that doesn't get enough attention (because it isn't toxoplasmic enough?): preferential clustering. Demographic minorities often cluster in specific industries and institutions, for mostly obvious reasons:
>
> - To exploit social networks.
> - As an outgrowth of cultural norms.
> - Due to accidents of geography related to initial immigration patterns.
>
> Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them).
>
> Clearly these preferences can be a consequence of past discrimination, but they also have a life of their own and deserve separate consideration. Absent discrimination, we'd still see significant demographic clustering, though it would likely be less negatively biased.
I agree there’s something to this - I’ve seen it used, for example, to explain why certain Indian castes are overrepresented in certain industries (eg the [Patel Motel Cartel](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/a-patel-motel-cartel.html)), Jews in other industries, etc.
But all the immigrant groups who have managed to do this kind of thing after just a few decades in the country make me skeptical that it can explain a pattern for black people lasting 100+ years.
**Rothwed [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55383560):**
> Behold, [USDA Form CCC-860](https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/emergency-relief-program/pdfs/ccc860_20230111.pdf):
>
> This a form to file for emergency relief funds from the USDA. Applicants must certify that they are part of a socially disadvantaged group to qualify (there are other qualifying groups but this one is relevant to civil rights law.)
>
> "A socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher is a farmer or rancher who is a member of a group whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. Groups include: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women (for those selecting a group that includes gender). Note that if applicant only checks "women" without also selecting the other category the selection does not make applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs."
>
> Note being a woman doesn't count unless the applicant also specifies that they aren't white. So here we have a program for giving aid money to farmers with a big No Whites Allowed sign. You might come to the conclusion that this is race based discrimination. Don't worry though, the USDA isn't allowed to do that kind of thing and even tells you so on the form:
>
> "In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status. income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA (not all bases apply to all programs). Remedies and complaint filing deadlines vary by program or incident."
>
> Get it? Just specify that you are part of a certain race/color/national origin and/or sex to qualify for this program, but also the USDA is legally forbidden from discriminating on the basis of those very things in its programs.
**Peter [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55341757):**
> A friend of mine in construction attended a "women owned business" social meetup. Not a single woman attended. All the businesses were 51% owned by the wife.
(followed by Martin Blank commenting that “My wife owns 51% of my business. It is frankly stupid not to, you lose so much work over it without that step.”)
**And [The Veil](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55476558):**
> Allow me to address the least important point: Di-az. In English it's almost always written as Diaz, but in Spanish it's almost always written with a diacritic over the i: Díaz. So imagine that the immigrant dad, trying to fit in, spells his name the American way, Diaz. Now the son, realizing that you can fit in just fine in America with an unusual name, spells his name Díaz. All good, except that some newspaper somewhere along the line doesn't properly capture the diacritic symbol, and instead of í, that paper writes i-. Boom: Di-az.
Finally, someone thinking about the important stuff!
## 9: Conclusions And Updates
This one was fascinating.
Lots of people wrote in to say that there was definitely unfair affirmative-action-style discrimination going on at their workplaces, and lots of other people wrote in to say there definitely wasn’t and they’d never seen anything like that in their whole career. Sometimes these people worked in the same industry, or even the same employer (eg the US civil service)!
A civil rights attorney said *Griggs* didn’t ban tests unless they were obviously discriminatory, and then some people wrote in saying they’d been sued or scared out of using good, non-discriminatory tests. I think the most likely way to reconcile all the differing perspectives is that you can probably get away with using most tests if you argue in court that they’re justified, but people don’t want to be sued so they don’t try it. I still don’t feel like I know important facts like how often test-users get sued, or who the burden of proof is on, or how strong it is, or what happens if there’s not enough data to be sure, or whether the courts are aware of / rule out collider bias. But I’m still not sure of any of this.
I will update towards the “applicant pool” process being fairer than I thought based on gjm, although I’ve heard the opposite from tech recruiters desperate to hire lots of women even though there aren’t that many in the “applicant pool”. Maybe this was for other reasons, like PR, or to satisfy other laws (like state laws).
I appreciated John’s story of his workplace culture becoming much worse after harassment complaints, but I still want to know more about how it happened. | Scott Alexander | 144299981 | Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke" | acx |
# Open Thread 328
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw. See [the meetups post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more info. And note addition of Kaduna, Nigeria.
**2:** [Robin Hanson](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine) and [Richard Hanania](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1785756978670862735) have both responded to my posts on their work; I’ll probably have Highlights From The Comments threads where I discuss their responses further at some point.
**3:** Jason Crawford is sponsoring another [progress studies blog-building fellowship](https://fellowship.rootsofprogress.org/programs/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8t6j2eKlHg5QRLYXW2wRNavQFPDMohPcyBGsamT-pyLIjp51tDnD0VyiHX9Z-9hIdrvW_fwQtnAwo4B-SZOvN6EoUbLA&_hsmi=305040193&utm_content=305040193&utm_source=hs_email), with advisors including Tyler Cowen and Andrej Karpathy.
**4:** I’ve gone through comment moderation backlog and banned seven more people. Remember, if someone makes a very bad comment, you can click the “. . .“ to the right of the comment and select Report from the drop-down menu. The wheels of justice may turn slowly (I check the moderation queue once every few months), but they grind exceeding small. | Scott Alexander | 144357982 | Open Thread 328 | acx |
# Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
## The Origins Of . . . Civil Rights Law
*[The Origins Of Woke](https://amzn.to/3xRooxr)*, by [Richard Hanania](https://www.richardhanania.com/), has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.
The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, *The Origins Of Woke.* Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:
The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called *Civil Rights Law Is Bad* would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.
Modern civil rights law is bad (he begins) for reasons baked into its history. The original Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to be an *ad hoc* response to the outrageous level of anti-black racism going on in the South, which protests and TV news had finally brought to the attention of the white majority. There was broad support for a bill which was basically “don’t be the KKK”.
Sex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke, half as a poison pill by its enemies to make the bill unpalatable (fact check: [true - but there’s a deeper story, see this Slate article for more details](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/title-vii-because-of-sex-howard-smith-history.html)). Ideas about “affirmative action” and “disparate impact” weren’t tacked on at all; the bill’s proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort, and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that. Still, after the bill was passed, a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things in place.
The key point here is that “quotas”, or any kind of “positive discrimination” where minorities got favored over more-qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American people. But civil rights activists, the courts, and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant kludge that *effectively* created quotas and positive discrimination while maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania specifically complains about[1](#footnote-1):
**Affirmative Action**
Hanania’s take on affirmative action involves the government sending companies a message like this:
1. We notice your workforce has fewer minorities than the applicant pool.
2. If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly many minorities as the applicant pool.
3. But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor minority applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.
4. Have fun!
This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.
[A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview). The FAA hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers. Various civil rights groups put pressure on them, and they replaced the test with a “biographical questionnaire”. The questionnaire asked weird unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA thought black people might give (for example, if you said your worst subject was science). This still didn’t get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through.
It’s easy to blame the FAA here, but (Hanania says) civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things, like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost-explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American people (who were still against racial preferences) wouldn’t catch on.
**Disparate Impact**
Not only can you not explicitly discriminate, you can’t use hiring criteria that “accidentally” discriminate by favoring one race over another. To give a stupid example, if someone refused to hire anyone from Detroit, this would have “disparate impact” since Detroit is a majority black city. If you allowed stuff like this, racists could covertly discriminate by using these sorts of rules.
But Hanania challenges us to think of *any* criterion that isn’t potentially racially biased. For example, we know universities discriminate against Asians, so only hiring people with college degrees is a “disparate impact”. We know that more men than women have experience as miners, so a mining company only hiring employees with experience is a “disparate impact”. Since whites typically do better on IQ tests than blacks, and all cognitive skills are correlated with IQ, the Supreme Court decided in *Duke vs. Griggs* that *all* tests of *any* ability were potentially disparate impact, and you opened yourself to lawsuits if you used any of them.
(in theory, companies are allowed to use tests and similar criteria if they prove them nondiscriminatory. But the standards for this - they have to prove it for each race and each job site individually - are so high that, in practice, few companies take this route.)
Since this technically banned all possible criteria, companies couldn’t follow the letter of the law. Instead they hired fancy lawyers to tell them which way the winds were blowing. The lawyers told them that college degrees were okay, resumes with biographies and experience were maybe okay, and interviews were okay. Tests were out. Anything more creative was out.
A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC [sued convenience store chain Sheetz](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environment/2974064/sheetz-sued-by-eeoc-criminal-background-checks/) for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check.
(the article links to [another case](https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2015/12/25/texas-fires-back-feds-criminal-hiring-efforts/14940357007/) where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application)
Is Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”.
His position is that all of these rules are so broad that every company is always violating them in some sense. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as “the applicant pool”, whatever that is. No company has some magical hiring rule that has literally zero correlation with race, especially since black people are on average poorer, less educated, and less likely to have any given achievement (so any attempt to choose better employees over worse will necessarily disadvantage them). In real life, the bureaucracy’s rules are something like “don’t do anything different from other companies in your industry, and *especially* don’t be caught seeming less woke”. Hanania argues this creates an arms race / ratchet. Every company wants to be at least 50th percentile wokeness or above. But not every company can be above average. So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in sight.
Continuing with Sheetz: according to the article on the lawsuit, in 2020 they “introduced the IDEA initiative”, ie Inclusion Diversity Equality & Accessibility. [Their website](https://jobs.sheetz.com/belonging) has a big picture of a black woman saying “We’re Building A Great Place To Work For All”, and boasts that they’ve created a special forum for black employees. They’ve made 60% of managers women, started a Woman’s Leadership Program, offered generous maternity leave, and written [letters](https://www.pachamber.org/media/the_current/sheetz_stephanie_doliveira_blog/) to the Chamber of Commerce on how the George Floyd murder made them realize “we quickly needed to learn, listen, be vulnerable and humbly approach . . . culture-shifting work”. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC will agree they’re an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their wide discretion to sue basically anyone. Too bad they’re getting sued anyway; some other convenience store must have done more of this stuff. Surely some executive is wishing they had just tried having one more mandatory diversity training…
**Harassment Law**
Harassment law might win the award for most complicated chain of reasoning from real legislation to enforcement:
* Legislation says you can’t discriminate against minorities
* If you bully minorities out of your company, that would be a way to discriminate against them.
* So you can’t have an environment that’s so hostile to minorities that they inevitably leave.
* In some sense, anything that offends a minority is part of this environment.
* Any joke, political comment, flirtation, etc, could potentially offend a minority.
* Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses.
Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far.
> Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs.
And
> In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az[2](#footnote-2) [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent.
(fact check: [this article](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/15/tesla-settles-racial-discrimination-lawsuit.html) says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version)
Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim.
But Hanania doesn’t *just* say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like *Office Space*.
Is this true? People talk about *Mad Men* (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation?
Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.”
In such a world:
> Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults.
I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.
**…And More**
Richard Hanania hates all this stuff.
Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act *enthusiastic* about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves.
This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with.
Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and *definitely not* any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs.
(unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”).
But also:
During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.
Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you *really really* want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more *financially* valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out.
**What To Do?**
Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1.
Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long?
His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar.
And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?”
But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the *source* of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later.
## The Origins Of . . . Inequality
A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?”
Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground.
“Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.”
My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went:
> 1. We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.
> 2. If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better be exactly as black as the general population.
> 3. But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor black applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of black employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.
> 4. Have fun!
Our hypothetical opponent could argue there’s nothing necessarily contradictory or Orwellian about this. If your company is whiter than its applicant pool (eg the general population), then you must be discriminating. If you stop discriminating, you can get racial balance without any of that nasty quota stuff. So what’s the problem?
Everyone is so circumspect when talking about race that I can never figure out what anyone actually knows or believes. Still, I think most people would at least be aware of the following counterargument: suppose you’re the math department at a college. You might like to have the same percent black as the general population (13%). But far fewer than 13% (let’s say 2%) of good math PhDs are black. So it’s impossible for every math department to hire 13% black math professors unless they lower their standards or take some other drastic measure.
Okay, says our hypothetical opponent. Then that means *math grad programs* are discriminating against blacks. Fine, *they’re* the ones we should be investigating for civil rights violations.
No, say the math grad programs, fewer than 13% of *our* applicants are black too.
Fine, then the undergrad programs are the racists. Or if they can prove they’re not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody somewhere along the line has to be racist, right?
I know of four common, non-exclusive answers to this question.
1. Yes, the high schools (or whatever) are racist. And if you can present a study proving that high schools aren’t racist, then it’s the elementary schools. And if you have a study there too, it’s the obstetricians, giving black mothers worse pregnancy care. If you have a study disproving that too, why are you collecting all these studies? Hey, maybe *you’re* the racist!
2. Maybe institutions aren’t too racist today, but there’s a lot of legacy of past racism, and that means black people are poor. And poor people have fewer opportunities and do worse in school. If you have a study showing that black people do worse even when controlled for income, then maybe it’s some other kind of capital, like educational capital or social capital. If you have studies about those too, see above.
3. Black people have a bad culture. Something something shoes and rap music, trying hard at school gets condemned as “acting white”. They should hold out for a better culture. I hear nobody’s using ancient Sumerian culture these days, maybe they can use that one.
4. White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85, this IQ difference accurately predicts the different proportions of whites and blacks in most areas, most IQ differences within race are genetic, maybe across-race ones are genetic too. I love Hitler and want to marry him.
None of these are great options, and I think most people work off some vague cloud of all of these and squirm if you try to make them get too specific. I don’t exactly blame Hanania for not taking a strong stand here. It’s just strange to assume civil rights law is bad and unnecessary without having any opinion on whether any of this is true, whether civil rights law is supposed to counterbalance it, and whether it counterbalances it a fair amount.
A cynic might notice that in February of this year, Hanania wrote [Shut Up About Race And IQ](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq). He says that the people who talk about option 4 are “wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations.” A careful reader might notice what he *doesn’t* describe them as being wrong about. The rest of the piece almost-but-not-quite-explicitly clarifies his position: I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.
(I’m generally against “calling people out” for believing in race realism. I think people should be allowed to hide beliefs that they’d get punished for not hiding. I sympathize with some of these positions and place medium probability on some weak forms of them. I think Hanania is open enough about where he’s coming from that this review doesn’t count as a callout.)
His foil here is race realist Nathan Cofnas, who says you *have to* discuss these things. Otherwise progressives can win every argument by using the line of reasoning above - “Just look how much inequality there still is, this shows there’s still lots of racism or at least the lingering effects of past racism, obviously our job isn’t done yet and we need lots more civil rights law to combat it.”
Hanania’s answer to Cofnas is that this isn’t a debate club. “Ah, but Glaucon, your claim that affirmative action is unnecessary must imply the corollary that there must be no inequality, thus proving a contradiction.” LOL no. Realistically this will get fought on the level of “You oppose affirmative action, which makes you a gross Nazi” vs. “You support affirmative action, which makes you an annoying wokescold.” Just say the wokescold thing louder than your enemies say the Nazi thing, and you win. Talking about racial differences scares people off and doesn’t help.
I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason, but Hanania is no doubt right about the strategic considerations. And in his book, he follows his own principle. There’s no discussion of why civil rights law might be necessary, or why it might be impossible for companies to hire enough minorities without reverse discrimination. As he predicts on his blog, it’s not fatal. You wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it.
I’m not really sure what to do here. How do you review a book that has a glaring omission, but also its author has written an essay called *Here’s Why I Like Glaring Omissions And Think Everyone Should Have Them*? Is it dishonest? Some sort of special super-meta-honesty? How many stars do you take off? Nothing in my previous history of book-reviewing has prepared me for this question.
## The Origins Of . . . Racial Categories
Hanania presents a few scattered arguments that civil rights law is the origin of woke, of which the section on racial categories was most interesting.
Having instituted affirmative action, the government had to decide what categories it was going to inspect businesses for. Like the rest of civil rights law, the resulting system was a bunch of political kludges. There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing.
* They created the concept of “Asian-American” by combining the old category “Oriental” together with Indians, Pakistanis, Thais, etc. Then, under pressure from the Hawaiian delegation, they added Pacific Islanders to create a even more heterogenous and meaningless category of “AAPI” (Asian American or Pacific Islander). Then, under more pressure from Hawaii later, they separated out “Native Hawaiian” again. The result is that Pakistanis, Koreans, and Tongans are the “same race”, but Hawaiians and Samoans are “different races”.
* They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans - previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians - into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they’d lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.
* Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.
All of this means that (for example) a company that had 10 Pakistanis and 10 Afghans might get classified as “too white” and get sued for failing to hire enough Asian-Americans. But a company that had 20 Pakistanis, or 10 Pakistanis + 10 Koreans, would be fine.
Hanania argues that this has gone beyond corporations and seeped into the culture, helping create modern wokeness. For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was [a campaign to #StopAAPIHate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_AAPI_Hate), as if AAPI were a natural category, or there were some racists targeting AAPIs in particular. Does this mean government-mandated racial categories are invading our deepest thoughts?
That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When *Everything Everywhere All At Once* came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
The point about “Hispanics” is better taken, and [you can read more about the case here](https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-invention-hispanics-what-it-says-about-the-politics-race). But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping. People are just as happy to talk about Latinos (and Latinx) as Hispanics. I’m not sure we can attribute this one to the government either.
As for Arabs, they seem to have plenty of organization and activism, eg CAIR; if this is less prominent than eg Asians or Latinos, it’s probably because Arabs are about 0.5% of the US population, compared to Asians’ 5% and Latinos’ 20%.
Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that [maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/hispanics-opting-to-identify-as-white-how-are-hispanics-assimilating.html) - the much-remarked upon [rise in Hispanic white supremacists](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-rise-of-latino-white-supremacy) seems like a weird yet promising sign here.
## The Origins Of . . . Woke
Aside from this, Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments. Civil rights law sets people against one another. It accustoms them to lying. It forces them to focus on people’s race instead of being color-blind. It denies merit. It saps people’s hope for the future, and their ability to trust the political system.
The few exceptions where he gave more specific stories were helpful. For example:
> Civil rights acts as a sort of force multiplier for disgruntled employees . . . allowing them to change institutions from the inside. The same company that might not think twice about disciplining workers for making unfounded or exaggerated claims about other aspects of its business can have its hands tied if the allegations being made contain even a hint of a charge of racism or sexism. As mentioned before, civil rights law bans “retaliation” against an employee even if the underlying complaint is ultimately without merit. When Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an article in the *New York Times* in the summer of 2020 calling for the military to be sent to deal with rioters in major American cities, the opinion editor of the paper eventually resigned after employees waged a campaign against him that included sending out identical tweets saying that the piece put black staff in danger. Had they claimed a grievance based on some other, “non-protected” identity, there would not have been the specter of legal liability for the article, nor would the controversy have invoked the grievance procedures and norms already established to deal with racial issues.
>
> If a major newspaper being influenced in its staffing and editorial choices by civil rights law seems too absurd to contemplate, consider that Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for the *Washington Post,* sued her employer on the grounds that it was discriminatory to take her off #MeToo stories after she talked about her own alleged sexual assault. Although her suit was dismissed in 2022, newspapers are no different than other employers in responding to incentives. Sonmez was eventually fired by the *Washington Post* in 2022 for weeks of publicly attacking coworkers on Twitter. It is reasonable to wonder whether the employer’s hesitancy to part ways with her was based on the incentives created by civil rights law and their downstream cultural effects.
So maybe the causal pathway is civil rights law → woker workforce at newspapers/universities/etc → cultural wokeness? But there’s not a lot here beyond this NYT example.
When I think of wokeness, I think of [the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture), when everybody started talking about privilege and white supremacy, Black Lives Matter burst onto the cultural scene, all your friends suddenly had rainbow and trans flags in their social media profiles, and people coined terms like “SJW” and “woke” to describe this phenomenon.
Source: [David Rozado](https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage-frequency)
Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but [The Closing Of The American Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind), generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant that this was an older form of wokeness more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. But that just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010s version of wokeness came from, which the book also doesn’t answer.
How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests? Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?
How did gay, lesbian, and transgender people win their rights, normalize their identity, and win victories in representation, medical care, and even the language? When these groups were still unpopular, civil rights law didn’t apply to them. They fought their way up from zero, with little legal help, until they were powerful enough that they could lobby for civil rights protection. Transgender people in particular weren’t covered under civil rights law until 2020, and they still don’t get some of the most-sought benefits like affirmative action. But they’re a central example of wokeness. Isn’t this evidence that wokeness can thrive without support from civil rights law?
I don’t read Hanania’s blog religiously. Maybe he has an article somewhere about Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument. But I can’t predict what it would say.
## The Origins Of . . . The Next Trump Administration’s Civil Rights Policy
Like I said with *[What We Owe The Future](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future)*, it’s probably unfair to review this book *qua* book.
I appreciated the readable and thoughtful overview of civil rights law and its history. I was already skeptical of affirmative action; this book further confirms that skepticism. I was less convinced by the attempt to connect it to cultural wokeness, but that’s fine - it seems to have caused enough direct damage to corporations, universities, employees, government departments, etc, to judge it negatively on those terms.
(although I’m suspending final judgment here based on my spot-check of the Tesla story turning up a different enough sequence of events that I’m not sure how much else was presented in a one-sided way - let me know if you find other parts that seem wrong.)
But my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.
It doesn’t matter if Hanania has a coherent theory of discrimination, or a coherent theory of how civil rights law causes woke culture. His instincts here are really good. He’s written a book that’s become popular and talked about, which has attracted exactly the sorts of policy wonks he wanted, and that’s well-designed to make them to pay attention to this issue. In this sense, the book is perfect. Complaining that it doesn’t satisfy my intellectual curiosity is like complaining that the operating manual for a missile system lacks convincing characterization or plot.
Read this book if you want a well-written expose of the past fifty years of civil rights decisions. Or read it in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’ve included three of Hanania’s four civil rights law subtopics. The book covers a fourth, Title IX (mostly focusing on women’s sports in college). Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
The book offers no explanation of why a father with the last name Diaz would have a son with the last name Di-az, but it includes the [sic] that makes me think it is on purpose. Other news articles covering the story are split about 50-50 about whether they use the hyphen in the son’s name. None of them explain what’s going on here. | Scott Alexander | 144030929 | Book Review: The Origins Of Woke | acx |
# Response to Hanson On Health Care
Robin Hanson [replied here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) to my original post [challenging him on health care here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness).
### On Straw-Manning
Robin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:
> Scott then quotes 500 words from a 2022 [post](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml) of mine, none of which have me saying all medicine is useless on all margins. Even so, he repeats this claim several times in his post. If Scott had doubts, he could have asked me. Or, consulted our 2016 book [The Elephant in the Brain](https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/) (52K copies sold; I’m sure he knows of it):
>
> *» “Our ancestors had reasons to value medicine apart from its therapeutic benefits. But medicine today is different in one crucial regard: it’s often very effective. Vaccines prevent dozens of deadly diseases. Emergency medicine routinely saves people from situations that would have killed them in the past. Obstetricians and advanced neonatal care save countless infants and mothers from the otherwise dangerous activity of childbirth. The list goes on. …*
>
> *» “We will now look to see if people today consume too much medicine. … we’re going to step back and examine the aggregate relationship between medicine and health. … We’re also going to restrict our investigation to marginal medical spending. It’s not a question of whether some medicine is better than no medicine—it almost certainly is—but whether, say, $7,000 per year of medicine is better for our health than $5,000 per year, given the treatment options available to us in developed countries.…*
>
> *» [Re] the medicine consumed in high-spending regions but not consumed in low-spending regions, … the research is fairly consistent in showing that the extra medicine doesn’t help. … Still, these are just correlational studies, leaving open the possibility that some hidden factors are influencing the outcomes. … To really make a strong case, then, we need to turn to the scientific gold standard: the randomized controlled study.”*
>
> We seem pretty clear to me there. There’s also my 2007 article *[Cut Medicine in Half](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/)* where I say:
>
> *» “In the aggregate, variations in medical spending usually show no statistically significant medical effect on health. … the tiny effect of medicine found in large studies is in striking contrast to the large apparent effects we find even in small studies of other influences.“*
>
> Obviously, if I thought medicine was useless at all margins, I’d have said to cut it all, not just cut it in half.
I acknowledge he’s the expert on his own opinion, so I guess I must be misrepresenting him, and I apologize. But I can’t figure out how these claims fit together coherently with what he’s said in the past. So I’ll lay out my thoughts on why that is, and he can decide if this is worth another post where he clarifies his position.
The marginal unit of health care doesn’t come clearly marked. If we want to cut the marginal unit of health care (for example, following Robin’s recommendation to cut health care in half) we need to cut specific things. If you would otherwise get ten treatments in a year, you need to cut out five if you want to halve health care like Robin suggests. Which five? You could make the decision centrally (the medical establishment decides some interventions are less valuable than others, and insurance stops covering those) or in a decentralized free-market way (customers get less insurance, increasing the cost of medical care and causing them to make harder trade-offs about when to get it), but somebody has to make this decision at some point. On what basis do they make it?
One possible reasonable position might be “obviously the cancer stuff and the antibiotics are important, so definitely keep those. Find stuff which seems frivolous, and then cut that.”
My impression is that Robin has very clearly rejected this position. For example, from [here:](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)
> It is clearly not the case that marginal care contains mostly treatments that doctors know to be less useful and more frivolous, while the serious situations where doctors know medicine is very valuable are usually in common care. In fact, doctors do not seem to see a difference between common and marginal care. So, if common care is much more useful on average than the useless-on-average marginal care, it must be because each patient somehow knows something that doctors cannot see about when he really needs to see a doctor. Now how likely is that?
We just *don’t know* which treatments are useful vs. bad? But don’t we know, for example, that antibiotics are good? [Robin again](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf):
> But what about those miracles of modern medicine we have all heard so much about? Did not the introduction of antibiotics, for example, dramatically reduce death rates for key diseases? Well, not much actually.
Public health measures? Sanitation? Clean water? [Robin again](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf):
> If medicine for treating individuals is not quite the miracle we have heard, does public health make up the difference? Have not we all heard how the introduction of modern water and sewer systems greatly improved our ancestors’ health? Well, a century ago the U.S. cities with the most advanced water and sewer systems had higher death rates than the other cities. Also, we can look today at how the death rates of individual households correlates with the water sources and sewer mechanisms used by those households. Even in poor countries with high death rates, once we control for a few other variables like social status we usually find that water and sewer parameters are unrelated to death rates. Well we must live longer now for some reason, right? Yes . . . but the fact is that we just do not know why we now live so much longer.
(Robin seems more bullish on sanitation elsewhere, so maybe he’s changed his mind? Like I said, I have trouble fitting all his statements into a coherent model.)
Okay, then how *do* we halve medical care? In [his CATO Unbound article](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/), I interpret him as saying it didn’t matter how you did it, because “most any way to implement such a cut would likely give big gains.”
Am I straw-manning him again here? Doesn’t he obviously think we should spend some time figuring out which medical treatments are good and effective (cancer care? vaccines?) so we don’t accidentally cut those?
In [a podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robin-hanson-on-lying-to-ourselves/), he mocked other economists who said that you needed to be really careful and work hard to figure out which parts of medicine were good, so you could make sure to cut only the useless parts:
> I did a Cato Unbound forum about 10 years ago where my starting essay was cut medicine in half, and a number of prominent health economists responded there. None of them disagreed with my basic factual claims about the correlation of health and medicine and other things, but, still, many of them were reluctant to give up on many medicine. They said, “Well, yes, on average, it doesn’t help, but some of it must be useful and, uh, we shouldn’t cut anything until we figure out what the useful parts are,” and I make the analogy of that with a monkey trap.
>
> In many parts of the world, there are monkeys that run around, and you might want to eat one. To do that, you need to trap one, and a common way to trap a monkey is you take a gourd, that is, a big container that’s empty, and you put a nut on the inside of that gourd, and the monkey will reach into the gourd and put his fist around the nut and try to pull his hand out because then mouth is too small to get his hand up, and he will not let go of that nut.
Robin thinks it’s a “monkey trap” to try to cut the bad parts of medicine but not the good. This seems consistent with his claim that you can’t distinguish good from marginal care, and with his claim that he’s not sure antibiotics or public sanitation are good.
It seems to me that if we were to cut medicine in half, figuring out which half to cut would be among the most consequential decisions in history. For example, if we foolishly tried to cut out all treatments that start with letters A - M, then we would lose antibiotics, appendectomies, AIDS medications, etc. I would expect even small mistakes in this process to cause more deaths than 9-11, the Iraq War, or other things we think of as greatly consequential.
But Robin doesn’t seem to think this matters very much, and his antibiotics and public health comments make it sound like this is because he’s not particularly sure thateven the most respected forms of medicine work. This is the context in which I cited his casino quote ([source](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/10/robin_hanson_on_1.html)) in the original article:
> Imagine someone claimed that casinos produce, not just entertainment, but also money. I would reply that while some people have indeed walked away from casinos with more money than they arrived with, it is very rare for anyone to be able to reasonably expect this result. There may well be a few such people, but there are severe barriers to creating regular social practices wherein large groups of people can reasonably expect to make money from casinos. We have data suggesting such barriers exist, and we have reasonable theories of what could cause such barriers. Regarding medicine (the stuff doctors do), my claims are similar.
In the context of everything else, I can’t help but interpret this as suggesting that medical care is net neutral, or even (like casinos) net negative, and that just as there is no specific slot machine that you know will work at a casino, and you would do best avoiding all of them, so there’s no one medical treatment that we know is positive in expectation, and cutting any of it would be fine.
Maybe this is all straw-manning, all of this is taken out of context, and the only place that Robin says his true opinion is in his book. But in that case I feel like this is a pretty extreme failure of communication that’s not entirely my fault. Also, other people seem to interpret it the same way I do:
If I thought medical care was mostly effective and just needed to be trimmed around the margin, and my readers were posting that I thought medical care was “useless”, or that “ALL health spending is wasteful”, or that “medicine is net neutral for health” - I would be horrified and try to clear it up as quickly as possible. Somehow in fifteen years this hasn’t happened. I guess if I can get Robin to make this clarification - even if it turns out I’m totally wrong and misunderstanding everything he says - then maybe this post will have been worthwhile.
So in the interests of getting a clearer understanding, I’ll pose Robin a trilemma:
1. Either we can’t distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, but the average intervention is net positive in expectation (in which case it seems like we should keep the amount of medicine we have now, since we assess each treatment equally and they’re all net positive)
2. Or we still can’t distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, but the average intervention is, after you count the monetary cost, net neutral or negative in expectation (in which case one should be equally skeptical of everything, including antibiotics and cancer treatment, and I don’t understand how saying this is a straw man)
3. Or we *can* distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, and we should throw out the bad ones and keep the good ones (in which case why does Robin keep saying the opposite, why does he call this a “monkey trap”, etc? And wouldn’t it be better for Robin to frame his position as “medicine generally works well, but there are some interventions that aren’t evidence-based enough”, which is the consensus medical position?)
If this is a false trichotomy, Robin should tell me how!
### Let’s Do Near Mode!
Despite (maybe?) disagreeing about health care, I have a huge amount of respect for Robin. He’s developed or popularized many of the ideas that still shape my thinking. One of them is “near mode vs. far mode”, his take on [construal level theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construal_level_theory). I find it helpful at times like this to try to go as Near Mode as possible.
For example, in one of the papers I linked above, Robin writes:
> Unfortunately, even if you believe everything that I have said, your behavior will probably not change much as a result. You will still spend nearly as much on medicine for yourself and your family, and spend much less effort on the more effective ways to increase lifespan. After all, your sick family would consider it the worst kind of betrayal if you did not “do something,” and give them all the medicine that your doctor recommends (Hanson, 2002). Alas, the problem of the fear of death muddling our thinking is so much worse than we imagined.
I interpret this as him saying that if you were smart, had the courage of your convictions, and weren’t so obsessed with signaling, then you, the literal reader, would cut your individual health care expenses right now after learning about his theory.
I, like many people, would like to spend less money on health care without my health being negatively affected in any way. The Nearest way possible to approach this is to think about how Robin’s theory suggests that I act. Here are some categories of health problem that I might one day have to think about:
1. A heart attack or stroke (going to the hospital)
2. Cancer (going to an oncologist, complying with their recommendations)
3. A bacterial infection, eg pneumonia, sinusitis, meningitis, etc (going to a doctor / urgent care / ER, taking antibiotics if recommended)
4. A chronic disease like Type II diabetes (going to the doctor, following their recommendations about glycemic control, taking medicine if recommended)
5. New-onset unexplained but serious-seeming symptoms, eg sudden intense abdominal pain, or suddenly feeling very dizzy (getting checked out by a doctor or hospital).
6. New-onset unexplained but mild-seeming symptoms, eg mild abdominal pain or suddenly feeling slightly dizzy (getting checked out by a doctor or hospital).
7. Acting erratically, hallucinating, saying things that don’t make sense (going to a psychiatrist or mental hospital).
8. Feeling very depressed or anxious, so much so that it’s hard to get through the day or do your usual work (going to a psychiatrist)
9. A middle-aged person with a family history of cardiovascular problems who hasn’t gotten a checkup in a while (going to a doctor, taking statins/ACEIs/etc if recommended)
10. Just sort of feeling blah all the time, eg tired, joints ache, etc (going to the doctor and getting checked out).
So my second question for Robin is: how do you recommend I proceed? Do I avoid going to the doctor for some specific subset of these categories, like 5-10? Are all the categories equal, such that I should flip a coin each time I get an illness, and only go to the doctors if the coin comes up heads? Get certain care in some categories, flip the coin for others? This isn’t intended to be a rhetorical question. I’m hoping it clarifies what it means to “cut the marginal unit of health care”, what a reader who didn’t have “the fear of death muddling [their] thinking” would do, and how much Robin believes we can distinguish between good and bad treatments.
Actually, we can get even Nearer. My wife and I recently took my four-month-old son to the pediatrician. The pediatrician said he had a mis-shapen head, and referred him to a head specialist for a second opinion. The specialist said yup, looks pretty mis-shapen, and referred us to a helmet-maker. The helmet-maker said yeah, definitely mis-shapen, and wants us to pay $300 for a helmet to correct it so my son doesn’t get stuck permanently looking like Frankenstein when he grows up.
(there are [some studies](https://thejns.org/focus/view/journals/neurosurg-focus/35/4/article-pE2.xml?tab_body=fulltext) of this intervention, which are neither obviously wrong nor obviously unimpeachable. They say the helmet works, but not necessarily better than “repositioning therapy”. Our son refuses repositioning therapy, so for us it’s the helmet or nothing.)
That helmet is probably our “marginal” health care expense, in the sense that it’s less obviously important than the other two things we’ve used healthcare for this year (childbirth, a scare with our son’s breathing). So, if we’re trying to cut the marginal health care expense, should we skip the helmet? Maybe we *should* skip it - I never see any adults with obviously mis-shapen heads out there, and surely they didn’t *all* get $300 helmets as kids. Maybe it’s all a racket.
(for pictures of people with mis-shapen heads, [see here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiocephaly), dead dove, do not eat)
How would Robin recommend I make this decision, if not by consulting the studies? Should I just base it off the RAND experiment? Are we sure that there were any babies with mis-shapen heads in RAND at all? Did RAND even use “has non-Frankenstein head shape” as an endpoint? Should I still go off RAND? Or should I trust [Johns Hopkins](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/helmet-therapy-for-your-baby) and all the specialists when they say this is good?
This is as Near as I can get. What now? Is Robin’s advice just aimed at some hypothetical dumb person who constantly gets healthcare for stupid reasons and never considered stopping? Or should I personally try not to get health care in situations like this one? If I value my son looking like a normal human being when he grows up at (let’s say) $30,000, then it seems like I should only need a 1% credence that this therapy works before I spend $300 on it (and surely my credence of something backed up by all available studies is higher than that). Is this Pascal’s Wager? But doesn’t all medicine have those kinds of odds? What do I do?
### On Cancer, Heart Attack, Etc Survival Rates
Moving through more specific sections of his post.
Hanson:
> First, my claim of a near zero marginal health gain from more medicine on average is consistent with some particular kinds of medicine having a positive marginal gains. We name some plausible candidates in our book. Cancer and heart attacks could also be among them. Or maybe just childhood cancer.
I don’t understand how this isn’t the CATO economist position. “Keep the good stuff that we know works, and look for likely-not-to-work forms of treatment around the edges that we can cut”. I certainly have some guesses about forms of medicine that don’t work - most surgeries for back pain are in this category. Do they add up to half of all medicine? I’m not sure, but if Robin agrees that this is the discussion, we can compare our lists and try to figure it out.
> Second, to be relevant to my claim these treatments need to be of the sort that many people get but many others do not. I’m willing to presume that cancer and heart attack treatment fall into this category, but Scott doesn’t show this.
Again, if Robin’s claim is that medicine is only useless on the margins, we’re much closer to agreement. But I don’t know how that meshes with saying that maybe antibiotics don’t help, or that we can’t possibly distinguish marginal from core, or that health spending is mostly signaling (as opposed to a mix of people correctly spending money on health because they know it’s great and will help them, plus some extra from people not being scientists and not knowing which treatments are good or bad).
> Third, Scott is well aware that many others attribute much of these changes to the population getting generally healthier over time, and thus better able at each age to deal with all disease, and also to earlier screening, which catches cases that would never get very bad. He judges:
>
> *» Although some of this is confounded by improved screening, this is unlikely to explain more than about 20-50% of the effect. The remainder is probably a real improvement in treatment.*
>
> But he seems [well](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/) [aware](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/sorry-but-so-far-war-on-cancer-has-been-a-bust/) that many other specialists judge differently here.
But the link is to a blog post where I examine this and find many studies showing, I think very clearly, that it really is medicine and not screening! Yes, other people think differently, but the link you’re using is a post about why they’re wrong!
But also, why is Robin objecting to this! I thought he was admitting that cancer treatment is maybe potentially good! This is why I find this conversation so frustrating. Mention a medical treatment to Robin, even one of the “good ones” like cancer or antibiotics, and he’ll try to argue that maybe the evidence it works is being misinterpreted, and in fact it’s unclear how well it works. Then I say he thinks this stuff might not work, and he accuses me of straw-manning him.
I would have no objection if there were, in fact, some evidence that cancer treatment was useless, and he was trying to bring it to my attention. But all he’s doing is linking my post showing that it’s not true, plus the article I started my post with as an example of the false narrative I’m trying to correct.
### On Insurance Experiments
I don’t see Hanson responding to my main point, which is that the insurance experiments show signs of having their power fail at random points in the causal chain, rather than showing anything about medicine. Just to rehash this for people who forgot:
* The Karnataka experiment couldn’t show that insurance made people more likely to give birth in hospitals, or more likely to have a doctor tell them that their blood pressure was too high, or basically any outcome related to how much care they were getting, let alone whether that care worked.
* The Oregon experiment found people got more diabetes drugs, but not that they had less diabetes. However, if you do a power calculation based on the increase in diabetes drugs and the known effect of diabetes drugs, we find that the experiment wouldn’t have detected it even if it was there.
* …and the same is true of hypertension and most of the other things they measured.
* The RAND outcomes I found were mostly things that doctors had no medicine for in the 1970s when the study was conducted. For example, they measured the effect of health care on obesity, but there were no good obesity drugs in the 1970s.
Instead, he discusses small quibbles with how I describe certain results. I’ll go through these quibbles, but I want to make it clear I don’t think they matter very much, and I would much rather talk about the main point. Going through the quibbles:
> Scott sees the first three as too underpowered to find interesting results. He found the results of RAND “moderately surprising”, but thinks “it’s a stretch to attribute [p = 0.03 blood pressure result] to random noise”, even if its the only result out of 30 at p<0.05.
I find it unfair to present this claim without presenting my reasoning, which is that there’s a whole other paper, [How Free Care Reduced Hypertension In The RAND Health Insurance Experiment](https://sci-hub.st/10.1001/jama.1985.03360140084030), which does various sanity checks to this result, finds that it holds up, and finds related claims with lower p-values.
> Scott calls Karnataka a “study where the intervention didn’t affect the amount of medical care people got very much” as “they were unable to find a direct effect of giving people free insurance on those people using insurance, at all, in the 3.5 year study period!” But I see the study as reporting big utilization effects:
>
> *» The average annual insurance utilization rate at 18 months (3.5 years) is 13.46% (2.56%) in the free-insurance arms versus 7.72% (0.64%) in the control arm. On average this effect amounts to a 74.35% (400%) increase in insurance utilization at 18 months (3.5 years).*
I said in my original post that utilization rates increased when spillovers were taken into account, but did not directly increase for the insured individuals. He is quoting the first half of a section that then goes on to say “Spillovers play an important role in boosting utilization. At 18 months and 3.5 years, ITT estimates of the direct effects of insurance access are not significant.”
So this was exactly what I said in my post, except that Robin takes out my explanation and quotes only half of the section, so that I look like a moron who didn’t read the paper.
> This seems to me a non-trivial constraint on medical effectiveness:
>
> *» We cannot rule out clinically-significant health effects, on average equal to 11% (8.8%) of the standard deviation for each health outcome in ITT (CATE) analyses.*
>
> (They *can* rule out larger effects.)
Again, this isn’t just about the effects of medicine. The outcomes Hanson is talking about include many things like giving birth in a hospital, or having surgery, or being told you have arthritis. If insurance can’t improve the likelihood of these things, it’s failing to connect with the medical system at all, not some kind of evidence that medicine doesn’t work.
On the Goldin paper:
> Now while their OLS estimate of the effect of treatment on mortality is only significant at the 1% level (and that exaggerated by selection bias), their OLS estimate of the effect of more insurance on mortality looks much stronger. At least if we could believe their Table IV which gives an estimate there of -0.026 and a standard error 0.001, for a ratio of 26! But as they never even discuss this crazy huge significance in the text, I have to suspect that this is just a table typo.
Other people have pointed this out and I’m not sure what’s going on here. Cremieux thinks all of Goldin might be a [Lindley’s paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox) situation (suggesting it isn’t a real effect), and I’m trying to clear this up with him and figure out if he’s right. I think my case is still strong if we stick with the lower treatment effect or ignore Goldin entirely.
> As Scott knows, we [have](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124) a huge problem of selective publication and specification search (“p-hacking”), especially in medicine, which is why I’m suspicious of the few “quasi-experimental studies” that find big health gains from medicine.
In 2004, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors [released a statement saying they would no longer accept non-pre-registered studies](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe048225) that started after July 1, 2005. Since then, all studies have had to pre-specify their protocol, making p-hacking much harder. You can see the results on trial composition [here](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.22.23290326v1.full.pdf):
…and on p-hacking levels [here](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.22.23290326v1.full.pdf):
Obviously this doesn’t mean that there’s no possible way medical studies could ever be biased. But I worry that people act like “studies can be p-hacked” is some sort of secret knowledge that elevates them above domain experts. Medical evidence is processed by groups like NICE and the Cochrane Collaboration that have been worrying about p-hacking since 2004, trying to factor its existence into their recommendations, and organizing pretty successful campaigns among journals and other stakeholders to minimize it. This doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but I think we’re beyond the level where you can say “what about p-hacking” and use it to throw out every clinical study in favor of three social science experiments that explicitly admit they don’t have enough power to test these kinds of questions.
> I know that typical regressions of health on medicine find no effect, and also that [medical errors](https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4185) and [prescription drugs](https://brownstone.org/articles/prescription-drugs-are-the-leading-cause-of-death/) cause huge numbers of deaths. Thus I focus on our few best studies: randomized experiments.
The first link goes to a study that does not try to quantify the number of deaths from medical error. The second goes to a claim that that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death. For the latter, I would recommend reading [Medical Error Is Not The Third Leading Cause Of Death](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/medical-error-not-third-leading-cause-death) and [”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2023/07/medical-errors-are-the-third-leading-cause-of-death-and-other-statistics-you-should-question/). These numbers usually come from massively overcounting medical errors from studies not intended to quantify them, from calling any death that happens after a medical error a result of a medical error, and from ignoring the many more sober estimates of medical error fatality rate that have been published. This isn’t to say that medical errors aren’t real and serious, just that I don’t think many people now continue to defend that particular claim.
> While many studies claim to show otherwise for specific treatments, those tend to be quite biased, pushing me to focus on our best studies: randomized trials of aggregate medicine. I say that they still consistently fail to find clear effects.
I’ve tried to explain how thoroughly I disagree with this claim, but let me try one more time.
Suppose we want to know something simple, like whether being shot with a gun can kill someone.
One option is that we get trials where we shoot a thousand people with guns, shoot another thousand people with placebo guns (blanks), and see how many in each group die. Maybe we could do this a hundred times, for every different type of gun. Maybe we’d even find that some guns (eg BB guns) don’t kill people, and we could replicate that a dozen times. I believe this method would be very decisive.
But maybe this would be “biased”. Maybe the only unbiased way to test this, for some reason, is to give a thousand people a special voucher that they can use to buy guns, and leave another thousand people as a control. Then we wait two years, and see whether the voucher group gets convicted of murder more often than the control group.
And maybe in fact we do this, and we find that there are three more convicted murderers in the voucher group, but this isn’t statistically significant.
Do we conclude that “being shot with a gun can’t kill you”? Or “the marginal gun can’t kill you?”
No. Among many other possible ways this could go wrong, we might find that only three extra people in the voucher group tried shooting someone. This exactly corresponds to our three extra deaths, consistent with a 100% death rate from being shot. But if you don’t ask this question, and you just stop at “well, there were only three extra murders, which isn’t statistically significant”, then it looks like getting shot with a gun can’t kill you.
I don’t understand why you would prefer the second form of study over the first, *especially* if you are going to summarize its results as “guns aren’t dangerous”.
(…the marginal gun isn’t dangerous? Some guns are dangerous, but we can’t tell which ones? Some guns are dangerous, we *can* tell which ones, and we should just focus on those?)
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding Robin. I look forward to him clarifying his position further.
In case *my own* position isn’t clear: I think lots of medicine is useless, and that most doctors would agree with this. We over-order tests when we don’t need them, we do a lot of ineffective stuff to please patients (starting with antibiotics for viral illnesses, but sometimes going up to surgeries that have only placebo value), and we do lots of treatments that we know fail >90% of the time, like certain kinds of rehab for drug addiction (we tell ourselves we’re doing it because the tiny number of people who do benefit deserve a chance, but a rational health bureaucrat who wants to save money might not see it that way). Does all this add up to half? I’m not sure. But I think we can work on cutting back on this stuff without saying things like “maybe medicine is just about signaling” or “how do we know if any of it works?” or “you can’t trust clinical trials because they’re all biased”, and that it very very much matters which parts of medicine we cut.
(something like this has to be true, because eg Britain spends only half as much per person as the US on healthcare, and Brits have *approximately* as good health outcomes. This isn’t because medicine, in the sense of specific treatments for specific diseases, works any better or worse in Britain - it’s for the same reasons that colleges have ballooned in cost without educating people much better.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if expensive insurance doesn’t have much marginal mortality benefit over cheap insurance, although it might still be worth it on a personal level (because it gets you faster care, kinder doctors, fancier hospital rooms, etc).
I don’t think the insurance studies tell us anything one way or the other here, and I have no confidence that the things that skeptics think they cast doubt upon are the things we should really be doubting. | Scott Alexander | 144089513 | Response to Hanson On Health Care | acx |
# Open Thread 327
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week, in Istanbul, Edinburgh, Manchester, Phoenix, Fort Meade, Brooklyn, Hanoi, and New Orleans. And Sao Paulo has been added to the list. More information, including times and dates, [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024).
**2:** Reminder that the due date for [this year’s Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2024) is May 5, ie next Sunday. You can find where to submit at the link.
**3:** I’ve said good things about the Prospera charter city and their libertarian approach to medical regulation. Supporting a libertarian approach to medical regulation doesn’t mean everything will work and there won’t be any scams, it just posits that the benefits will be worth these downsides. Still, I feel an obligation to let people know when one of them probably doesn’t work, so here’s [a convincing-seeming takedown of the Prospera-based Minicircle clinic](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT7_6kWkIqrvzFZvs88O_NqVzmn-NPINvHOLM-A6r_ieZyvnJsNVk4FSU7EYrePnQg9gT_3kwahJESZ/pub) (see also [SarahC’s writeup](https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/bad-news-for-minicircle)).
**4:** Manifold Markets [wants to pivot](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393) from play-money prediction markets to real-ish money via a loophole that allows certain kinds of gambling-like activity. In the process, they’re devaluing mana (as available for charitable donations) by a factor of ten as of May 1. If you want to donate your mana to charity, ~~do it before then.~~ [EDIT: Delayed until 5/15, and [with other considerations](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-327/comment/54998970))
**5:** Philosophy Bear was interested in some responses to the ACX survey and doing a follow-up survey to explore them further. He’s offering a $50 - $150 prize for a lucky survey respondent. Go here to take [his follow-up survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdcK6c_rUWUedS75ajDqGTr2wbSY-uT4gRyHCZHkLfdzPs_cQ/viewform). I’m deliberately not starting with a link his blog because it might give away the point of the survey, but after you’ve taken it, you can read it [here](https://philosophybear.substack.com/).
**6:** Robin Hanson [wrote a response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) to my piece arguing against his healthcare views. I’ll probably have a response up sometime in the next week or two if I don’t get distracted. | Scott Alexander | 144090754 | Open Thread 327 | acx |
# Survey Results: PMS Symptoms
In November 2022, Aella posted [this Twitter poll](https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1589509446837075970):
19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
[Here’s another one](https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1631139468043513858):
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this [here](https://aella.substack.com/p/neuroticism-correlates-with-pms), and sebjenseb confirms [here](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/pms-and-neuroticism). I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic *because of* PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
I tried to replicate this on [this year’s ACX survey](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024), using these questions:
These are a numerical scale, compared to Aella’s Y/N, so to start I dichotomized them: “have PMS” was defined as a score of 3+, and “believe in supernatural” was 2+. I freely admit these were post hoc choices intended to capture as much variation as possible. I selected for cis women only, to avoid any confounds with hormones and whatever trans people’s menstruation situation is:
30% of those without PMS believed in the supernatural, compared to 48% of those with symptoms. Chi-square was significant at the < 0.001 level.
55% vs. 61% anxious, chi-square was 0.046.
Going back and disaggregating the data, we find:
T-tests find both of these are significant:
Weird!
I asked Aella why she even thought to do a poll on this. She said:
> I read [the penis thieves boo](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness)k and figured if PMS is psychosomatic, this must be something around culture telling women they should feel bad around their periods, and women who are more susceptible to internalizing this to the degree they feel something real, might also be susceptible to internalizing other beliefs to the degree that they have a legitimately altered experience.
Sebastian proposes the alternative possibility that it’s [something about hormones](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/pms-and-neuroticism).
I tried correlating PMS symptoms with lots of other things I had to see what turned up. This is bad practice and for exploratory purposes only, but here’s what I found:
No correlation with any political opinion (there was a slight, likely random correlation with YIMBYism, not included on this table). Correlations with feeling negatively affected by various scary things, potentially related to neuroticism. Some correlations with what appears in their dreams (???). I didn’t have a big enough sample to do much work with psychiatric conditions.
This maybe slightly contradicts a suggestibility hypothesis (lots of people say Donald Trump is bad; wouldn’t that convince more suggestible people that Donald Trump is bad?). But also, on many questions where men and women differ (for example, on wokeness, not pictured on the table), there was no PMS effect. Maybe that argues against hormones?
I had two other questions about conditions which sometimes get classified as psychosomatic:
…but neither of them are correlated with PMS.
I’m pretty confused by this whole area.
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available [ACX Survey Results](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024). If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me. | Scott Alexander | 143803725 | Survey Results: PMS Symptoms | acx |
# Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
One of the most common arguments against AI safety is:
> Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.
I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it *did* happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument.
The first hundred times this happened, I thought I must be misunderstanding something. Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!
Usually the thing that didn’t happen is overpopulation, global cooling, etc. But most recently it was some kind of coffeepocalypse:
You can [read the full thread here](https://twitter.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/1741445839053025450), but I’m warning you, it’s just going to be “once people were worried about coffee, but now we know coffee is safe. Therefore AI will also be safe.”[1](#footnote-1)
I keep trying to steelman this argument, and it keeps resisting my steelmanning. For example:
* Maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of “most technologies don’t go wrong”? But people make the same argument with things that aren’t technologies, like global cooling or overpopulation.
* Maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of “the world is never destroyed, so doomsday prophecies have an abysmal track record”? But overpopulation and global cooling don’t claim that everyone will die - just that a lot of people will. And plenty of prophecies about mass death events have come true (eg Black Plague, WWII, AIDS). And none of this explains coffee!
So my literal, non-rhetorical question, is “how can anyone be stupid enough to think this makes sense?” I’m not (just) trying to insult the people who say this; I consider their existence a genuine philosophical mystery. Isn’t this, in some sense, no different from saying (for example):
> I once heard about a dumb person who thought halibut weren’t a kind of fish - but boy, that person sure was wrong. Therefore, AI is also a kind of fish.
The coffee version is:
> I once heard about a dumb person who thought coffee would cause lots of problems - but boy, that person sure was wrong. Therefore, AI also won’t cause lots of problems.
Nobody would ever take it seriously in its halibut form. So what part of reskinning it as about coffee makes it more credible?
Whenever I wonder how anyone can be so stupid, I start by asking if I myself am exactly this stupid in some other situation. This time, I remembered an argument from one of Stuart Russell’s pro-AI-risk arguments. [He pointed out](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26157) that physicist Ernest Rutherford declared nuclear chain reactions impossible *less than twenty-four hours* before Szilard discovered the secret of the nuclear chain reaction. At the time, I thought this was a cute and helpful warning against being too sure that superintelligence was impossible.
But isn’t this the same argument as the coffeepocalypse? A hostile rephrasing might be:
> There is at least one thing that was possible. Therefore, superintelligent AI is also possible.
And an only slightly less hostile rephrasing:
> People were wrong when they said nuclear reactions were impossible. Therefore, they might also be wrong when they say superintelligent AI is possible.
How is this better than the coffeepocalypse argument? In fact, how is it even better than the halibut argument? What are we doing when we make arguments like these?
Some thoughts:
**As An Existence Proof?**
When I think of why I appreciated Prof. Russell’s argument, it wasn’t because it was a complete proof that superintelligence was possible. It was more like an argument for humility. “You may think it’s impossible. But given that there’s at least one case where people thought that and were proven wrong, you should believe it’s at least possible.”
But first of all, one case shouldn’t prove anything. If you doubt you will win the lottery, I can’t prove you wrong - even in a weak, probabilistic way - by bringing up a case of someone who did. I can’t even prove you should be humble - you are definitely allowed to be arrogant and very confident in your belief you won’t win!
And second of all, existence proofs can only make you *slightly* more humble. They can refute the claim “I am absolutely, 100% certain that AI is/isn’t dangerous”. But not many people make this claim, and it’s [uncharitable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/13/arguments-from-my-opponent-believes-something/) to suspect your opponent of doing so.
Maybe this debate collapses into the debate around the [Safe Uncertainty Fallacy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy), where some people think if there’s any uncertainty at all about something, you have to assume it will be totally safe and fine (no, I don’t get it either), and other people think if there’s even a 1% chance of disaster, you have to multiply out by the size of the disaster and end up very concerned (at the tails, this becomes Pascalian reasoning, but nobody has a good theory of where the tails begin).
I still don’t think an existence proof that it’s theoretically possible for your opponent to be wrong goes very far. Still, this is sort of what I was trying to do [with the diphyllic dam example here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party) - show that a line of argument can sometimes be wrong, in a way that forces people to try something more sophisticated.
**As An Attempt To Trigger A Heuristic?**
Maybe Prof. Russell’s argument implicitly assumes that everyone has a large store of knowledge about failed predictions - no heavier-than-air flying machine is possible, there is a world market for maybe five computers. You could think of this particular example of a prediction being false as trying to trigger people’s existing stock of memories that *very often* people’s predictions are false.
You could make the same argument about the coffeepocalypse. “People worried about coffee but it was fine” is intended to activate a long list of stored moral panics in your mind - the one around marijuana, the one around violent video games - enough to remind you that *very often* people worry about something and it’s nothing.
But - even granting that there are many cases of both - are these useful? There are many cases of moral panics turning out to be nothing. But there are many other cases of moral panics proving true, or of people not worrying about things they should worry about. People didn’t worry enough about tobacco, and then it killed lots of people. People didn’t worry enough about lead in gasoline, and then it poisoned lots of children. People didn’t worry enough about global warming, OxyContin, al-Qaeda, growing international tension in the pre-WWI European system, etc, until after those things had already gotten out of control and hurt lots of people. We even have words and idioms for this kind of failure to listen to warnings - like the ostrich burying its head in the sand.
(and there are many examples of people predicting that things were impossible, and they really were impossible, eg perpetual motion).
It would seem like in order to usefully invoke a heuristic (“remember all these cases of moral panic we all agree were bad? Then you should assume this is probably also a moral panic”), you need to establish that moral panics are more common than ostrich-head-burying. And in order to usefully invoke a heuristic against predicting something is impossible, you need to establish that failed impossibility proofs are more common than accurate ones.
This seems somewhere between “nobody has done it” and “impossible in principle”. Insisting on it would eliminate 90%+ of discourse.
See also [Caution On Bias Arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), where I try to make the same point. I think you can rewrite this section to be about proposed bias arguments (“People have a known bias to worry about things excessively, so we should correct for it”). But as always, you can posit an opposite bias (“People have a known bias to put their heads in the sand and ignore problems that it would be scary to think about or expensive to fix”), and figuring out which of these dueling biases you need to correct for, is the same problem as figuring out which of the dueling heuristics you need to invoke.
**What Is Evidence, Anyway?**
Suppose someone’s trying to argue for some specific point, like “Russia will win the war with Ukraine”. They bring up some evidence, like “Russia has some very good tanks.”
Obviously this on its own proves nothing. Russia could have good tanks, but Ukraine could be better at other things.
But then how does *any* amount of evidence prove an argument? You could make a hundred similar statements: “Russia has good tanks”, “Russia has good troop transport ships”, “the Russian general in the 4th District of the Western Theater is very skilled” […], and run into exactly the same problem. But an argument that Russia will win the war has to be made up of some number of pieces of evidence. So how can it ever work?
I think it has to carry an implicit assumption of “…and you’re pretty good at weighing how much evidence it would take to prove something, and everything else is pretty equal, so this is enough evidence to push you over the edge into believing my point.”
For example, if someone said “Russia will win because they outnumber Ukraine 3 to 1 and have better generals” (and then proved this was true), that at least seems like a plausible argument that shouldn’t be immediately ignored. Everyone knows that having a 3:1 advantage, and having good generals, are both big advantages in war. It carries an implied “and surely Ukraine doesn’t have some other advantage that counterbalances both of those”. But this could be so plausible that we accept it (it’s hard to counterbalance a 3:1 manpower advantage). Or it could be a challenge to pro-Ukraine people (if you can’t name some advantage of your side that sounds as convincing as these, then we win).
And it’s legitimate for someone who believes Russia will win, and has talked about it at length, to write one article about the good tanks, without explicitly saying “Obviously this is only one part of my case that Russia will win, and won’t convince anyone on its own; still, please update a little on this one, and maybe as you keep going and run into other things, you’ll update more.”
Is this what the people talking about coffee are doing?
An argument against: you should at least update a *little* on the good tanks, right? But the coffee thing proves *literally* nothing. It proves that there was *one time* when people worried about a bad thing, and then it didn’t happen. Surely you already knew this must have happened at least once!
An argument in favor: suppose there are a hundred different facets of war as important as “has good tanks”. It would be very implausible if, of two relatively evenly-matched competitors, one of them was better at all 100, and the other at 0. So all that “Russia has good tanks” is telling you is that Russia is better on at least one axis, which you could have already predicted. Is this more of an update than the coffee situation?
My proposed answer: if you knew the person making the argument was deliberately looking for pro-Russia arguments, then “has good tanks” updates you almost zero - it would only convince you that Russia was better in at least 1 of 100 domains. If you thought they were relatively unbiased and just happened to stumble across this information, it would update you slightly (we have chosen a randomly selected facet, and Russia is better).
If you thought the person making the coffee argument was doing an unbiased survey of all times people had been worried, then the coffee fact (in this particular time people worried, it was unnecessary) might feel like sampling a random point. But we have so much more evidence about whether things are dangerous or safe that I don’t think sampling a random point (even if we could do so fairly) would mean much.
**Conclusion: I Genuinely Don’t Know What These People Are Thinking**
I would like to understand the mindset of people who make arguments like this, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded. The best I can say is that sometimes people on my side make similar arguments (the nuclear chain reaction one) which I don’t immediately flag as dumb, and maybe I can follow this thread to figure out why they seem tempting sometimes.
If you see me making an argument that you think is like coffeepocalypse, please let me know, so I can think about what factors led me to think it was a reasonable thing to do, and see if they also apply to the coffee case.
. . . although I have to admit, I’m a little nervous asking for this, though. Douglas Adams once said that if anyone ever understood the Universe, it would immediately disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible. I worry that if I ever understand why anti-AI-safety people think the things they say count as good arguments, the same thing might happen.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
And as some people on Twitter point out, it’s wrong even in the case of coffee! The claimed danger of coffee was that “Kings and queens saw coffee houses as breeding grounds for revolution”. But this absolutely happened - coffeehouse organizing contributed to the [Glorious Revolution](https://www.history.com/news/coffee-houses-revolutions) and the [French Revolution](https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/test/article/view/444/360), among others. So not only is the argument “Fears about coffee were dumb, therefore fears about AI are dumb”, but *the fears about coffee weren’t even dumb.* | Scott Alexander | 140348944 | Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument | acx |
# Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
### I. Introduction
Robin Hanson of [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/) ~~more or less believes medicine doesn’t work~~ [EDIT: see his response [here,](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care) and [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine)]
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, [he writes](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml):
> Europeans in 1600 likely prided themselves on the ways in which their “modern” medicine was superior to what “primitives” had to accept. But we today aren’t so sure: seventeenth century medical theory was based on the four humors, and bloodletting was a common treatment. When we look back at those doctors, we think they may well have done more harm than good.
>
> When we look at our own medical practices, however, we tend to be confident we are in good hands, and that the money that goes to buying medical care–in 2020, it was 19.7% of our G.D.P. –is well spent. Most of us know of a family member who credits their life to modern medicine. My own dad said this about his pacemaker, and I, too, am a regular customer: I’m vaccinated, boosted, and recently had surgery to fix a broken arm.
>
> We believe in medicine, and this faith has comforted us during the pandemic. But likewise the patients of the seventeenth century; they could probably also have named a relative cured by bloodletting. Yet health outcomes are typically too random for the experience of one family to justify medical confidence. How do we know our belief is justified?
>
> This might seem like a silly question: in Europe of the seventeenth century, the average lifespan was in the low 30s. Now it’s the low 80s. Isn’t that difference due to medicine? In fact, the consensus is now that historical lifespan gains are better explained by nutrition, sanitation, and wealth.
>
> So let’s turn to medical research. Every year, there are a million new medical journal articles suggesting positive benefits of specific medical treatments. That’s something they didn’t have in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, we now know the medical literature to be plagued by serious biases, such as data-dredging, p-hacking, selection, attrition, and publication biases. For example, in a recent attempt to replicate 53 findings from top cancer labs, 30 papers could not be replicated due to issues like vague protocols and uncooperative authors, and less than half of the others yielded results like the original findings.
>
> But surely modern science must have some reliable way to study the aggregate value of medicine? Yes, we do. The key is to keep a study so simple, pre-announced, and well-examined that there isn’t much room for authors to “cheat” by data-dredging, p-hacking, etc. Large trials where we randomly induce some people to consume more medicine overall, and then track how their health differs from a control population–those are the key to reliable estimates. If trials are big and expensive enough, with lots of patients over many years, no one can possibly hide their results in a file drawer.
After listing bigger studies that he interprets as showing no effects from medicine, he concludes:
> We spend 20% of G.D.P. on medicine, most people credit it for their long lives, and millions of medical journal articles seem to confirm its enormous value. Yet our lives are long for other reasons, those articles often show huge biases, and when we look to our few best aggregate studies to assuage our doubts, they do no such thing.
Or, [even more clearly](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/10/robin_hanson_on_1.html):
> Imagine someone claimed that casinos produce, not just entertainment, but also money. I would reply that while some people have indeed walked away from casinos with more money than they arrived with, it is very rare for anyone to be able to reasonably expect this result. There may well be a few such people, but there are severe barriers to creating regular social practices wherein large groups of people can reasonably expect to make money from casinos. We have data suggesting such barriers exist, and we have reasonable theories of what could cause such barriers. Regarding medicine (the stuff doctors do), my claims are similar.
His argument: there have been three big experimental studies of what happens when people get free (or cut-price) health care: RAND, Oregon, and Karnataka. All three (according to him) find that people use more medicine, but don’t get any healthier. Therefore, medicine doesn’t work. If it looks like medicine works, it’s a combination of anecdotal reasoning, biased studies, and giving medicine credit for the positive effects of other good things (better nutrition, sanitation, etc).
I’ve spent fifteen years not responding to this argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat up on one contrarian who nobody else listens to. But I recently learned Bryan Caplan [also takes this seriously](https://betonit.substack.com/p/reflections-on-goff-and-the-cost). Beating up on *two* contrarians who nobody else listens to is a *great* use of a platform!
So I want to argue:
* Medicine obviously has to work
* Examined more closely, the three experiments Robin cites don’t really support his thesis
* There are other experiments which provide clearer evidence that medicine works
I’ll follow Robin’s lead in dismissing the entire medical literature - every RCT of every medication or treatment ever published - because it might have “huge biases,” and try to rely on other sources.
### II. Modern Medicine Improves Survival Rate
What do I mean by “medicine obviously has to work”?
Age-adjusted mortality rate from most diseases has declined significantly over the past few decades. Robin doesn’t want to credit medicine, arguing that this might be due to “nutrition, sanitation, and wealth”.
But we can more clearly distinguish the effects of medicine by looking at the effects of secondary prevention, ie how someone does after they get a specific disease. For example, what percent of cancer patients die in five years? What percent of heart attack patients die within the first month after their heart attack? This is the kind of thing that depends a lot on how much medical care you get, and is less affected by things like nutrition or sanitation.
(I’m more confident saying this about sanitation and wealth. You can imagine nutrition improving this - maybe better-nourished cancer patients are better able to fight their disease - but nutrition hasn’t really improved over the past few decades in First World countries anyway.)
Here are 5-year survival rates for various cancers, 1970s vs. 2000s:
([source](https://www.publichealthpost.org/databyte/cancer-survival-is-mostly-improving/))
People with cancer are more likely to survive than fifty years ago.
This is after you’ve already gotten the cancer, so it’s hard to see how nutrition, sanitation, etc could explain this. Some of these changes (especially prostate) are a result of earlier diagnosis. But [others reflect genuinely better treatment](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/). For example, studies have shown great results from the anti-leukemia drug imatinib and the anti-lymphoma drug rituximab. In Robin’s model, these extraordinary studies would have to be bias or chance, and *totally coincidentally* at the same time somehow better nutrition made leukemia patients (but not uterine cancer patients) twice as likely to survive.
Might this be because people are getting cancer younger (and therefore are better able to deal with it?) I can’t find great data on this; there’s increasing cancer among younger people, but (since people are living longer) we should also expect increasing cancer among older people (since there are more older people). Rather than try to figure out how to balance these effects, here’s a graph showing similar survival improvements among childhood cancers in particular, where we wouldn’t expect this to be a problem:
([source](https://www.acco.org/us-childhood-cancer-statistics/))
Likewise, here is post-heart attack 30-day mortality rate over time:
[Source here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2728009?resultClick=1).
The odds of death within 30 days of a heart attack have fallen from 20% in 1995 to 12.4% in 2015 ([source](https://www.clearvuehealth.com/b/heart-attack-mortality-data/)). This is also no mystery; the improvement comes from increased use of basic drugs like ACEIs, aspirin, and beta-blockers, plus more advanced interventions like thrombolytics and angioplasties, plus logistical improvements like more heart attack patients being placed on specialized cardiac wards.
Again, can we dismiss this because maybe heart attack victims are younger? The study this particular graph comes from says their patients were on average 2.7 years older at the end than the beginning, so here age effects seem to point in the opposite direction. [Here’s a graph](https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/surviving-a-heart-attack-a-success-story) showing the same decline if you break it up by under- and over-65s, though I wish I could find something with smaller bins.
Same data for stroke:
Source [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4768867/). Note that these are age-adjusted data!
In 2000, a stroke victim is only half as likely to die in the first two years after their illness as they were in 1980. Here we don’t have to worry about age effects at all; the graph is already adjusted for age.
You can see similar survival rate increases for other conditions like [congestive heart failure](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31523902/) (5-year survival rate went from 29% to 60% since 1970), [multiple sclerosis](https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/88/8/621) (standardized mortality rate went from 3.1 to 0.7 since 1950), [type 1 diabetes](https://practicaldiabetic.com/2020/10/22/easd-2020-life-expectancy-of-diabetics/) (survival rate at 50 from about 40% to 80% since 1950) and nearly any other condition you look up.
I’m harping on this because it’s in some sense the central example of medicine: you get some deadly disease like cancer, and you want to know if doctors can help you survive or not. All the evidence suggests medicine has gotten much better at this in the past fifty years. Robin’s going to have a lot of hard-to-interpret studies about what happens to your cholesterol score or whatever after you change insurance, and we’ll pick these apart, but to me this seems like a much less central example of “does medicine work?” than the fact that we’re curing cancer and increasing heart attack survival rates.
### III. RAND Health Insurance Experiment
[This](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R3055.pdf) is considered the canonical study on the effect of health insurance. In the 1970s, RAND gave thousands of people one of five types of insurance, ranging from very bad (barely any coverage until a family reached a deductible of $1000, ie $5000 in today’s dollars) to very good (all care was free). Then they waited eight years. Then they checked whether the people on the good insurance ended up any healthier than the people on the bad insurance.
The paper I found measured five questionnaire-based outcomes plus five objective physiological measures, for a total of ten outcomes (Robin says he has [a book](https://www.amazon.com/Free-All-Lessons-Insurance-Experiment/dp/0674318463/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Z6F1UI4KZY1I&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tGKJKNcQOn0MyTPZGvqvqDJICj_ciqq0bs6gsrircflZo1Ri0puAzQWJlJ6Yby-5bQcXTtSX7gcnmU6LiOceBmNEgTbNb4z9gufpkS9JZP8FNqelncw-urKAc-VIdG_pQEfghFWZcxszwX45hbJTyT1AM32SbwWtdXE4m_pK4FTAacp53QsRH3AScIX80eIeKGBW5LQ6Gga1fXJ7fVwWmDG2oesHbjaBwp2tp_kGM5f-orZfbZA95NM-g87ZR7jEPUIkuTNFwA_NWPNsrZm7gg.91-ATi9C5ioOCNW7vUH8VD5DLwuqlT-sexz4SoPlppg&dib_tag=se&keywords=free+for+all+rand+health&qid=1713931881&sprefix=free+for+all+rand+health%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1) where they discuss 23 to 30 outcomes, but I don’t have that book, so I’m sticking with the paper). The ten in the paper I read were:
1. Physical functioning questionnaire
2. Role functioning questionnaire
3. Mental health questionnaire
4. Social life questionnaire
5. Health perceptions questionnaire
6. Smoking
7. Weight
8. Cholesterol
9. Vision
10. Blood pressure
They found no effect of insurance on any of the questionnaires, and modest positive effects on vision and blood pressure.
How surprising is this?
It seems moderately surprising that nobody improved on any of the questionnaires. These seem to measure overall health. Maybe they were bad measures? Maybe 10,000 mostly-healthy people over 8 years doesn’t provide enough power to detect health improvements on questionnaires? I’m not sure.
It doesn’t seem surprising to me that nobody improved on smoking, weight, or cholesterol. The 1970s didn’t have any good anti-smoking medication - even the nicotine patch wasn’t invented until after this study was finished. Likewise for weight loss - the 1970s were in the unfortunate interregnum between the fall of methamphetamine and the rise of Ozempic. There were some weak cholesterol medications back then - eg nicotinic acid - but they were rarely used, and doctors weren’t even entirely convinced that cholesterol was bad. For all three of these things, the 1970s state of the art was doctors saying “You should try to stop smoking and eat better.” RAND found that the better insurances led to 1-2 more doctor visits per year. I don’t think that 3 visits to a doctor saying “You should try to stop smoking and eat better” vs. 4 visits to that doctor is going to affect very much.
It’s also not surprising that vision improved; the good insurances were more likely to cover glasses, and everyone knows that glasses help your vision. Even Robin admits this is a real effect; he just classifies it as more physics than medicine.
Blood pressure is more debatable. The 1970s had some okay blood pressure medications, like the beta-blockers, and doctors weren’t afraid to use them. So it seems possible in theory that better medical care could lead to decreased blood pressure. Still, Robin is skeptical. He says that the improvement in blood pressure found during the study was p = 0.03. In a study with 30 measures, one will be positive at 0.03 by coincidence. The version of the study he’s reading has 30 measures (mine has 5 - 10, depending on how you count the questionnaire).
On the other hand, [this paper](https://sci-hub.st/10.1001/jama.1985.03360140084030) looks into the blood pressure result in more detail. It finds that “plan effects on blood pressure” were three times higher for hypertensives for non-hypertensives; that is, unlike statistical flukes (which we would expect to affect everyone equally), the effect was concentrated in the people we would expect doctors to treat. It also finds that plan effects are higher for poor people; unlike statistical flukes (which would affect everyone equally), the effect was concentrated in the people we would expect insurance to help. And it finds pretty convincing intermediating factors: people with good insurance were 20 percentage points more likely to get hypertension treatment, p < 0.001). So I think it’s a stretch to attribute this one to random noise.
This is the study authors’ conclusion as well. They calculate the benefit from this blood pressure improvement and find that:
> If 1,000 fifty-year-old men at elevated risk were enrolled on a free rather than a cost-sharing plan, then we would anticipate that about 11 of them, who would otherwise have died, would be alive five years later.
Still, they describe their study as having a negative result, because:
> ...these mortality reductions, in and of themselves, are not sufficient to justify free care for all adults.
I assume they’re working off of some kind of reasonable cost-effectiveness model for government spending here. Still, if I were a fifty year old adult, I might be willing to personally spend a few hundred extra dollars a year to increase my 5-year-survival-rate by 1%. Certainly I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as “RAND proves medicine doesn’t work.”
Robin has a book with more information than I could get from the papers, so I feel bad contradicting him on this one. I’m more confident in my discussion of the next two experiments, which I think are clear enough that we can go back to this one later and apply what we’ve learned.
### IV. Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
In 2008, Oregon had extra money and decided to expand Medicaid, a free insurance program for poor people. Many people applied for the free insurance, the state ran out of money, and they distributed the available Medicaid slots by lottery. This made the expansion a perfect setup for a randomized controlled trial on whether government-provided free insurance helps the poor.
Scientists monitored the recipients for two years (why not longer? I think at some point the insurance coverage stopped) [and found](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535298/) that the people with Medicaid did in fact use more medical care than the control group. For example, only 69% of the control group described themselves as getting all the medical care they needed, but 93% of the group with insurance did. People with the insurance [used more](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0925) of almost all categories of medication:
[People who got the free insurance](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535298/) had less medical debt at the end of the study period. They described themselves on questionnaires as having better health (55% vs. 68% at least “good”, p < 0.0001), and were more likely to say their health had improved over the past few months (71% vs. 83%, p < 0.001). They described having better mental health and less depression (25% vs. 33% depressed, p = 0.001).
However, Robin notes that many of these subjective changes happened immediately, ie before they even had a chance to use their new insurance. This means they’re more likely to represent mood affiliation (eg “I have insurance now, so I’m optimistic about my health!”). [There was no difference on objective health measures](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3701298/), including blood pressure, cholesterol, and HbA1c (a measure of blood sugar / diabetes control).
Why not? The authors do the math on diabetes. If you look at the graph above, you see that about 12.5% of controls vs. 17.5% of experimentals took diabetes medications, p < 0.05. Studies find that diabetes medications decrease HbA1c by about one percentage point (normal HbA1c is about 5%, so this is a lot). If 5% of the insurance group took diabetes medications and decreased their HbA1c by 1 pp each, then the HbA1c of the experimental group would decline by 0.05 pp compared to the control group. Their 95% confidence interval of the difference was (-0.1, +0.1 pp), which includes the predicted value. So when they say “insurance didn’t significantly change HbA1c”, what they mean is “the change in HbA1c is completely consistent with the consensus effect of antidiabetic medications”.
Could the same be true of the other results, like hypertension? We find that the experimental group was 1.8 percentage points more likely to get a hypertension diagnosis, 0.7 percentage points more likely to get hypertension medications, and had 0.8 points lower blood pressure - but that all of these numbers were nonsignificant. If we take the nonsignificant numbers seriously, 0.7 pp taking antihypertensives caused an 0.8 point blood pressure drop in the full sample, meaning that antihypertensives caused a 100 point blood pressure drop in each user. This definitely isn’t true - a 100 point blood pressure drop kills you - but it means that a plausible pro-medicine result like antihypertensives lowering blood pressure 10 point is well within the study’s confidence interval.
Maybe the anti-medicine position is that, for some reason, good insurance doesn’t lead to hypertension diagnosis or antihypertensive medication use? If I understand [these numbers](https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/facts.htm) right, about 22% of Americans have blood pressure > 140/90, the level at which doctors recommend medication. I expect the marginally-insured poor people in this experiment to be less healthy than average, so let’s say 25 - 30%. In the experiment, about 13.9% of the control group and 14.6% of the experimental group got antihypertension medication. Why so low? [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962263/) found that only about 60% of participants in the Oregon study who got the insurance even went to the doctor for non-emergency reasons! Subtract out the ones who refused to take antihypertensives, or who have too many side effects, or whose doctors let this fall through the cracks, and I think the 13 - 15% numbers make sense.
This study found that insurance increased hypertension medication use by a central estimate of 0.7 pp, not significant, confidence interval -4.5 to 5.8. Let’s take a convenient central estimate of our likely hypertension rate and say that 28% of our population should have gotten hypertension meds. That means the central estimate increased the percent of people who got recommended hypertension meds from 50% to 53%, and the 95% confidence interval includes up to 71%.
So my assessment of the blood pressure results from this study is:
* At the beginning of the study, about 50% of people who should have been on hypertension meds were. The study had too low power to really figure out how this changed, but the central estimate is +3%, and the 95% CI rules out improvements beyond +21%
* The study had too low power to figure out if hypertension meds worked, and basically could not rule out *any* level of effectiveness, even effectiveness so high that the meds would instantly kill you by lowering your blood pressure to 0.
I don’t think we can summarize this study as “we’ve proven medication doesn’t work”.
### V. Karnataka Health Insurance Experiment
Same story, different scenery. [This one](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29576/w29576.pdf) happened in India. 10,000 families. End result is:
> Having measured (a) 3 parameters (direct/indirect/total) for (b) 3 ITT and one TOT effect for (c) 82 specified outcomes over 2 surveys, only 3 (0.46% of all estimated coefficients concerning health outcomes) were significant after multiple-testing adjustments. (As Table A8 shows, 55 parameters (8.38%) are significant if we do not adjust for multiple-testing.) We cannot reject the hypothesis that the distribution of p-values from these estimates is consistent with no differences (P=0.31). We also find no effect of access on our summary index of health outcomes (Table A6 and Table A7).
In other words:
* They tested a lot of stuff
* If you don’t adjust for multiple comparisons, they got 55 significant results
* Once you adjust, they got 3 significant results
* They can’t prove that getting 3 significant results is itself a significant result
* Their study was only powered to detect effects of size 0.1 or greater.
It’s helpful to look at their table of measured outcomes (A7). This has some of the usual ones like blood pressure. But it also has things like:
* Doctor or nurse assisted with childbirth
* Gave birth in a hospital
* Had surgery
* Takes medicine for hypertension
* Told that they have diabetes
* Told that they have cancer
…and these were among the majority of their outcomes where the study found no effect.
These don’t cast doubt on the effectiveness of medical treatment. They just look like a study where the intervention didn’t affect the amount of medical care people got very much. This was the authors’ conclusion too. In fact, they were unable to find a direct effect of giving people free insurance on those people using insurance, at all, in the 3.5 year study period! They had to rescue this with “spillover effects”, ie the effect of one person getting insurance in a village on other people, in order to even claim that the insurance increased healthcare utilization.
Why couldn’t they find an effect of giving people insurance on those people using insurance? Insurance is very new in India. These people weren’t really familiar with it, and in many cases their doctors and hospitals weren’t very familiar with it. In a few cases it didn’t even seem like the insurance companies fully understood their product:
> Many households had difficulty using insurance to pay for healthcare. On average across treatment arms, access to insurance increased by 3.34 pp annually the number of households who tried to use their insurance card by 18 months but were unable to do so (from a base of 2.68% in the control group12). (Our TOT estimates suggest that insurance enrollment increased failed use by 4.02 pp off a base of 3% annually.) This excess failure rate is 50.50% of the successful utilization ITT effect.
>
> Lack of knowledge about the purpose of insurance and how to use insurance seem likely explanations for the failure rate. Because insurance is a relatively new product, hospitals and beneficiaries may not know how to use it (Rajasekhar, Berg et al. 2011, Nandi, Dasgupta et al. 2016). In our midline and endline surveys, we asked why households did not try to use their insurance card to pay for care and why they were unable to use the card even when they tried (Table A5). Frequent reasons given for not using the card were not knowing that the card could be used for insurance (15% at 18 months, 20% at 3.5 years), forgetting the card at home (13% at 18 months), not knowing how or where to use the card (29% and 30% at 3.5 years). Besides these beneficiary-side problems, there were also supply-side problems. Of people that tried to use the card, 55% and 69% said that the doctor did not accept the card at 18 months and 3.5 years, and 12% said that the insurance company did not accept the card (i.e., did not approve use) at 3.5 years. (These should be interpreted with caution because we do not know if doctors correctly did not approve the card because a service was truly not covered, or incorrectly did so.) This finding suggests that demand-side education and supply-side logistics may be important for raising utilization of (and thus demand for) insurance in India and similarly situated countries.
I don’t want to over-update on this. They did eventually manage to find a medium effect of free insurance on insurance use when counting the spillover effects. I think the main problem with this study is the same as all the other studies - its confidence intervals are wide enough to include medicine working amazingly well, better than anyone claims it works in real life.
This is what the authors think too:
> Care should be taken in interpreting the insignificant health effects observed. Perhaps the effect of hospital care on measured outcomes is too small to translate into health improvements that we have power to detect despite our substantial sample size (Das, Hammer et al. 2008). Moreover, confidence intervals reported in Table A6 and Table A7 suggest that medically significant effects for many outcomes cannot be ruled out.
### VI. Summary Of Robin’s Three Insurance Studies
If it helps, think of these insurance studies as a sort of funnel:
In order for more insurance to result in better health on some measurable parameter (eg lower blood pressure), you need a chain of four things.
* First, you need the better insurance to result in more doctors visits.
* Second, you need the doctors visits to result in more diagnoses (eg of high blood pressure).
* Third, you need the diagnoses to result in more treatment (eg blood pressure medication).
* Fourth, you need the treatment to work (actually lower blood pressure).
Each step lowers our ability to detect a signal. That is, going to the doctor doesn’t, with 100% efficacy, result in more diagnoses. Some doctors will miss some diagnoses; that will introduce noise and lower our power / statistical significance. You can imagine doing a whole paper on whether increasing doctors’ visits increases hypertension diagnoses; that paper would have a p-value greater than zero / Bayes factor of less than infinity. So even assuming that better insurance really does improve health, each step we go down the chain decreases our ability to detect that.
In fact, in these three studies, we find dropoffs below statistical significance scattered basically randomly throughout this chain:
* In some parts of the Karnataka study, we lose statistical significance at step 1. The better insurance didn’t necessarily result in more medical utilization. For example, it didn’t cause people to be (significantly) more likely to give birth in a hospital or get surgery.
* In the hypertension outcomes of the Oregon study, we lose statistical significance at step 2. The better insurance led to significantly more doctors’ visits. But this didn’t result in significantly more hypertension diagnoses (it only resulted in non-significantly more).
* I don’t think we see any clear examples of losing significance at step 3, but you could sort of think of the smoking outcomes of the RAND study this way. The RAND participants with better insurance saw the doctor more. Probably the doctor noticed they were smoking and diagnosed them with this, insofar as “tobacco use” was a formal diagnosis at all in 1974. But there were no good anti-smoking treatments in the 1970s, so the doctor didn’t prescribe anything.
* In the diabetes outcome of the Oregon study, we lose statistical significance at step 4. Diabetics with better health insurance were significantly more likely to see the doctor, significantly more likely to get diagnosed, and significantly more likely to get placed on medication, but only had nonsignificantly better health. Why? Probably because, as mentioned before, if diabetes medication worked as well as studies say it does, the study wouldn’t have enough power to detect its effects.
Robin’s argument (that medicine doesn’t work) assumes that the only possible failure is at step 4, and that the failure must be a true failure rather than one of statistical significance. But in fact there are failures at every step (although I kind of have to stretch it for step 3), and the authors of the papers tell us explicitly that these are most likely failures of statistical power.
This helps us think about a remaining question: why did these three studies get such different results?
* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused higher ratings of self-reported health. But in the RAND and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.
* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused less depression. But in the RAND and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.
* In the RAND study, better insurance caused increased use of antihypertensive medication. But in the Oregon and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.
* In the RAND study, better insurance caused lower blood pressure. But in the Oregon and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.
* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused more use of antidiabetic drugs. But in the Karnataka study, it didn’t (AFAICT RAND didn’t measure this).
I think Robin attributes these differences to noise, ie the results being fake in the first place. He writes:
> A muddled appearance of differing studies showing differing effects is to be expected. After all, even if medicine has little effect, random statistical error and biases toward presenting and publishing expected results will ensure that many published studies suggest positive medical benefits.
I think this is implausible. Many of these effects are large and replicable. For example, the Oregon self-rating effects are p <0.0001 on each of four different assessment methods, yet these are absolutely null in the other two studies. The RAND blood pressure results are p < 0.03, but match our expectations about subgroups (highest in the poor and sick) and accompanied by a p < 0.01 finding that insurance results in more hypertension medication (which was absent in the Oregon study). The antidiabetic drug result in Oregon was p = 0.008.
Can we explain these through differences in the studies? I think [Robin’s analysis here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-oregon-health-insurance-experimenthtml) is actually pretty good. Expanding it slightly:
* RAND was a normal cross-section of Americans
* Oregon was poor and unhealthy Americans
* Karnataka was poor Indians who didn’t know how to use insurance, and they only got hospital care (whereas the other two studies included primary care)
We find that Karnataka didn’t result in as many utilization increases as the other two studies because it was only hospital care (which is unlikely to be involved in managing chronic problems like hypertension) and the recipients barely used the improved insurance.
We find that Oregon had increased self-reported health because these were poor and unhealthy people who were very excited to get the new insurance. Robin points out that 2/3 of the improvement came immediately after getting the insurance, before they had time to use it, so this suggests a placebo effect. Maybe these poor unhealthy people were more excited about getting free insurance than the comparatively well-off people in RAND or the insurance-naive people in Karnataka?
But we can’t dismiss the Oregon mental health findings as easily. Many of them came from depression screening questionnaires that ask pretty specific questions about eg sleep and suicidal thoughts over the past few weeks. I think these findings are plausibly real, especially given the strong effects of insurance on mental health medication use (see first graph in section IV above). If so, differences from RAND and Karnataka would be easy to explain: 1970s Americans and rural Indians mostly don’t have mental health problems (or at least don’t think of them in those terms), whereas 2008 Americans do. In 2008 America, depression is common and easy to measure. Also, antidepressants have very large effect sizes (you may have heard they have small effect sizes, but that’s *after you subtract the placebo effect*; before you subtract placebo effect, they’re extremely effective, and this study isn’t controlling for placebo). So this is exactly the sort of area where you’d expect to see an effect. I won’t say for sure it’s real, but nothing about the studies makes me think it isn’t.
That just leaves the diastolic blood pressure effect in RAND. Remember our funnel again: the difference between RAND and Oregon doesn’t start in Step 4 (does the drug work?) It starts in Steps 2-3 (did more medical visits result in more medication?)
In RAND, we found that better insurance increased the percent of hypertensives on appropriate medication by 20 percentage points.
In Oregon, we found that it increased it by about 2 percentage points, but with the confidence interval including 20.
So my guess is that the middle-class people in RAND were a bit more likely to go for preventative medicine than the poorer people in Oregon, and that if we ran both experiments a million times, we would get something like 5-10 pp out of Oregon and 15-20 pp out of RAND, and that’s enough to give us the statistical power to detect an effect in RAND but not Oregon. I can’t prove this is true because of the statistical power issues, it just seems like a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy.
One more point: because of statistical power issues and multiple hypothesis testing, there are a lot of cases here where we can’t say anything either way. These might be places where an effect seems plausible but we can’t prove it, or where we find an effect but can’t prove that it isn’t a result of multiple hypothesis testing. Here we should go back to the statistical basics and remember that this means more or less nothing. We shouldn’t update our priors.
Part of how Robin makes his counterintuitive argument against healthcare is to say that all of these studies found “null effects”, so now we *have to* believe medicine is fake. I think instead we should look at the arguments in Section II above, start with a strong prior on medicine being real, and then - confronted with studies that sometimes can’t find anything for sure either way - continue having that prior.
### VII. Other, More Positive Studies
Since Robin posted the early versions of his argument, there’s been a newer, bigger, RCT-like study on the effects of medicine.
Obamacare originally mandated that everyone get health insurance, and punished noncompliance with a fine. In 2017, the IRS fined 4.5 million people for not having insurance. It originally planned to send these people a letter, saying “Obamacare mandates you to have insurance, you’re getting fined for failing to comply, please buy insurance through such-and-such a website.” But it ran out of budget after sending 3.9 million letters to a randomly selected subset of the insuranceless. The letter must have been at least a little convincing, because the 3.9 million recipients were 1.3 percentage points more likely to get insurance compared to the 0.6 million non-recipients. So the whole event turned out as a sort of randomized trial of telling people to get insurance.
[Goldin, Lurie, and McCubbin](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26533/w26533.pdf) followed up on the results. Because this “study” was so big compared to the others (4.5 million participants compared to a five-digit number for RAND, Oregon, and Karnataka), they were able to measure mortality directly. They found that:
> The rate of mortality among previously uninsured 45-64 year-olds was lower in the treatment group than in the control by approximately 0.06 percentage points, or one fewer death for every 1,648 individuals in this population who were sent a letter. We fou nd no evidence that the intervention reduced mortality among children or younger adults over our sample period.
>
> Using treatment group assignment as an instrument for coverage, we estimate that the average per-month effect of the coverage induced by the intervention on two-year mortality was approximately -0.17 percentage points. We caution, however, that the magnitude of the mortality eect is imprecisely estimated; our con dence interval is consistent with both moderate and large eects of coverage on mortality. At the same time, our estimated con dence interval is su ciently precise to rule out per-month eects smaller in magnitude than -0.03 percentage points, including the estimate from the OLS regression of mortality on coverage across individuals.
This result was p = 0.01 and robust to various checks.
[Robin’s response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml):
> A 2019 U.S. tax notification experiment did, maybe, see an effect. When 0.6 of 4.5 million eligible households were randomly not sent a letter warning of tax penalties, the households warned were 1.1% more likely to buy insurance, and 0.06% less likely to die, over the next two years. Now that last death result was only significant at the 1% level, which is marginal. So there’s a decent chance this study is just noise.
Come on! Thousands of clinical RCTs show that medicine has an effect. Robin wants to ignore these in favor of insurance experiments that are underpowered to find effects even when they’re there. Then when someone finally does an insurance experiment big and powerful enough to find effects, and it finds the same thing as all the thousands of clinical RCTs, p = 0.01, Robin says maybe we should dismiss it, because p = 0.01 findings are sometimes just “noise”. Aaargh!
Here are some other quasi-experimental studies (h/t [@agoodmanbacon](https://twitter.com/agoodmanbacon/status/878813851361452032)):
[Sommers, Baicker, and Epstein](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1202099#figures): finds that when some states expanded Medicaid after Obamacare, mortality rate in those states (but not comparison states) went down, p = 0.001. Note that Baicker was one of the main people behind the Oregon experiment.
[Sommers, Long, and Baicker](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24798521/): same story: after Romneycare, mortality in Massachusetts went down compared to comparison states (p = 0.003).
[Currie and Gruber](https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA18422964&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00335533&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ee9bf5f49&aty=open-web-entry): increased Medicaid availability for children was associated with lower child mortality (they don’t give p-values, but some of the effects noted seem large).
See more discussion on [this thread](https://twitter.com/agoodmanbacon/status/878813851361452032).
### VIII: Final Thoughts
The insurance literature doesn’t do a great job in establishing one way or the other whether extra health insurance has detectable health effects on a population. Gun to my head, I’d say it leans towards showing positive effects. But if Robin wants to fight me on this, I can’t 100% prove him wrong.
But it’s far less tenable to say - as Robin does - that these studies show *medicine doesn’t work*. These studies are many steps away from showing that!
**First,**as discussed above, it’s unclear whether insurance studies themselves should be described as having positive or negative results. The best and biggest, like Lurie and Goldin, show detectable and robust effects on mortality.
**Second**, when insurance studies fail to show certain effects, they’re practically always underpowered to say anything about the effects of *medication*. Often they can’t even find that the better-insured subjects use more medication than the less-insured subjects (eg all negative RAND outcomes, all Oregon outcomes except diabetes, everything in Karnataka). When they *can* detect that better-insured subjects use more medication, they can often precisely quantify whether their study has enough power to test the effect of medication, and explicitly find that it cannot. I can’t think of a single one of the experiments Robin cites that finds an increased amount of medication in the experimental group, a power high enough to find medication effects, and a lack of medication effects. So these studies shouldn’t be used to make any claims about medication effectiveness.
**Third,** even if we were to unwisely try to use these studies to assess medication effectiveness, they only measure marginal cases. For example, in the Oregon study, the insured group used about 33% more health care than the insured group - eg the uninsured people had a hospital admission rate per six months of 20%, compared to the insured group’s 27%; the uninsured group took about 1.8 medications daily, compared to the insured group’s 2.4. Presumably everyone is going to the hospital for very serious cases (eg heart attack), and the better-insured people are just going for some marginal extra less serious things. Even if we could prove with certainty that the insured group’s extra medication wasn’t benefiting them at all, this doesn’t say anything about the core 2/3 of medical care that people would get even if they weren’t insured.
(Robin sometimes talks about how it’s hard to distinguish core vs. extra care, and I’m not sure how this works on paper, but in practice the poorer patients I talk to seem to be able to distinguish it very well - lots of them will go to the hospital for “real emergencies” but start worrying about money for anything less)
**Fourth,** we have strong direct evidence that medicine works, both in the form of randomized controlled trials, and in the form of increasing survival rates after the diagnoses of many severe diseases (and this isn’t just the diseases being diagnosed better and earlier, see for example [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/), or the patients getting the diseases younger, see the age-adjusted rates above). Even in the counterfactual where we had *unambiguous*, *well-powered, non-marginal* insurance studies suggesting that medication didn’t work, we should at most be confused by these conflicting sources. Most likely that confusion would end in us setting the insurance studies aside as suffering from the usual set of inexplicable social science confounders, given that they contradict stronger and more direct clinical evidence.
I think if Robin wants to do something with these insurance study results, he should follow other economists, including the study authors, and argue about whether the marginal unit of insurance is cost-effective - not about whether medication works at all.
**EDITED TO ADD:** Hanson’s response [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical), my response to his response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care). | Scott Alexander | 143671629 | Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness | acx |
# Open Thread 326
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week: NYC, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake, Madrid, Zurich, Hyderabad, Rio, Taipei. And a new meetup has been added for Zwolle. See [the list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.
**2:** Possible correction by Natalia to my Lumina post: [there might not have been three different trials](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54107727), my objections [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54133007), Natalia’s response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54167671). I am still confused by this situation, for the reasons discussed.
**3:** Some good third-party analyses of the survey, including [Philosophy Bear on political orientation and altruism](https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/altruistic-kidney-donation-initiators) and [sebjenseb on a bunch of things including joint hypermobility](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/analysis-of-ssc-survey). | Scott Alexander | 143847751 | Open Thread 326 | acx |
# ACX Survey Results 2024
Thanks to the 5,981 people who took the 2024 Astral Codex Ten survey.
**[See the questions for the ACX survey](https://forms.gle/TxkHyN4nMVebuCHi6)**
**[See the results from the ACX Survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTw4xhkP5Awgn0xhL4ScjvZp8ieaojGrnSPgDTM-lSH8m--g/closedform)** (click “see previous responses” on that page[1](#footnote-1))
I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions[2](#footnote-2). If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.
Download the public data (**[.xlsx](https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.xlsx)**, **[.csv](https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.csv)**)
If you’re interested in tracking how some of these answers have changed over time, you might also enjoy reading the [2022](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022) or [2020](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/) survey results.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I can’t make Google Forms only present data from people who agreed to make their responses public, so I’ve deleted everything identifiable on the individual level, eg your written long response answers. Everything left is just things like “X% of users are Canadian” or “Y% of users have ADHD”. There’s no way to put these together and identify an ADHD Canadian, so I don’t think they’re privacy relevant. If you think you’ve found something identifiable on the public results page, please let me know.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
I deleted email address, some written long answers, some political questions that people might get in trouble for answering honestly, and some sex-related questions. I binned age to the nearest 10 years and deleted the finer-grained ethnicity question. I binned all incomes above $1,000,000 into “high”, and removed all countries that had fewer than ten respondents (eg if you said you were from Madagascar, it would have made you identifiable, so I deleted that). If you need this information for some reason, email me. | Scott Alexander | 143600454 | ACX Survey Results 2024 | acx |
# Ye Olde Bay Area House Party
*[previously in series: [1](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party), [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party), [3](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party), [4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party), [5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party)]*
When that April with his sunlight fierce
The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce
And filleth every spirit with such hale
As horniness engenders in the male
Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts
Their bodies firm from exercise and sports
And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties
And San Franciscans long to go to parties.
"Hey!" says the hostess. "Great to see you again! You keepin' it real?" You were actually composing faux-Chaucer poems in your head, which seems like a marginal-at-best level of connection to reality. In desperation, you remember a piece of social skills advice you saw on r/greentexts, where you imagine what a hypothetical cooler version of yourself would say, then say that. You simulate the hypothetical cooler version of yourself. It says: "Real as an eel, sister!", then saunters off cockily. You decide to ignore all social skills advice from now on. Instead, you mumble something incomprehensible and desperately try to change the topic.
"How is your ... " You strain your memory, then it comes to you. "...automated land acknowledger?" That's right, [last time you talked to her](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party) she was working on an Amazon-Echo-like device that you could leave in your home and workplace. At programmable intervals, it would read a canned message acknowledging you were on Native land.
She laughs. "It's funny! I met this Native American guy at a conference, and he said it was an offensive piece of tokenist crap that made no material difference in the lives of the oppressed!"
You nod glumly. "Yeah, none of us wanted to be the one to tell you."
"...but it's fine! Cause I started thinking, how can we make a material difference in the lives of the oppressed, and now we've got an even better product. Landulgences! We've partnered with local Indian tribes to let you pay them rent. You pay them about $0.10 per square foot per year, they give you a certificate saying you're welcome to use their land during that time."
"I thought the whole idea was that we had stolen the land, so it's not theirs anymore."
"Yes, but if we hadn't stolen the land, you would pay them rent. So if you're against stealing the land, you can make it as if you didn't steal it, by paying them the rent you believe they're due. Isn't it great? We're especially working on advertising to corporations. Imagine. Your top customer goes to your competitor's meeting, and hear 'We acknowledge that this office building stands on the unceded ancestral land of the Ohlone tribe, which we have stolen because we are evil colonizers.' Then they go to your meeting, and hear 'This building stands on the land of the Ohlone, who we've come to a mutually beneficial agreement with. Their chief sent us a thank-you letter for being such good tenants, you can see it in the break room.' Which one of you seems more trustworthy?"
“This is the unceded ancestral land of the Ohlone people! Buy a landulgence for as low as $4.99 your first month" chirps the Land Acknowledger, behind her.
"I thought you said that was offensive and tokenist", you say.
"I said it *would have been*, without the landuldgences! Now it's a part of our horizontally integrated product strategy!"
You feel like you should say something, but it *is* an improvement. And you want to stay on her good side, because maybe next time you see her she’ll be a billionaire. So you wish her good luck and take your leave.
You see a familiar t-shirt and recognize [The Burrowing Company guy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party). Now *that* was a cool, ambitious plan. You make a beeline for him. “Hey, how are the giant ground sloths?”
“Lazy,” he sighs. “I guess we should have predicted that. But they hate digging tunnels. They just want to hang around all day. We’ve got to pivot or die.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“I worry this is kind of offensive,” he says, furtively looking around to make sure nobody else can hear. “But I was reading [this article](https://www.timesofisrael.com/gaza-tunnels-stretch-at-least-350-miles-far-longer-than-past-estimate-report/) about how Hamas dug 350 miles of tunnels under Gaza. Meanwhile, Elon’s Boring Company has only dug about 3 miles of tunnel in its whole corporate existence. So I’m thinking, maybe we forget about the ground sloths and try to poach Hamas’ people. It should be pretty easy; the smart ones have *got to* be looking for new jobs around now. We change the name to something more culturally appropriate like The Buraj Company. Then we’re back in business!”
“Won’t there be visa issues with trying to get lots of terrorists into the US?”
“People make the whole visa thing sound harder than it is. You’ve just got to prove there’s no American worker who can do the job you’re hiring the foreigner for. Looking at the history of US tunneling in the past thirty years, I’d say that’s a no-brainer.”
“What happens to the giant ground sloths?”
“We’re still trying to figure something out. Do you know if sloths are halal?”
You elect not to answer that question, and move on. There’s a circle of people all sitting and talking. After you join, you notice something wrong about the atmosphere. Did you accidentally stumble into an AI Circle or Urbanist Coven again? No. You realize with sinking heart that this is one of those conversations where everybody compares their jobs to see who is the coolest.
“I work for *Stop Talking About Taylor Swift Magazine,”* says a man in his mid-twenties. “It’s the #1 publication for people who want to stop hearing about Taylor Swift all the time. We carry monthly features on why Taylor’s music, schedule, personal life, and wardrobe are all less important than other things and don’t deserve the level of attention they’ve been getting.”
You don’t want to interrupt, but you can’t help asking: “Would the kind of person who wants to stop hearing about Taylor Swift really be into a magazine like that?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re the third-best-selling women’s magazine in the United States at this point. Our only regret is that we’re not as popular with the male demographic. That’s why we’re working on launching a new spinoff, *Stop Paying Attention To The Marvel Cinematic Universe*. We just signed our first big contract; Freddie de Boer will be writing 600 articles for us over the next three years.”
Everyone silently evaluates his worth as a human being - he writes for a magazine! pretty cool! - and the metaphorical conch shell passes to the next person in the circle, a young woman in round-rimmed glasses and a bright red t-shirt saying WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY - SCIENCE THAT REPLICATES.
“I run QRiosity, a browser with native QR code support. Just click on a QR image, and it will take you to the website!”
“So, like links, but worse?” someone asks.
“Like links, but *not deboosted on social media*. X and the rest are pulling every trick they know to prevent you from leaving their walled garden. Now the customer is getting some tricks of their own to fight back. Next we’re working on implanting QR codes in videos, so your links can get maximal algorithmic boosting.”
Everyone silently evaluates her worth as a human being - it’s a good product idea! - and moves on to the next person, a clean-cut blond man in a black polo shirt.
“I work for the Threads Of Life Foundation,” he said. “You know, every so often billionaires and journalists condemn effective altruists because, like, what if they give poor people malaria nets, and then those poor people use them for fishing, and it hurts the fish. And people like to say “oh, those billionaires and journalists never care about fish in any other context” and “obviously this is just incredibly blatant cope so they can feel morally superior for *not* donating to charity” and “it’s pretty crazy that our obsession with ‘harm’ and ‘the precautionary principle’ has gone so far that if you save millions of people but also kill a few fish, the establishment unites in painting you as a villain for not considering the fish deaths.’ But that didn’t seem charitable to me. I thought ‘No, I bet these are actually good people, who have a little trouble empathizing with human suffering, or with any-animal-except-fish suffering, or with fish suffering in 99.9% of contexts - but for some reason, they feel absolutely devastated at the thought of a fish getting caught in a bednet given to a poor person by a charity for the express purpose of saving their lives. That poor fish, stuck in those tiny little insecticide-laced threads, writhing around! These people don’t need our mockery - they need to unite and stand up for the suspiciously-specific thing they believe in!
“That’s why I started Threads Of Life. We’re a charity dedicated to preventing fish from getting caught in repurposed malaria nets. We send hundreds of monitors to rivers all across Africa. They seek out locations where net fishing is going on, take samples of discarded nets, use chemical testing to match them to brands of malaria net given out by charities. Then if they find a match, they find the offending fisherman, cut his remaining nets, and free the fish. It’s tough work, but the outpouring of support we’ve gotten has made it all worth it. A bigshot AI venture capitalist recently donated half his fortune to us. A Stanford professor, when he heard about our work, pledged to give us 10% of his paltry academic income every year from then on, just because he believed in our cause.
“It’s really inspiring. But there’s so much work still to be done! I’ve surveyed our donors and found that there are lots of other causes they care about too, like birds getting caught in wind turbines built to provide renewable energy, or people’s views being ruined by solar plants. I’m meeting an ethologist next week to see if we can breed strains of birds with genetically-implanted windmill avoidance patterns. Is this an effective use of resources? No. Does it address one of the tiny number of extremely specific concerns which, if we were to treat our donors’ engagement with the concept of ‘charity’ as an honest expression of their revealed preferences, receive overwhelming multipliers in their utility functions? Absolutely!”
Everyone silently evaluates his worth as a human being, and he is found acceptable - he works with venture capitalists! We move on to the next person, a middle-aged woman in a loose dress.
“I work on meta-planning-applications for the city of London,” she says. “If you’re trying to repair a bridge or something, you can’t just send out engineers like you’re in the Wild West or something. You have to do an environmental impact report, to make sure that the repair won’t harm the environment, or threaten communities, or take place in an inequitable way. These applications have grown bigger and bigger over the past few decades, so that the most recent one, [for the Lower Thames Crossing](https://www.cityam.com/lower-thames-crossing-planning-application-becomes-uks-longest-ever-at-more-than-350000-pages-and-costing-almost-300m/), took fifteen years, involved 2,383 separate documents, and ran to 359,000 pages. Imagine how many harms a planning application that big could cause! That’s why the government instituted the meta-planning-application. Now if you want to make a planning application like the Thames one, you start by applying for a meta-planning-application. Our department makes sure that the paper for your hundreds of thousands of pages will come from sustainably sourced timber, and that the dozens of planning bureaucrats you hire will be sufficiently diverse.
“Now, I know what you’re going to say - don’t you need a meta-meta-planning application to start the meta-planning application? Isn’t it an infinite regress? Ha ha. Like we haven’t heard that one a thousand times. But no, the meta-planning application is a much simpler affair than the planning application. We’ve set a goal that it shouldn’t take a team of ten people more than a year, and it shouldn’t run to more than 10,000 pages. So we let you meta-apply for an application without any previous layers of permission.”
Everyone silently evaluates her worth as a human being - she does, in some sense, contribute to the building of infrastructure - and moves on to the next person. He looks to be in his mid-twenties, dressed in a finely-tailored suit. He wears a watch with enough diamonds on it that it has to cost low-six-figures, at least. He leans on his date, who appears to be some kind of supermodel.
“I’m a retired photographer,” he says.
The Threads of Life guy asks the question all of you are thinking: “How do you make enough money, as a photographer, to retire to a life of luxury in your mid-20s?”
“I took that one picture of Elon Musk where he’s scowling and steepling his fingers in a sinister, manipulative-looking way. Since then it’s been the headline image for every story on Elon Musk, and I’ve gotten royalties for all of them.”
Everyone silently evaluates his worth as a human being, realizes he is the most successful person in the room, and slinks off. As the circle disperses, you head to the kitchen. There’s still a few slices of cold pizza. One other guy is eating at the counter. You pull up a chair beside him. “Can I sit here?”
“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
You’re kind of taken aback. “Is it something I said earlier?”
“No,” he says. “But you know that saying that’s become popular recently? ‘If there’s a Nazi at the table, and ten people sitting and willingly eating alongside him, then you have 11 Nazis.’”
“Okaaaaay,” you say. “But I’m not a Nazi.”
“You don’t *think* you’re a Nazi,” he corrected. “But if you take the saying literally, then anybody who’s ever sat down at a table with a Nazi is a Nazi. And anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with *them* is a Nazi, and anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with *them* is a Nazi too, and so on. It’s a six degrees of separation problem. When you actually calculate it out, then as long as the average person sits and eats with at least two people during their lifetime, there’s a 99.9998% chance everyone is a Nazi. The only way out is to refuse to ever sit and eat with anyone. Which is what I’m doing.”
You see his face from a different angle, and something snaps into place. “Hey, aren’t you @DanielC35801 from Twitter?”
“Yeah,” he says. “So what?”
“Didn’t you tweet a couple of days ago that the Jews should be driven into the sea?”
“That was part of the fight against settler colonialism, so it’s different,” he said. “Also, I said you couldn’t sit here. Go away.”
You take your slice of cold pizza and walk into the living room. You take a seat at the little coffee table, opposite a shaven-headed man with the Generic Circle-y Startup Logo tshirt. “Hey,” you say. “I saw you a couple minutes ago when everyone was talking about their jobs. I guess you didn’t get a chance to go.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It sucks, because I think I have the best job of anyone here. I started a company that uses diphyllic polymers for dam construction. Diphyllic polymer is a new material that strengthens when it encounters water. You can just pour a truck full into a river, and get a dam in a fraction of the time for half the price.”
You took a course that touched on diphyllic polymer once, so for once you’re not a total rube. “Hey, I know a little about that! I thought it turned brittle and fractured below about 36 degrees F. Aren’t you concerned that your dams might break during a cold spell?”
The dam guy looks at you blankly for a second. Then it’s as if a light goes on in his eyes: “Oh, I see! You’re one of those people who thinks technology makes the world worse! You should read this great essay - it’s called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. You’ll see that actually, throughout human history, technology has made the world *better*!”
“I agree that technology is good in general,” you say. “I just thought I heard that this particular technology might shatter once the temperature reaches 36 degrees F, and then it would flood anywhere downstream of the dam.”
“I wish you could hear yourself,” said the dam guy. “It’s like - a hundred years ago people said we shouldn’t use antibiotics, because only God should be allowed to heal people. And then fifty years ago, people said we shouldn’t use nuclear power, because it might have meltdowns and kill us all. And now you’re saying we can’t make diphyllic dams. Doesn’t it worry you to be part of this long line of people trying to hold back the Promethean spirit of the human race?”
“I’m totally for Promethean spirit!” you say. “It’s just - yes or no, does diphyllite shatter at 36 degrees F?”
Dam guy starts to look really frustrated. “You know, Tyler Cowen [has a saying](https://sun.pjh.is/tyler-cowen-on-builders-vs-nervous-nellies): ‘Either you’re a Builder, or you’re a Nervous Nellie: take your pick.’ Well, I’m going to create monuments that advance the glory of civilization and generate hydroelectricity and push humanity into a beautiful future. I think that makes me a Builder. And you might think you’re so profound, being a Nervous Nellie over there, but Tyler Cowen says that Nervous Nellies are just overindulging in their own neuroticism and don’t have any profound wisdom at all. Like, what have *you* ever built, *Nellie*?”
You are pretty sure you have irreparably offended Dam Guy. Also, people are starting to stare at you. What if you get a reputation as a someone who hates progress, and never get invited to any more cool Bay Area house parties? What was that social advice you vowed never to take a few minutes ago? Oh, right. Imagine what a much cooler person would do, then do that thing.
You hand Dam Guy a business card from your wallet - it’s your dentist’s, but he doesn’t know that. “Congratulations,” you say. “I’m actually a bigshot VC. I was just testing you to make sure you weren’t a Nervous Nellie. You’ve passed with flying colors. I’d like to invest in your company at an absurdly high valuation.”
His face fills with sudden delight. “Holy s\*\*\*! This is what I’ve always dreamed of! Are you for real?”
“Real as an eel, brother!” you say, and saunter off cockily. Or maybe not. You can’t remember whether a saunter is supposed to be more like a walk, a jog, or a run. Mostly you just want to be out of there.
Thus having cleverly escaped a fight
Our Pilgrim saunters out into the night
Abandoning the bustle of the square
To drink a draught of cool and foggy air
Then, having filled his head with wild schemes
He seeks his bed, for warm and pleasant dreams | Scott Alexander | 143477407 | Ye Olde Bay Area House Party | acx |
# Updates on Lumina Probiotic
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that [I wrote about in December](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq), is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to [$250](https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/preorder) and getting endorsements from [Yishan Wong](https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1777925961927082426), [Cremieux](https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-rise-and-impending-fall-of-the), and [Richard Hanania](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1778480964903256377) (as well as anti-endorsements from [Saloni](https://twitter.com/salonium/status/1778393370383065350) and [Stuart Ritchie](https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1778794180187238628)). A few points that have come up:
**1: What happened with the FDA testing?**
In the original FAQ, I wrote:
> Professor Hillman started a company “Oragenics” and applied for FDA approval. The FDA demanded a study of 100 subjects, all of whom had to be “age 18-30, with removable dentures, living alone and far from school zones”. Hillman wasn’t sure there even *were* 100 young people with dentures, but the FDA wouldn’t budge from requiring this impossible trial. Hillman gave up and switched to other projects.
I got this information from (company CEO) Aaron, who says he got it from (original inventor) Jeffrey Hillman.
[Commenters](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18d84sa/defying_cavity_lantern_bioworks_faq/kd896ig/) ([and Kevin Drum](https://jabberwocking.com/did-the-fda-kill-a-promising-new-way-of-preventing-cavities/)) searched publicly-available archives and found a slightly different story, with three trials:
1. A Phase 1 trial, scheduled April 2005, on 26 people, age <55, with dentures. The company couldn’t find enough people who met enrollment criteria, so they renegotiated with the FDA and switched to (2).
2. A second attempt at Phase 1 trial, scheduled October 2007, on 10 people, age 18-30, no dentures necessary, done in a hospital setting. This trial succeeded, escalating the process to (3)
3. A Phase 1b trial, scheduled January 2011. Nobody can find any details on this one, but Oragenics says it never took place because of “the very restrictive study enrollment criteria required by the FDA”.
Some people have tried to argue that someone must be lying, because I wrote about a 100 person trial age 18-30 with dentures, and this doesn’t match either of the two trials we know about.
I think two more likely explanations are:
* This is Trial 3, the one we know nothing about
* *Or* someone in the Dr. Hillman → Aaron → me chain mixed up details of the three trials into a mishmash with some characteristics of each.
**2: What happened in the rat trials?**
Several people including Natalia Coelho [found an old rat study](https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1778537436446117985) that Dr. Hillman had done.
The rats with the new strain (BCS3-L1) got only 1/3 the normal rats’ “caries score”. But they didn’t get a score of zero. So maybe claims like “BCS3 represents a complete cure for cavities” are overblown.
Why didn’t rats with the new strain get zero dental caries? [Bacteria other than](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2292933/) *[S. mutans](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2292933/)* can also cause cavities, so maybe it’s one of those.
Rat trials are famous for results that don’t replicate in human trials, so take these with a grain of salt.
**3: What did the latest colonization studies show?**
Aaron was able to retest six people who got free samples in December. Four of those people still have the bacterium. The other two don’t.
Of the two failures, one had an active cavity at the time the strain was applied (which interferes with the oral microbiome), and the other had his wisdom teeth removed (which involves rinsing the mouth with strong antiseptics).
Aaron hopes this shows the strain will stick around in most normal situations (though the failure in the presence of active cavities is disappointing).
**4: Any new concerns about side effects?**
In my original post, I mentioned the possibility that this would set off Breathalyzers. Lantern was able to test this, and proved that it wasn’t a problem.
Yesterday, [Lao Mein suggested on Less Wrong that it might raise oral cancer risk](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGu4nLgQYwfsoxddu/reconsider-the-anti-cavity-bacteria-if-you-are-asian) - their post focused on people with ALDH deficiency (most common in Asians) but the calculations are too vague to be sure exactly which groups should and shouldn’t worry. This is less than 24 hours old, the company hasn’t replied yet, and is still developing. I’ll try to update people if anyone gets more clarity on this.
Someone on the post mentioned that they’ve gotten worse hangovers since using the product, maybe because the constant trickle of alcohol changed the way gut flora metabolize it.
**5: Any other meaningful results since the samples?**
Cremieux [says his breath smells better](https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1777854752635691247).
Some people have objected to this claim on the grounds that it takes ~12 months before the bacterium has colonized your mouth. One of the figures in my earlier post suggested that the bacterium might start strong, retreat for a while, and then take 12 months to fully colonize, so that might potentially explain his findings. But also, is it biologically plausible that this prevents bad breath? My impression was that bad breath came from other bacterial byproducts besides lactic acid. It might be possible in theory that the same metabolic changes that switch lactic acid to alcohol disrupt these other byproducts, but it seems kind of unlikely.
An alternate explanation is that, in order to apply this product at all, you need to do a dentist-style teeth cleaning that kills your previous mouth bacteria. Maybe that improves the bad breath regardless of whether you add the Lumina afterwards?
Some other people have said their mouth feels fresher or something, but realistically all of this is overwhelmingly likely to be placebo.
**6: Do I “endorse” Lumina?**
Richard Hanania [has a post about how he trusts Lumina because I’ve endorsed them](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/if-scott-alexander-told-me-to-jump). It’s extremely kind and I appreciate his respect.
But also, the most I said in the original post was that I was still debating whether or not to get the treatment.
My real opinion, as precisely as I can express it, is:
* Advance of approximately the same magnitude as fluoride: 5%
* Good on balance, comparable to other beneficial dental treatments: 35%
* Doesn’t work in its current form, but could easily be modified into something that does: 10%
* Doesn’t work at all and never will: 50%
* Causes minor side effects for some people, same scale as Tylenol: 30%
* Causes medium side effects, same scale as tricyclics: 5%
* Causes disastrous side effects, same scale as thalidomide: <1%
Lots of people are going to round this off to “So you’re saying it hasn’t yet been proven to work? Doesn’t that mean it’s Not Real Science which means it’s a scam which means anyone who likes it is exactly as bad as LK-99 believers or ivermectin proponents?”
I will never get tired of posting this picture:
If there’s really an intervention with a 5% chance of being as good as fluoride, languishing in a file drawer somewhere, that’s a big deal!
Obviously the best course is to study it carefully and not do anything until you know more. The FDA has already closed off that route. Aaron’s taking the only option left - getting it out there where it can be mass tested by users. Soon we’ll have good data on colonization rates, retention rates, and (hopefully) mouth lactic acid levels. After a while, we’ll have at least some anecdotal evidence on cavities. If we’re really lucky, that will provoke a second round of interest from pharma companies, dentists, and scientists.
Just because testing things like this is +EV value for society, doesn’t mean it’s +EV value for every individual involved. The testing process has to pull together inventors, investors, manufacturers, and customers, using some mix of greed, delusion, altruism, technophilia, and goodwill. I think it’s fair to try to minimize the greed and delusion by reminding people that medical interventions which make biological sense and work in rats have a bad human track record. But having done that, I don’t think you also have to try to crush the goodwill and technophilia.
If you’re a poor person, spending your last $250 on this because you desperately want to cure your cavity problem, and you would be devastated if it didn’t work or if had any side effects - then you shouldn’t buy Lumina.
But if you have extra money, and you think biomedical innovation is cool, you want to be able to tell people you have genetically-modified bacteria in your mouth, and you want to contribute to the project of taking this out of the file drawer of discarded good ideas and back into the arena, and maybe get fewer cavities as a bonus - then yeah, I think it’s a prosocial thing to do, and probably won’t go too wrong - although this is not medical advice and really we have no way of knowing how wrong it will go (though maybe wait until people have had more time to look over the new oral cancer claims, especially if you’re Asian).
I would prefer not to be quoted as “endorsing” Lumina in any way more simplistic than this, lest people who think endorsement = “it definitely works” over-update on my supposed opinion.
**UPDATE:** [More thoughts and information from Yishan Wong](https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1780131552615420189) | Scott Alexander | 143543134 | Updates on Lumina Probiotic | acx |
# Open Thread 325
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** More meetups this week, including London, Oxford, SF, Cambridge (UK), Vienna, Portland, Jerusalem, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Capetown, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Boulder, Dallas, **Leipzig**, and **Jakarta**; bolding these last two since they were later additions you might have missed the first time. Check [the list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.
**2:** Thanks to everyone for continued good discussion on the [Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7). I want to avoid getting bogged down in this forever, so I’ll mostly try to resist responding and just highlight some of the pro-lab-leak comments I found most thought-provoking:
* ACX commenter David Bahry has [published a paper on the lab leak case](https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23), especially relating to ascertainment bias.
* Bahry was also able to find [the source of the George Gao quote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53563090) (though see also objection [here](https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1695484121789673942))
* Saar [on the negative blood samples](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53592553).
* Simon Stats [on early COVID doubling time arguments](https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2024/04/09/how-likely-is-it-for-covid-to-establish-itself/) (but cf my response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53962488))
* A figure I took from Peter’s blog post [was edited from its original context](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53608334), further explanation [here](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778080286934233370).
* Michael Weissman’s [probabilities](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53645411).
* [Long discussion of new data about DEFUSE proposal](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53646726).
Feel free to discuss your thoughts on these here, I won’t be participating. Also: [Phil H explains why one of the scientists in this debate is named “Lv”](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53522537) (it’s a romanization issue)
**3:** Sorry for low post volume recently, combination of kids, illness, and trying to get all the lab leak stuff tied up. Hopefully will improve ~~in 18 years~~ shortly. | Scott Alexander | 143596446 | Open Thread 325 | acx |
# ACX Classifieds 4/24
This is the irregular classifieds thread. Advertise whatever you want in the comments.
To keep things organized, please respond to the appropriate top-level comment: **Employment, Dating, Read My Blog** (also includes podcasts, books, etc)**, Consume My Product/Service, Meetup,** or **Other.** I’ll delete anything that’s not in the appropriate category.
Remember that posting dating ads is hard and scary. Please refrain from commenting too negatively on anyone’s value as a human being. I’ll be less strict about employers, bloggers, etc.
Potentially related links:
— [EA job board](https://jobs.80000hours.org/)
— [EA internships](https://ea-internships.pory.app/)
— [Dating docs](https://dateme.directory/) / [Manifold.love](https://manifold.love/)
— [Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) | Scott Alexander | 143474423 | ACX Classifieds 4/24 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
Original post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim). Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post [on the Rootclaim blog](https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/).
Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were *sort of* trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.
Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has [a blog](https://medium.com/@tgof137), including [a post summing up his COVID origins argument](https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704).
Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.
**1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis**
— 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?
— 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?
— 1.3: 92 early cases
— 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater
— 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments
— 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments
— 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?
— 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?
— 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases
— 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats
— 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post
**2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak**
— 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?
**3: Other Points That Came Up**
— 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds
— 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis
— 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim
**4: Summary And Updates**
# 1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis
---
### 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?
**Simon stats wrote:**
> It is important to consider how different SARS-CoV-2 is to other zoonoses. I have a challenge for zoonosis proponents to find me a zoonosis with all of the following features
>
> - Spillover occurred after 2000 when sequencing became much cheaper
>
> - There were more than a hundred human cases
>
> - There are zero infected animals.
>
> This characterises SARS-CoV-2, but no other zoonosis meets these criteria. Why?
[hmm](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52671277) answers the challenge:
> 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak; almost 30k cases, no animal intermediate.
>
> This is probably the most notable zoonotic episode of the last 20 years apart from SARS-2, I'm surprised you missed it.
>
> There are also 7 other Ebola outbreaks that match your criteria.
>
> We've been studying Ebola for over 40 years and have yet to determine the animal reservoir. It took 20 years to identify the reservoir for HIV-1's progenitor. Sometimes finding the reservoir is easy, sometimes it's hard. Typically it is easy when you have lots of cases and the virus is not very efficient at human-to-human transmission, because that necessitates lots of separate zoonotic events, which necessitates lots of infected animals. For something that spreads fast (i.e., the kind of virus likely to start a pandemic), you don't need a big reservoir, so you have a smaller target. For example, we *did* find the reservoir for the 2009 flu pandemic, but it took 7 years: <https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777>
HKU1 might also fit these criteria. It’s a coronavirus discovered in 2004 that seems to have spilled over in China and spread globally (it’s fine; it just causes yet another subtype of common cold). The exact animal reservoir has never been identified, although Wikipedia says it “likely originated from rodents”.
The classic case where we *did* find infected animals was SARS (which came from civets). It took six months of careful research. Most of the civet farms and civet wet markets were negative. Even at farms with some positive civets, other civets were negative. Twenty years later, it’s still not obvious civets were the definitive intermediate host, rather than some other animal that got caught in the crossfire.
Meanwhile, a few weeks after COVID was discovered, China killed all the animals in the market without testing any raccoon-dogs for COVID. Then they told all nearby raccoon-dog farms to kill all their raccoon-dogs too. Then they banned Chinese scientists from researching the origins of COVID. Probably this is part of why we eventually found an intermediate host for SARS1 and not COVID.
[Simon objects](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52742842) that although it was hard to find the exact civets responsible for SARS, we did later find that lots of civet handlers had SARS antibodies (even though they didn’t remember getting sick).
> There's different types of evidence for infected civets, some of which comes from higher seroprevalence among civet traders.
>
> In May 2003, Guan et al (2003) identified SARS-CoV-like virus in animals in a live-animal market in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. Guan et al (2003) also tested for antibodies among workers in the market. They note that “8 out of 20 (40%) of the wild-animal traders and 3 of 15 (20%) of those who slaughter these animals had evidence of antibody, only 1 (5%) of 20 vegetable traders was seropositive.” This suggests that the majority of the infections of the 11 people with close contact with animals were zoonotic. Among 508 animal traders, 66 (13%) tested positive for IgG antibody to SARS associated coronavirus by ELISA, while the control groups including hospital workers, Guangdong CDC workers, and healthy adults at clinic had an antibody prevalence of 1–3%.
I agree this is an important point. During the debate, Peter said that if we had tested lots of raccoon-dog handlers using the Guan et al methodology, we might have found they also had COVID antibodies. Unfortunately nobody did, and it’s too late, because by now the raccoon-dog handlers have probably gotten COVID the normal way.
### 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?
**Simon stats [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52649865):**
> What you say about raccoon dogs here is mistaken. Raccoon dogs are not a plausible intermediate host for sars-cov-2 on the basis of information that has been known since 2021. There are several considerations.
>
> 1. Xiao et al (2021) - <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B> , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.
>
> Secondly, a mystery of sars-cov-2 is how it acquired the furin cleavage site that makes it so transmissible. There are 850 known sars-like coronaviruses, and only one with a furin cleavage site. According to private messages exchanged by proponents of zoonosis, the furin cleavage site could not have been acquired in the market because the density of animals was too low (only 3-4 per cage). When avian influenza acquires a furin cleavage site that occurs on farms with thousands of chickens densely packed, i.e. not in the wild and not when there are a handful of animals in cages in a market. <https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/visual-timeline-proximal-origin/>
>
> 2. Wang et al (2022) <https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809> also confirms that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei. What's more, Wang et al (2022) tested 15 wild raccoon dogs of suppliers of Wuhan markets, including the Huanan market, in January 2020 and found them to be negative for SARS-CoV-2. On average, 38 raccoon dogs were sold across the four markets in Wuhan from 2017 to 2019. So, the 15 raccoon dogs likely comprised nearly the whole inventory of raccoon dogs that would have been supplied to the Huanan market at the time […]
>
> Xiao et al (2021) has a list of species sold at the Huanan market. I would encourage you to read that list and suggest which animals you think are plausible, and I will tell you why they are not actually plausible.
Xiao (2021) Table 1 only says that some raccoon dogs in Wuhan had wounds, suggesting they were wild-caught. It makes no claims that all raccoon-dogs were wild-caught. There are dozens of raccoon-dog farms in the same province as Wuhan.
IIUC Wang (2022) says that 38 raccoon dogs were sold in Wuhan *per month*, not 38 during the whole two-year study period, so the claim that the traders in Wang represent the whole supply fails. [EDIT: Possibly I misunderstood this, see [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53522877)]
The raccoon dogs were tested for active infection, not serology, so you would have had to catch a raccoon-dog in the act of having COVID to see anything. Remember, during SARS, scientists kept testing the farms that supplied the wet markets where it was spilling over, and most farms were negative.
The wildlife trade in China is complicated, and sometimes involves a permeable barrier between farm and wilderness. Farmed and wild animals are kept in the same pens, packed in the same crates, and sold at the same stalls.
Suppose you know that one of the animals in the middle crate on the right was caught in some safe, disease-free way, 500 km away, three months ago. How confident does that make you feel?
To answer the question about which animals in the Xiao paper are plausible: at least civets and bamboo rats. SARS spread back and forth in some kind of weird net between civets, raccoon dogs, and a bunch of made-up-sounding animals like "ferret-badgers" and "greater hog-badgers". For all we know, COVID could have done likewise.
If all of this sounds desperate and wishy-washy, imagine an alien who comes to Earth, hangs out at Area 51, and catches COVID. She theorizes that she got it from humans. She’s heard that the humans at Area 51 came from schools, so she abducts fifteen humans from a nearby school and gives them COVID throat swabs. None of them are positive, so she announces that humans can’t be a COVID intermediate host. Other aliens suggest further testing, but she has already vaporized Earth, just in case, so the further testing never gets done.
**Simon added:**
> Even the strongest proponents of the raccoon dog hypothesis have walked back their bold claims that raccoon dogs are the host.
I asked a scientist whose name is on some of the original raccoon-dog papers if this was true. He said:
> I secretly root for other intermediate hosts. Bamboo rats or civets would be really fascinating and have flown under the radar. But it’s been really hard to bet against raccoon dogs. First we learn they can transmit and the virus didn’t change when transmitted between them (Freuling 2020)? Then turns out they’re sold in the market (Xiao 2021)? Then it turns out they’re freaking everywhere in the genetic data from the market, the most common mammal detected? Then it turns out the market animals aren’t from northern China fur farms? It’s been a tough road for those betting against them….
### 1.3: 92 Early Cases
**There was a long multi-branching thread of arguments centered around 92 early cases, for example [here](https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1773722754862239759):**
My understanding of the situation: the first officially-confirmed case of COVID started December 11, 2019. Later in the pandemic, in 2021, the World Health Organization wanted to figure out if that was really the first, or whether there had been earlier ones. They scoured Chinese hospital records for illnesses that might be COVID during the two months before the official discovery (ie early October to early December) In particular, they asked Wuhan hospitals for records of any cases of fever, flu, respiratory illness, and pneumonia. The hospital gave them 76,253 cases, because China is big and flu is common. This was slightly more cases than usual, but there was a normal flu spreading too, so the researchers didn’t find this very compelling.
Then they narrowed these cases down to those that were “clinically compatible” with COVID, and ended up with 92.
Then they went over those 92 more carefully, including “review by the external multidisciplinary clinical team” and blood draws from the former patients. They were able to track down 67 of the 92. The clinical team decided none of those 92 cases really resembled COVID, and the blood draws were all negative. They published this as the results of their study:
> The retrospective search for cases compatible with COVID-19 illness identified 76 253 episodes with one of four indicator conditions. A rise in one of these conditions, [acute respiratory illness] (as well as [flu-like illness] and fever), was seen in this group of individuals in the over-60-year age group in early December. The clinical assessment of the 76,253 individuals revealed 92 cases clinically compatible with COVID-19. It is possible that the application of stringent clinical criteria, resulting in the identification of only 92 clinically compatible cases, may have decreased the possibility of identifying a group or groups of cases with milder illness. All the 92 cases were rejected as cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection on further clinical review.
>
> None of these cases (where blood could be obtained) was positive on SARS-CoV-2 serological testing carried out more than 12 months later. The use of retrospective serological testing so long after the illness cannot be relied on to exclude the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection at the time of the presenting illness, given the possible drop in SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody over time and the associated reduced sensitivity of commercial assays. The possibility that earlier transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection was occurring in this community cannot be excluded on the basis of this evidence.
In other words “we looked for early COVID, we didn’t find any, but we can’t promise we didn’t miss anything”.
On Twitter, [Giles Demaneuf](https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1773853669764780426) makes an interesting point. The researchers took the samples in 2021, when China was in Zero COVID. When the Wuhan outbreak was finally contained in early 2020, 4.4% of Wuhanites had contracted COVID. So isn’t it surprising that 0/67 of the former patients who the researchers tested were had antibodies to COVID? The chance that 67 randomly-selected people in a population with 4.4% prevalence rate are all negative is only about 5%. Is this evidence of foul play?
No. See the conclusions section of the report, which said: “The use of retrospective serological testing so long after the illness cannot be relied on to exclude the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection at the time of the presenting illness, given the possible drop in SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody over time and the associated reduced sensitivity of commercial assays”.
You have a lot of COVID antibodies just after getting COVID. By a year or so afterwards, you might not have enough to detect. So it’s not surprising the WHO study didn’t detect any.
Why did they even try looking for antibodies? There seem to be two reasons not to: first, they should have known antibodies would decay after a year. Second, even if some of them did have antibodies, how would we know they weren’t just infected in spring 2020 like everyone else?
They don’t say. My guess: antibody decay is very variable. Some people’s antibodies might last more than a year. So if they found that way more than 4.4% of people had antibodies, that would be surprising and suggest that most of them had had COVID in autumn 2019. But instead they found that nobody had antibodies, which is consistent with one or two of them getting sick when everyone else got sick, and having their antibodies decay at the normal rate. But also, I think the antibodies were just intended to supplement the clinical review, and not be a very important part of their determination.
I think this study is moderately strong evidence that there wasn’t much COVID going around before December 2019. Doctors looked for cases, they winnowed them down into the cases that looked most like COVID, but when they examined those cases closely, they didn’t look enough like COVID to be interesting. I don’t think the antibody tests add or subtract much from this assessment.
I would be fine if someone else said they don’t think the WHO report provides much evidence either way. The main thing I want to insist on is that there’s no conspiracy to hide 92 previously-undiscovered cases. They searched really hard for potential cases, they subjected the most plausible candidates for further review, and then they decided those ones were not, in fact, COVID.
(You can read all of this [here](https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-joint-report_origins-studies-6-april-201.pdf). It’s not a very good description and I’d be interested if someone has a more thorough writeup of the research.)
This was just one of many efforts that researchers made to try to identify pre-December-2020 COVID cases. For example, 30,000 people donated blood in autumn 2019, and the hospitals still had most of it. So they tested the blood samples for COVID antibodies and didn’t find any. I don’t think antibodies decay in stored blood samples (I might be wrong). There are 12 million people in Wuhan, so if even a few hundred people had COVID during that time, one of them should have turned up. None of them did.
Finally, during COVID’s officially-recognized existence, its numbers doubled about once every 3.5 days. Again, if COVID existed a month earlier than previously believed, then it would be 256x more common than expected. This would be hard to miss! Nobody found evidence from excess mortality that COVID was 256x more common than expected.
I’m using the version of the doubling time argument because it’s simple enough for me to understand, and I don’t have to worry about anyone trying to hide something in their complex model. It’s not exactly true, but it’s true enough to rule out COVID starting much before November 2019. If you want the fancy official version, it’s in [Pekar 2021](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8139421/?report=reader#!po=12.5000) and looks like this:
This alone isn’t fatal to lab leak. It’s perfectly possible for the lab to leak (let’s say) November 5th, the virus spreads a bit, and then a month later someone goes to the wet market, coughs on a vendor, and starts the officially recognized pandemic.
But if that were true, you’d expect (let’s say) 30 cases by early December. Let’s say the wet market vendor was exactly Case # 30. She infected the other wet market vendors, starting a pandemic with an obvious center at the wet market and lots of infected wet market vendors and patrons. What about Case # 29? If they were (let’s say) a barista, how come they didn’t infect people at their coffee shop? How come there wasn’t a second obvious cluster radiating out from a coffee shop, lots of coffee-shop-linked cases, etc? How come there weren’t 30 equally-sized clusters?
In order to avoid this, you either need to claim that the wet market was a perfect superspreader location, or that the pattern with lots of cases in the wet market and few-to-none anywhere else was a result of ascertainment bias. Saar made both those arguments during the debate, but I thought Peter rebutted them effectively.
### 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater
**Nicholas Halden ([blog](https://metroeating.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52701277):**
What should we make of [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7938741/), which found the presence of covid in Brazilian wastewater in late 2019?
Consider the doubling times.
The study says that scientists working in late 2020 found COVID in samples of Brazilian wastewater from November 27, 2019. This was long before the first detected case of transmission in Brazil on March 13, 2020.
Between November 27, 2019 and March 13, 2020 is about 16 weeks, so 32 COVID doubling times. 32 doubling times with no lockdown is enough time for COVID to infect every single person in Brazil. If COVID had infected everyone in Brazil before the first recognized case, we would have noticed.
(again, COVID doubling time isn’t exactly invariably 3.5 days, but here we’re talking about numbers big enough that the exact details don’t matter very much)
So if COVID was in Brazil on November 27, it must have fizzled out instead of going pandemic. How likely is that? If one person had COVID, it’s not too unlikely - not all COVID cases transmit it forward. If (let’s say) twenty people had COVID, it’s very unlikely - at that point, the law of large numbers takes over; in a freak coincidence, every single patient would have to fail to infect anyone else. So almost certainly fewer than 20 people in Brazil had COVID in November 27.
So which is more likely - that somehow 20 people had COVID long before the virus was officially detected, and on a totally different continent, yet somehow a scientist looking through wastewater found the water from exactly those people and managed to detect the virus? Or that there was a sampling error, which happens all the time in these kinds of things?
Peter [wrote a blog post on some of these issues](https://medium.com/@tgof137/when-did-covid-first-show-up-outside-of-china-e54c358736bb). He found that there were positive tests from wastewater samples as early as March 2019, which doesn’t fit anyone’s timeline, including lab leakers’. And most of these positives (including the Brazilian sample) contained later strains of the virus with mutations it picked up late in 2020. So these were almost certainly false positives from contamination.
### 1.5: Biorealism’s 16 arguments
**Biorealism has a list of sixteen arguments, which he liked so much that he posted it three times in the ACX comments, twice on Less Wrong, twice on Manifold, and about a dozen times on Twitter under multiple account names. Some posts were slightly different from others, but a typical version is:**
> Importantly, Miller incorrectly claimed the N501Y mutation would result from passage in hACE2 mice (mixed them up with BALB/c mice). The major papers Miller relied on have been seriously challenged since the debate. See Stoyan and Chiu (2024), Weissman (2024), Bloom (2023) and Lv et al (2024). Overall the circumstantial evidence makes lab v plausible:
Peter admitted getting this wrong during the debate. I think this very minor point about mice mutations was approximately his only mistake in 15 hours of debating, and he admitted it as soon as he noticed. Biorealism somehow heard about this (obviously not through watching the debate, as we’ll see in a moment), then left about 20-30 comments starting with it, under various accounts, on various platforms, as if it somehow discredited Peter. This is making me somewhat less charitable to him and his 16 arguments than I would be otherwise.
> 1. Chinese researchers Botao & Lei Xiao observed lab origin was likely given the nearest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were far from Wuhan. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sampled SARS-related bat coronaviruses where the nearest relatives are found in Yunnan, Laos and Vietnam ~1500km away. They refuse to share their records.
The ancestral viruses of SARS were found equally far from where SARS spilled over into humans, so we know it’s possible (and likely) for viruses to travel that far.
> 2. Patrick Berche, DG at Institut Pasteur in Lille 2014-18, notes you would expect secondary outbreaks if it arose via the live animal trade. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/>
There are constant outbreaks of weird coronaviruses in animal handlers. See eg [this paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31860-w), which estimates about 60,000 of these per year. None of these ever go anywhere, because the farmers are in rural areas that aren’t dense enough to sustain a high R0, and the epidemic fizzles out after a single digit number of cases. Any early outbreaks of COVID would have vanished into this long and mostly unnoticed list.
> 3. Molecular data: Only sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site. Well adapted to human ACE2 cells. Low genetic diversity indicating a lack of prior circulation (Berche 2023).
>
> Restriction site SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI restriction map falls neatly within the ideal range for a reverse genetics system and used previously at WIV and UNC. Ngram analysis of the codon usage per Professor Louis Nemzer
>
> <https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1667232580255490053?t=IJgitS5cw364ioclzVWxaA&s=19>
>
> The SARS2 backbone is very low in CG and CpG. While the 12-nt insert that gives it the FCS is extremely high in both. Almost as if it was some kind of chimera of a consensus sequence and a codon-optimized polybasic cleavage site?
>
> <https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1752800486837678377?t=EpIRgyybJVaPgeMP5xdstA&s=19>
>
> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1>
>
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0?fbclid=IwAR1HMUMtLIAFOFppVasQDeoIAYrVhP8j4YoPO4wnaTOUiKLsllZl_oKryOw>
Most of this was discussed extensively in the second session of the debate, which I recommend.
> The CGG-CGG arginine codon usage is particularly unusual but used in synthetic biology.
I asked a synthetic biologist about this. He said:
*» “Nope. I would literally never do this if I was designing a small insert (maybe I wouldn't notice if it happened by chance with ~1 in 25 odds in a naive codon optimization algorithm as part of a larger sequence). High GC% is bad. Tandem repeat is worse. Several other perfectly fine arginine codons. And I wouldn't engineer a **viral** genome using **human** codon usage. An engineer would not do it.”*
> 4. DEFUSE full proposal: virus 20% different from SARS1, consensus seq assembled with 6 segments, without disrupting coding seq, BsmBI order, FCS. SARS2: 20% different than SARS1, 6 evenly spaced fragments w BsmBI and BsaI restriction sites, FCS.
>
> Jesse Bloom, Jack Nunberg, Robert Townley, Alexandre Hassanin have observed this workflow could have lead to SARS-CoV-2. Work often begins before funding sought or goes ahead anyway.
Re: 4 - Also scattered across second section of debate, also not going to retread
> 5. Market cases were all lineage B. Lv et al (2024) indicates there was a single point of emergence and A came before B. So market cases not the primary cases. See also Bloom (2021), Kumar et al (2022). Peter Ben Embarek said there were likely already thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019.<https://t.co/50kFV9zSb6>
>
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/34398234/>
>
> <https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661>
There *was* a Lineage A sample in the market, lab leak proponents just try to ignore/dismiss/conspiracize it away. The first two known Lineage A cases were very close to the market. Lv (is this even a real name? It sounds like Roman numeral? But I guess that’s what you expect in a country ruled by someone named Xi) found some weird COVID variants in Shanghai that might or might not mean anything; you can see some discussion of the implications [here](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1765565049203253687), but I don’t think they’re strong evidence either way. If A was first, it means some really weird stuff coincidences have to happen to give us the spread rates and genetic clock data we get, but they’re not necessarily *weirder* in the zoonosis hypothesis than the lab leak one.
The claim that there were “thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019” is very easy to disprove by doubling rate arguments like the one above, by the blood bank study mentioned above, by the WHO’s failed case search, and by many other lines of argument.
> 6. Evidence for lineage A in the market is based on a low quality sample according to Liu et. al. (2023).
I really think lab leakers need to decide whether they think China is a sinister actor trying to cover up the truth, or whether they should trust every offhand comment by Chinese government officials as gospel. Dr. Liu doesn’t explain in what sense he thinks the Lineage A sample is “low-quality”, and the Western scientists who I asked about this said they didn’t understand this complaint and that the sample was fine. A Western team re-analyzing the same sample [describes it as](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.13.557637v1) “conclusively contain[ing] Lineage A.” I think most lab leakers have switched from trying to deny the genetics to claiming that this was “contamination”, which also doesn’t make sense (the sample is genetically very early). Note that aside from this sample, the first two Lineage A cases discovered were both very close to the wet market.
> 7. Bloom (2023) shows market samples do not support market origin. There is also no evidence of transmission in the claimed susceptible animals elsewhere. <https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/vead089/7504441>
Discussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate.
> 8. Lineage A and B only two mutations apart. François Ballox, Bloom and Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo note this is unlikely to reflect two separate animal spillovers as opposed to incomplete case ascertainment of human to human transmission (Bloom 2021).
Discussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate.
> 9. Sampling bias. George Gao, Chinese CDC head at the time, acknowledged to the BBC stating they may have focused too much on and around the market and missed cases on the other side of the city. David Bahry outlines the documented bias. Michael Weissman has shown this mathematically.
>
> <https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23>
>
> <https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556>
Re: Dr. Gao, see above comment about Chinese officials. See the section Ascertainment Bias below for why I disagree with this specific claim, which also addresses the Michael Weissman argument.
> 10. Spatial statistics experts show the Worobey claim the market was the early epicentre was flawed.
>
> <https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954>
Re: 10 - See [Confirmation Of The Centrality Of The Huanan Market Among Early COVID-19 Cases](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05859), a response to the paper you cite:
> The centrality of Wuhan's Huanan market in maps of December 2019 COVID-19 case residential locations, established by Worobey et al. (2022a), has recently been challenged by Stoyan and Chiu (2024, SC2024). SC2024 proposed a statistical test based on the premise that the measure of central tendency (hereafter, "centre") of a sample of case locations must coincide with the exact point from which local transmission began. Here we show that this premise is erroneous. SC2024 put forward two alternative centres (centroid and mode) to the centre-point which was used by Worobey et al. for some analyses, and proposed a bootstrapping method, based on their premise, to test whether a particular location is consistent with it being the point source of transmission.
>
> We show that SC2024's concerns about the use of centre-points are inconsequential, and that use of centroids for these data is inadvisable. The mode is an appropriate, even optimal, choice as centre; however, contrary to SC2024's results, we demonstrate that with proper implementation of their methods, the mode falls at the entrance of a parking lot at the market itself, and the 95% confidence region around the mode includes the market. Thus, the market cannot be rejected as central even by SC2024's overly stringent statistical test.
I think this response is pretty strong. In one analysis, they show that even though the other paper’s methodology is worse than theirs, if you apply it correctly (instead of inappropriately excluding various cases like the paper’s authors did), the center of all early cases in Hubei province lands on the wet market parking lot. In another analysis, they show that the other paper’s recommended tests wouldn’t have correctly pointed to the offending water pump in the famous John Snow cholera outbreak, but theirs would have.
Still, I think it’s useful to supplement fancy statistics with normal common sense, so I recommend just looking at the map of early cases:
…and deciding whether you think the assumptions behind a specific statistical test are likely to debunk the idea that cases are centered around the wet market.
> 11. Wuhan used as a control for a 2015 serological study on SARS-related bat coronaviruses due to its urban location.
>
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/>
I don’t know why this point is supposed to matter. If you mean that Wuhan isn’t directly exposed to bats, nobody ever said it was. The zoonotic theory is that wildlife carted in from other areas of China started the pandemic in the wet market.
> 12. Superspreader events also seen at wet markets in Beijing and Singapore (Xinfadi and Jurong).
This was discussed very extensively in the debates, both in section 1 and section 3. Wet markets weren’t “superspreader locations” - in fact, the disease spread no more quickly there than anywhere else. They were the first place in those cities that the pandemic started, due to contaminated animal products. If anything, this supports zoonosis. See also my discussion with Saar on this point below.
> 13. WIV refuse to share their records with NIH who terminated subaward in 2022. Wider suspension over biosafety concerns. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling>
Although WIV has not been especially forthcoming, some of their databases were leaked in various ways and showed that they did not have any viruses capable of transforming into COVID.
> 14. PLA involvement at WIV and MERS research prior to SARS-COV-2. MERS features several similarities with SARS-CoV-2.
>
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/>
I can’t even tell what conspiracy theory you’re trying to propose with this one; if you spell it out I can try to explain why it might be false.
> 15. SARS1 leaked several times and SARS-COV-2 has leaked from a BSL-3 lab in Taiwan.
Agreed that SARS leaked several times. It also spilled over from animals several times. During the debate, a lab leak rate of once per lab per 500 years was proposed (everyone agreed to steelman this by 10x for WIV numbers); I would be interested to know whether anything about the study of SARS challenges that number.
> 16. Unpublished infectious clone identified from Wuhan contradicting arguments such reverse genetics systems would be published.
>
> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full>
I asked some scientists about this paper and here’s what they told me. Wuhan University sequenced some rice. In the middle of the sequence, there’s an unexpected sequence from a common coronavirus, HKU4. The most likely explanation is that someone else in Wuhan was working on the coronavirus and there was cross-contamination. Plausibly this is Wuhan Institute of Virology, who is known to work with coronaviruses. This is cool detective work, but it’s not clear what it’s supposed to prove. I think some lab leakers are using it to prove that WIV can do reverse genetics, but they admitted this already in [a published paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/) so that’s not too helpful. I think others are using it to prove WIV had “secret viruses” in their catalogue, but the rice virus wasn’t secret, it was HKU4, which is common and which WIV [has already published papers about](https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/1/56).
### 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 Arguments
Once again, I cannot stress enough how much better a take you might have on this debate if you watch it.
* “The first known case predates the market outbreak by a month” - this is not the consensus position. I cannot say for sure what Dr. Chou means by this, but I suspect he’s referring to one of the many claims to this effect that Peter effectively debunked during the debate (Connor Reed, Mr. Chen, the 92 cases, Brazil, etc).
* “Genetic analyses put the realistic start date around Sept/Oct” - see the section on Brazil above for the many reasons this is impossible. Pekar, the most-cited genetic analysis, puts the origin in November. Dr. Chou doesn’t cite his sources, so I don’t know what he’s referring to, but it certainly hasn’t entered the knowledge of the reality-based community.
* “The wet market cases were concentrated around a mahjong room”. CTRL+F “mahjong room” in the original post. The mahjong room itself tested negative, and the “epicenter” mechanism isn’t fine-grained enough to be useful (CTRL+F “Central Park” in the original post for a discussion of why this is).
* “No animals at the market (or in Wuhan) tested positive.” No raccoon-dogs were tested. In SARS1, which we know was zoonotic, they also never get positive animal tests at several wet markets where they knew spillovers had occurred. Again, imagine the alien, coming to Earth and taking a dozen randomly selected cats (not even humans this time!) and finding none of them had COVID.
* “No raccoon-dogs anywhere on the planet have tested positive, beyond those being forcibly infected to do experiments”. False, [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9968901/) discusses an outbreak of COVID among raccoon-dogs on a farm in Poland.
* “They aren’t capable of catching or spreading COVID”. False, [here’s a paper on the subject](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.19.256800v1.full) which says that “Raccoon dogs are susceptible to and efficiently transmit SARS-CoV2”.
* “The clustering around the wet market in Wuhan . . . was just a product of oversmoothing”. Here is a map of December 2020 COVID cases. I recommend ignoring the contour lines and just looking at the dots. How could dots be oversmoothed?:
* “At the time of the wet market outbreak, COVID was already spreading around the world”. Dr. Chou doesn’t give a source for this, but I think it’s referring to the Brazilian data already discussed earlier.
I think he had more of these somewhere else on the subreddit, but I’m not feeling like this is extremely worth my time.
### 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?
**GStew writes:**
> I personally agree it was not a lab leak but a pretty important was lost in the debate (or at least poorly factored in). Namely China was hiding evidence. While this may impact priors…the bigger impact is that, if it was a lab leak we only know what information was released (which almost certainly would be anything that boosted their preferred narrative) and do not have all the evidence that was presumably withheld (which would be all the evidence they could suppress that went against the preferred narrative).
This was discussed a bit, and Peter’s position is that China was a bad actor, but it wasn’t specifically trying to suppress lab leak / favor zoonosis. As often as not, it was trying to suppress zoonosis, or just swat anyone who spoke up about anything.
During SARS, the international health community criticized China for having wet markets where zoonotic spillovers could happen. China promised to clean them up, then mostly didn’t (for example, the raccoon-dog vendor at Wuhan was fined a few times, but kept operating). China’s first priority was to prevent people from accusing them of failing to clean up wet markets. For example, here’s what happened to Li Wenliang, the first person to raise the alarm about a mysterious new epidemic centered around the wet market, ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang)):
> On 3 January 2020, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigating the case interrogated Li, issued a formal written warning and censuring him for "publishing untrue statements about seven confirmed SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Market." He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that any recalcitrant behavior would result in a prosecution.
Because of that, a lot of what we know about the possible zoonotic origins of the epidemic is in spite of China, not because of them. For example:
* China killed all the animals at the market after the pandemic started, without telling anybody which ones they were. We know more about them because [a Chinese researcher](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-17/where-did-covid-come-from-report-on-infected-wuhan-wild-animals-sheds-new-light?embedded-checkout=true) had been documenting them for an unrelated project about tick-borne diseases. He sent his work to Western journals, and after a mysterious delay they eventually published them.
* China denied that there were raccoon-dogs the market. In addition to the researcher’s data, we know they were lying because we had virologist Eddie Holmes’ travel photos of them.
* We have WIV’s catalog of viruses because they tried to publish it in a Western journal just before the pandemic, the journal rejected it, and then years later they realized what they had.
My impression is that China (realistically Wuhan City Government, I don’t think Xi would have been involved at this early stage) made a vague attempt to cover up the wet market early on - but that it wasn’t their Department Of Covering-Up’s finest work. For example, when the WHO asked for files on early cases, China gave them what they wanted, and then Western scientists were able to plot their addresses and find that they centered on the wet market.
Is it possible that China was trying to cover up a lab leak, and, in order to fool outsiders, *pretended* to be covering up the wet market, while actually feeding international observers datasets massaged to make the wet market look more likely? Anything is possible. But as a sign of the Chinese government’s level of competence, remember that they didn’t put a travel ban on Wuhan until January 23, ie *after* many Wuhanites had left to visit family for the Lunar New Year holiday. So they would have to be executing their brilliant fake-cover-up-to-detract-from-the-real-coverup scheme while also being too stupid to prevent Wuhanites from taking the train to Beijing.
Two more short points:
*First*, when the debate came to the question of China’s cover-up competence, Peter presented this photo:
This is the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research group, out for a team dinner at a local restaurant on January 15th 2020 (ie a month after the pandemic started). This isn’t the most rational probabilistic evidence in the world. But we’ve already seen people take the rational probabilistic evidence twenty different directions. So let’s ask the same question Peter did - do these look like people who secretly know they just started the worst pandemic in modern history?
If they secretly knew they’d just started the worst pandemic in modern history, wouldn’t they at least be wearing masks?
I think China, WIV, etc, were as clueless as the rest of us, at least at the beginning of the pandemic when a lot of this origins evidence was being collected. They tried to shove the raccoon-dogs under the bed, to prevent anyone from accusing them of bungling their SARS commitments. But they weren’t really up to anything else.
A more thorough argument would go over specific pieces of evidence, examine when they were collected (ie whether it was before or after China started caring enough about COVID to get their competent people involved), and how China could have rigged each.
*Second*, Peter (privately) discussed a Chinese conspiracy theory of his own with me by email.
[Here’s an article from a random Chinese blog](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ldOjZEhri5JmMCLHo6NW6g) (you’ll have to Google Translate it). It describes China’s preferred theory of COVID origins: it was started by imported lobster from Maine (really!) The lobster arrived in the wet market, the wet market got sick, and diabolical Americans trying to hide their own complicity blamed it on raccoon-dogs and lab leaks and what-have-you.
The article includes this graphic:
It’s a map of which vendors at the wet market got COVID and where their stalls are. In many ways, it matches the maps that China gave to Western scientists. In other ways, it’s better - it includes information that Western scientists only inferred months after this article came out. But also, unlike the maps provided to Western scientists, it says the raccoon-dog vendors got COVID - something China has previously denied, and which would significantly raise the odds of a natural origin.
Is this China’s internal record of what *really* happened at the wet market? Did they fail some kind of critical communication about how classified it should be, so that a guy in their propaganda department accidentally released it publicly in a stupid article about lobsters? That would be so embarrassingly weird that Peter didn’t even try bringing it up in the debate. But in a response to a question about coverups, sure, let’s get conspiratorial.
### 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?
Worobey and Pekar are the two most prolific pro-zoonosis scientists, and many of the points in Peter’s argument were based on them. Several people criticized my writeup for not mentioning that these were “debunked”, for example:
Worobey and Pekar have about a million papers, each of which makes many different points, so I don’t know for sure what these are referring to. But a few other people make more specific claims, and I’ll respond to them here:
* Pekar’s paper on the two lineages originally estimated 99-1 odds of double spillover. Someone found a coding error that reduced it to 6-1 odds, Pekar admitted the error, and the paper has been updated. Other people have made other criticisms which I haven’t investigated in depth and am agnostic on. I don’t think my argument depends too much on the details of this paper. The argument for B earlier than A is that it infected twice as many people and has more genetic diversity. It’s possible these things happened by chance and A preceded (and mutated to) B. In that case, I still think the most likely scenario is that A was released at the wet market, infected a customer or two, mutated to B, and infected a vendor. A then spread among the neighborhoods near the market, and B spread among market vendors.
* Worobey’s paper includes an erratum saying he messed up the names of some of the supplementary data files. One of the data files also had the wrong number of samples somehow, but giving it the right number of samples didn’t affect results in any way. Lots of lab leak proponents have been tweeting that “Worobey finally admitted his paper was wrong!”, but I think they just mean this erratum.
* Several people accused Pekar of ignoring intermediate lineages. Peter addressed this by finding these were mostly sequencing errors. There’s a very new paper about potential intermediate lineages which might change this debate; my provisional assessment is that it’s boring but I’m waiting to see if other people have more thoughts on it.
* Several people linked to Biorealism’s 16 arguments as examples of Pekar/Worobey being “debunked”. I tried to address these above.
* Several people claimed there was ascertainment bias in their papers. I try to address this below.
* If there are other claims about Pekar and Worobey being “debunked”, I don’t know them.
In general, I find [claims about “debunking”](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/) annoying even when they’re made by Important People who theoretically have the authority to make pronouncements. I think they’re even more annoying when they’re made by self-styled rebels who admittedly disagree with the scientific consensus.
### 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases?
**observeralt [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bpu8gf/practicallyabook_review_rootclaim_100000_lab_leak/kxbwhou/):**
> The judges put huge weight on early cases being near the market. Michael Weissman's recent paper showing ascertainment bias in early case data is also significant as Miller relies on the sampling being random. Chinese CDC head at the time George Gao acknowledged this to the BBC last too. They focused too much on and around the market and missed cases on the other side of the city.
Here’s the Worobey map everyone is debating:
Before going further, I recommend reading page 8 of the supplementary text of Worobey’s paper, titled “Robustness Of Statistical Test Results To Ascertainment Bias”, or pages 14-17, “Additional Data Related To Case Ascertainment Biases”, which explain all the reasons he thinks this isn’t true. I promise you aren’t the first person to think that maybe Worobey could be contaminated by ascertainment bias.
If that still doesn’t help, Worobey talks more about his strategy for avoiding ascertainment bias [here](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454). Most important, he counted only cases from December; the market connection was discovered December 30 and added to diagnostic criteria January 3. This doesn’t mean bias is impossible - some of these points are people who caught COVID on December 31, but only got diagnosed January 4 after the new diagnostic criteria were added. But most cases are pre-criteria. And Worobey looked at various subsets of pre-criteria cases and found they were all at least as market-focused as the overall set. For example, he looked at the earliest COVID records in one Wuhan hospital system:
> 10 of these hospitals’ 19 earliest COVID-19 cases were linked to Huanan Market (∼53%), comparable both to Jinyintan’s 66% (of 41 cases) (*[4](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454#core-R4)*) and to the WHO-China report’s 33% of 168 retrospectively identified cases within Wuhan across December 2019 (*[1](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454#core-R1)*). Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.
Likewise, [a study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext) *[conducted](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext)* [January 2](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext) (so not impacted at all by the January 3 criteria) found that 27 of 41 known patients had market links.
Likewise, the first five cases were all detected in the market, and it doesn’t even make sense to talk about ascertainment bias for these.
What is [the Weissman paper](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2401/2401.08680.pdf) that observeralt is talking about? It argues: if the pandemic started at the market, each seemingly non-market-linked case must ultimately derive from a market-linked case. Therefore, we should expect non-market-linked cases to require more steps than market-linked cases. Therefore, they should be further away. But if we look at the map above, we see that not-market-linked cases are closer to the market than market-linked cases. So something must be wrong, and that something might be ascertainment bias.
(at least this is my interpretation of Weissman’s argument, which is more mathematical; read the paper to make sure I’m getting it right).
This is a weirdly spherical-cow view of an epidemic, worthy of a physicist. It’s easy to think of reasons the linked-cases-should-be-closer rule might not hold. For example, suppose that on their lunch break, market vendors go have lunch at restaurants surrounding the market. They infect people in these restaurants, who then infect their friends and family. But these people never went to the market themselves. Now there are a bunch of non-market-linked cases immediately surrounding the wet market.
But also - of all markets in Wuhan, Huanan sold the most weird wildlife. Suppose someone in the boonies gets a craving for raccoon-dog one day, their local convenience store doesn’t have it, so they hop on a bus and go downtown to the city’s main wet market. Then they get infected with COVID. Now there’s a wet-market-linked case in the boonies.
In other words, we should expect two modes of spread: general geographic diffusion from the epicenter, and people from far away who made specific trips.
If this still doesn’t seem obvious to you, consider - usually when COVID first arrived in America or Brazil or wherever, they were able to trace it back to a specific person from Wuhan who visited the country. If I was the first person in America to get COVID, I could usually say “Oh, it must have been my business meeting with Mr. Chin from Wuhan”. At the same time, if someone from the next town over from Wuhan got COVID, they probably couldn’t trace it back to a specific Wuhanite - everyone from Wuhan is coming and going so often that my town is just full of COVID in general.
So I don’t think Weissman’s paper proves anything, and I think the general pattern of blue and orange dots suggests ascertainment bias *wasn’t* playing a role.
So why does George Gao say that there was ascertainment bias? I looked for the direct source of the Gao quote and couldn’t find it; if someone else is able to, please let me know, since I’d be interested in exactly what he thinks about this.
### 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats
**Gwern wrote:**
> Yes, I don't understand this (paraphrased) claim by Peter:
>
> *> He also told the Mail that his cat got the coronavirus too, which is impossible.*
>
> 'Impossible', thus implying the man was lying? I was under the impression that, quite aside from cats having tons of coronaviruses in general (FCoV being a particularly serious threat to young cats, which also seems to be a remarkable case study of the harms of the FDA), that it was not just not 'impossible' for domestic pet cats to get the coronavirus too, it was routine for them to get COVID-19, and even other cat species in \*zoos\* have tested positive and this was true very early in the COVID-19 pandemic and quite well publicized and well known (eg April 2020 <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/tiger-coronavirus-covid19-positive-test-bronx-zoo> ). This was a topic of interest to me at the time because I like cats and have a cat and was wondering what the implications of me being inevitably infected might be for my cat, and so I remember this quite well despite my general attempt to remain ignorant of as many COVID-19 matters as possible... And double-checking now to see if all of these reports were somehow false positives or faked, I continue to see everyone like the CDC stating that it is still totally possible and routine for cats in close contact with infected humans (you know, like a \*pet\* cat) to be infected with COVID-19: <https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/covid-19/pets.html>
>
> Given that Peter has supposedly spent years autistically researching every last detail and this detail in particular in order to discredit that British dude, I'm experiencing sudden Gell-Man Amnesia here about the rest of his claims, as well as the supposed experts evaluating Peter's claims if they didn't flag that (I have not checked).
This is in the context of Connor Reed, a British man who claimed to have gotten COVID on November 25 - which, if true, would be surprisingly (though not impossibly) early according to the zoonosis narrative. Peter argued his story didn’t hold up, and one of his points centered around his claim that his cat might have caught COVID from him and died.
Unfortunately, I mis-quoted Peter. I said Peter argued it was impossible for his cat to get COVID-19 (false). His actual statement was that it’s extremely rare for a cat to *die* of COVID-19.
Peter, Gwern, and I then proceeded to get very confused about the exact claims and timeline, which I think is because Connor said totally different things in different interviews:
* In [an interview with Wales Online](https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welshman-thought-first-brit-catch-17684127) on 2/4/2020, he said that "my kitten caught the feline coronavirus and developed pneumonia and died, but I don't think I caught it from her. I think that was just coincidence.”
* In [an interview with the Daily Mail](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8075633/First-British-victim-25-describes-coronavirus.html) on 3/4/20, he said that his kitten died, after a two-day illness, on the ninth day of him (Connor) having COVID. He said “I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu” (speaking as if it was him in the past, who thought he had flu because he hadn’t heard of COVID yet).
This is a weird inconsistency! In the Wales interview, the cat got it before him (at least that’s how I interpret “I don’t think I caught it from her”). In the Mail interview, he got it nine days before the cat.
In The Wales interview, it’s “the feline coronavirus”. In the Mail interview, he doesn’t know what the cat got and speculates that it might have been COVID. But also, if it was “the feline coronavirus”, how would he know? Wouldn’t you need a vet to diagnose that? But in the Mail interview, he said he didn’t leave the house for a week around the time his cat was sick. So how did he go to the vet?
It gets worse. In the Mail interview, he gave a day-by-day account of his sickness. On Day 12, he goes to Zhongnan University Hospital. He says:
> As soon as I get there, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia. So that’s why my lungs are making that noise. I am sent for a battery of tests lasting six hours.
And then says that he went home either that day, or the next.
> Day 13: I arrived back at my apartment late yesterday evening. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for the pneumonia but I’m reluctant to take them
But in an interview with FOX News said:
> He said he went to the hospital after he struggled to breathe and experienced a bad cough, both of which are signs of the pneumonia-like illness.
>
> "I was stunned when the doctors told me I was suffering from the virus. I thought I was going to die but I managed to beat it,” he told the outlet, adding he was hospitalized at Zhongnan University Hospital for two weeks following his diagnosis.
In his earlier story, he was at the hospital for less than a day. Now it’s two weeks.
But also, the doctors “told [him he] was suffering from the virus”, but this is impossible - the virus hadn’t been discovered yet. The whole point of Saar bringing him up is that he’s a supposed anomalous case before the official pandemic. So how did the doctors tell him this?
In the Mail interview, he tells a different story of how he learned he’d had COVID:
> Day 52: A notification from the hospital informs me that I was infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. I suppose I should be pleased that I can’t catch it again — I’m immune now.
Day 52 would be January 11th. So I think he’s saying that, a month after he recovered, the hospital “informs” him it was coronavirus. Charitably, maybe they kept his samples (really?), then re-tested them after COVID was discovered, found he had it, and told him. But, at a time when the eyes of the world medical establishment were fixated on Wuhan and its new pandemic, didn’t they think to tell anybody that they’d confirmed a case two weeks before any other known cases? Just called Connor and said “Hey, you’re the first ever COVID patient, congrats” and did absolutely nothing else? And then he didn’t show up in any of those WHO searches for early cases?
There’s one more weird inconsistency. Connor said in his interview that he thinks he might have gotten COVID at “the fish market”:
> Maybe I caught the coronavirus at the fish market. It’s a great place to get food on a budget, a part of the real Wuhan that ordinary Chinese people use every day, and I regularly do my shopping there. Since the outbreak became international news, I’ve seen hysterical reports (especially in the U.S. media) that exotic meats such as bat and even koala are on sale at the fish market. I’ve never seen that.
This sounds to me like a reference to the Huanan Seafood Central Market, ie the wet market with the raccoon-dogs where the first confirmed cases were found. He says “the fish market” like he expects us to know which one he means, and adds that “since the outbreak became international news”, he’d seen “hysterical reports” in US media about it. US media was covering the Huanan Market because that’s where the pandemic was first found; it didn’t cover any other fish market in Wuhan.
During the debate, Saar objected that Connor lived on the opposite side of Wuhan from the wet market; it would have taken him about an hour to get there. It would be weird to “regularly” do your shopping somewhere an hour away. Saar speculated that Connor meant somewhere closer to his home.
I can’t deny that it’s weird to do your regular shopping at a market an hour away, but it really sounds like he’s referring to the wet market where all the cases started here.
But also, isn’t it weird that the first ever coronavirus case is a white person? And that he’s 25 years old, yet was hospitalized with COVID (about 1% of people in their 20s with COVID require hospitalization)?
I think the best explanation for all of this is that Connor was making this all up. He told whatever story sounded cool at the time, and all of his stories ended up contradicting each other or making no sense. This would also explain why he said he had COVID at a time when, by the standard narrative, it either didn’t exist yet or was confined to a single-digit number of people.
### 1.11: Rootclaim Response
Saar and Rootclaim wrote a response to my earlier post. You can read it at [COVID origins debate: response to Scott Alexander.](https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/) I’ll post the introduction and first summary, you can go to the link for the rest of the case, and I’ll respond to parts I disagree with below.
> We were initially excited to have Scott cover the story, hoping that someone with an affinity to probabilities would like to dig into our analysis and fully understand it. Sadly, Scott seemingly hadn’t enough time to do so and our exchange focused on fixing factual mistakes in earlier drafts of his post and explaining why rules-of-thumb in probabilistic thinking that he proposed do not work in practice. We did not get to discuss the details of our analysis, resulting in a post that is essentially a repeat of the judges’ reports with extra steps.
>
> His post has two main messages:
>
> 1. **It’s hard to get probabilistic inference right** – we fully agree with this and ironically his post is a great example, containing many probabilistic inference mistakes, some of which are listed below. While we agree it’s hard, our experience taught us that it is far from impossible.
> 2. **Zoonosis is a more likely hypothesis due to being better supported by the evidence** – This is completely untrue, but to fully understand it one has to commit to learning how to do probabilistic inference correctly, which Scott could not free enough time to do.
>
> Instead of explaining the whole methodology and how it applies to Covid origins, which will take too long, we will focus on the main mistake in all the analyses in Scott’s post – believing that the early cluster of cases in the Huanan Seafood Market (HSM) is strong evidence for zoonosis. Scott prepared a very useful table comparing the probabilities various people gave to the evidence about Covid origins (discussed later in more details). It nicely shows how the zoonosis conclusion stands on this single leg, and once it is removed, lab-leak becomes the winning hypothesis (Scott specifically will flip to 94% lab-leak).
>
> Having explained this many times in many ways, we realize by now that it is not easy to understand, but we promise that those who make the effort will be rewarded with a glimpse of how much better we can all be at reasoning about the world, and will be able to reach high confidence that Covid originated from a lab.
>
> Given this point’s importance, we will explain why HSM is negligible as evidence, using three levels of detail: a simple version, a summarized version and a detailed version.
>
> ## Simple Version
>
> 1. The zoonosis hypothesis fully depends on the claim that it is an extreme coincidence that the early Covid patients were in HSM – a market with wildlife – unless a zoonotic spillover occurred there.
> 2. The rest of the evidence strongly supports the lab-leak hypothesis, so if this claim is mistaken, lab-leak becomes the most likely hypothesis.
> 3. There are multiple cases where a country has had zero Covid cases for a while, and then a cluster of cases appears in a seafood market. In all these outbreaks, there is no contention that the source is not zoonotic, as it is genetically descended from the Wuhan outbreak.
> 4. Since zero Covid periods are fairly rare, it is impossible to have so many market outbreaks unless there is something special about these locations. We discuss below what that may be, but whatever it is, it likely also applies to HSM, which is the largest seafood market in central China.
> 5. This collapses the ‘extreme coincidence’ claim, which as explained above, turns lab-leak into the leading hypothesis.
My strongest disagreement is with his Point 3 - the inference from other seafood-market-based COVID spread events. Saar writes:
> A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
Most of these outbreaks have been traced back to either a migrant worker (eg a fisherman from a country with COVID sells fish at the market of a country with Zero COVID) or a cold chain product. For example, here’s [Dai et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/) on the Xinfadi outbreak, the most important event of this type:
> According to a joint publication by the Beijing CDC and 13 research institutions, the outbreak at Xinfadi Market was likely to be initiated by fomite transmission from contaminated foods imported via cold-chain logistics ([Pang et al., 2020](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0305); [Beijing Daily, 2020b](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0020)). Based on the epidemiological investigations at the Xinfadi Market, the researchers preliminarily concluded that booth #S14 in the aquaculture product selling area on the basement floor of the primary trading hall was the source of the initial transmission. Specifically, five customers were tested positive for IgG/IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in serological screenings, all of whom visited booth #S14 on May 30 and 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, the owner of booth #S14 procured imported and fully packaged salmon from a company's cold storage warehouse, then cut and processed the salmon for sale at the Xinfadi Market. Laboratory tests showed that sample swabs from five salmon fish from this supplier were tested positive by examining all salmon in the original sealed packages (*n* = 3582) in the cold storage facility. Viral genome sequencing showed that the viral strain isolated from one of the positive salmon swabs was homologous to that isolated from the infected persons and environmental samples at the Xinfadi Market ([Beijing Daily, 2020b](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0020)). The joint study reported that an ancestral strain isolated from the Xinfadi Market in Beijing was markedly different from the strains identified in two preceding outbreaks in China and the sequences obtained in March 2020 in Beijing. Phylogenetic analysis assigned the ancestral Xinfadi strain to clade B.1.1. Given the fact that the ancestral sequences were mainly identified in Europe, the strain was more likely to be imported to Beijing rather than derived from strains previously circulating in China ([Pang et al., 2020](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0305)).
I know China has a bias towards believing frozen food COVID explanations, but this all sounds pretty convincing to me.
Why is it more often markets than other places with cold chain products? Partly it’s the migrant workers - a lot of seafood markets are right next to seaports, and the contact tracing eventually traces back to a fisherman who came in through the seaport - I don’t think this is any more mysterious than epidemics often starting via airport or any other transportation hub. But even just keeping the focus on cold chain products, - there have also been outbreaks in [seafood distribution warehouses](https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/covid-outbreak-at-sydney-seafood-distributor-great-ocean-foods-sparks-urgent-isolation-orders-c-3229873), [on docks](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202010/19/WS5f8d597da31024ad0ba7f9fa.html), and in [a seafood processing work area](https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/doi/10.46234/ccdcw2021.114). Markets have many more people than any of those locations, and maybe (total speculation) cutting on cutting boards could aerosolize bits of fish.
The strongest evidence that the Wuhan / Huanan Seafood Market epidemic wasn’t caused by migrant workers or imported seafood products is that there was no previous COVID-infected source of workers or seafood. If there had been, we would have noticed when the outbreak there spread (see Section 1.4 on Brazil).
Responses to a few of Saar’s other points below:
> How many locations other than markets provide an interface with wildlife? Were markets actually identified in advance to be high-risk spillover locations or only in retrospect?
I think scientists had called wet markets as an especially dangerous potential transmission location in advance. See for example [Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141584/), published in 2006, which says:
*» “In Chinese wet-markets, unique epicenters for transmission of potential viral pathogens, new genes may be acquired or existing genes modified through various mechanisms such as genetic reassortment, recombination and mutation. The wet-markets, at closer proximity to humans, with high viral burden or strains of higher transmission efficiency, facilitate transmission of the viruses to humans.”*
In 2004, [a paper on an emerging bird flu](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC324441/) expressed hope that it would not spread too widely, but concluded that:
» *“Even in the event of yet another lucky escape, more measures must be taken to limit the amplification of viruses with pandemic potential in the wet markets around the world.”*
In 2007, Reuters published an investigation: [Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket/china-market-may-be-breeding-ground-for-deadly-viruses-idUSHKG27143120071210/), which said things like:
*» “We face similar threats from other viruses and such epidemics can happen because we continue to have very crowded markets in China," said Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong. "Even though official measures are in place, they are not faithfully followed. We are not talking about just civet cats, but all animals," he added.”*
[Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112390/), published 2004, is admittedly focusing on the next SARS1 outbreak instead of on SARS2, but gets bonus points for mentioning *both* wet markets *and* labs as likely causes of the next pandemic:
*» “Will SARS reappear? This question confronts public-health officials worldwide, particularly infectious disease personnel in those regions of the world most affected by the disease and the economic burden of SARS, including China, Taiwan, and Canada. Will the virus re-emerge from wet markets or from laboratories working with SARS CoV, or are asymptomatic infections ongoing in human beings? Similar questions can be asked about a pandemic of influenza that is probably imminent. Knowledge of the ecology of influenza in wet markets can be used as an early-warning system to detect the reappearance of SARS or pandemic influenza.”*
Saar mentions that there are several other possible sources like restaurants or farms. I think Peter demonstrated during the debate that pandemics are unlikely to start in rural areas, so farms aren’t that important. Restaurants mostly source their products from wet markets. During SARS1, some pandemics started in restaurants because they kept the civets in cages next to the diners (like how some Western restaurants keep lobsters). After SARS1, restaurants stopped doing that and became a less likely spillover location.
Saar again:
> Scott quotes Peter, who implies that under the lab-leak hypothesis, we would expect the confirmed early cases to be centered around the WIV. However, cases are not expected to center on the lab. The lab is not spraying viruses into the air or hosting thousands of locals daily. If a worker gets infected, they spread the virus to their friends and family at completely different locations.
In most places with an outbreak of known origin, epidemics show some geographic clustering. This has been true ever since the very beginning of epidemiology, when John Snow successfully traced a cholera outbreak back to its origin at a contaminated water pump by taking the center of the map of cholera cases.
This isn’t a 100% law of nature; an infected lab worker might get lucky and not pass it to any of his lab co-workers. Still, we might expect him to infect his family, the stores he went to, or the restaurants he went to.
If he lived near his workplace, these might also be near the lab. If he didn’t - let’s say he lived on the other side of town and had a long commute - he would start a cluster near his house, or his favorite store, or his favorite restaurant. Then the people there would infect their families/co-workers/stores/restaurants. The cluster would start somewhere! Sure, some people would infect nobody close to their work or home, and instead just infect one person a hundred miles away who they breathed on during a trip - but this is the exception, not the rule.
So you wouldn’*t* expect a totally random distribution of cases all around Wuhan. There would be one center, or maybe several centers.
But none of the claims that COVID was quietly spreading for months before the wet market have pointed to some alternate center of cases. If COVID was spreading for months before the lab, it somehow spread in a completely diffuse geographical pattern, with people exactly as likely to infect people far away from them as close to them - until it reached the wet market in December, and then spread in the normal center-radiating-outward way that every other infection spreads.
> All the evidence trying to support a spillover at the market is based on complex models with many single points of failure, built from unreliable and biased data. Therefore, it is difficult to give this evidence significant weight as there is always a possibility of errors in the data or its interpretation. More on this in the UFO comment below.
Disagree. “First known case was at a wet market” is as simple as it comes. Certainly it’s less complex than “the virus has a 12 nucleotide insertion at the furin cleavage site, and even though those sometimes happen by natural recombination probably this one didn’t, and even though it looks out of frame maybe there was some weird thing going on with serine that made it in frame this one time only”, which is Saar’s star piece of evidence.
I understand Saar thinks he can come up with lots of objections to “seen near wet market is suspicious for wet market origin”, then claim that getting over those objections requires “complexity”. But if Peter had no dignity, he could also come up with lots of objections to “seen in same city as Wuhan Institute of Virology is suspicious". He could say that maybe the civet farms of Hubei province were uniquely blah blah blah, and then Saar would have to prove that the civet farms weren’t uniquely blah blah blah, and then he could say “Oh, sure seems like you have a complex model with lots of unique points of failure, it all depends on fifty facts about the regulation of civet farms.”
> To illustrate what a market looks like in a real zoonotic pandemic, consider [this study from SARS1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92471/). The researchers went to a random market and sampled the wildlife sold there. 4 of 6 civets sampled were positive, and 3 of them were phylogenetically distinct (i.e. infected in completely different places).
A scientist I talked to says the 3 phylogenetically distinct lineages were most likely sampling errors. Still, this seems irrelevant to me since, again, no raccoon-dogs were tested.
> Scott explains that Covid’s closest known relative, BANAL-52, is rare and so it’s highly unlikely the WIV would’ve had it available as the starting point to engineer Covid . . . This is a basic mistake. SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here.
No BANAL-52 relative close enough to create COVID from has ever been discovered.
By mentioning BANAL-52, I was trying to be maximally charitable to the lab leak side. In order to create COVID, they would need a virus very close to COVID. But in years and years of searching, nobody has ever discovered a virus like this. Therefore it must be rare. As a way of bounding how rare, let’s see how rare the closest virus ever discovered is. That’s BANAL-52. It is very rare. Therefore, the COVID ancestor must be rarer than that.
I don’t know how strong this argument is, because maybe there are millions of rare viruses capable of becoming pandemics, such that getting any one of them is very easy, even though each one individually is rare. The version of this I find convincing is that it should be a probabilistic cost to say that WIV did gain-of-function on a seemingly undiscovered and so-far-very-hard-to-discover rare virus instead of on any of the usual SARS-like viruses that people do their gain-of-function research on.
> Overall, all attempts to portray [Connor Reed] as an unstable, delusional person were unsuccessful. He is an ordinary person who very accurately described Covid-19 symptoms in real-time and claims to have received a positive test result. The timing and location matches the lab leak hypothesis and is impossible for the HSM claim. Therefore, they must discredit him.
>
> It is worth noting here the biased evidentiary standards used by zoonotic proponents. Reed’s testimony about his sickness, given on camera to multiple outlets, is deceitful and should be ignored. Yet, an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication is definitely identified as Mr. Chen (another possible pre-HSM case) and should be considered reliable.
See above for why I don’t trust Connor Reed.
I’m not sure why Saar attributes Mr. Chen to “an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication”. When I looked for Chen information, I got [this thread](https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1397227238764990469), where it’s attributed to two Chinese hospital doctors, cross-checked with the Chinese COVID data repository, and double-cross-checked with the supplementary table in a peer-reviewed paper published by a team of Wuhan doctors.
> To understand how ridiculous the claim is that the HKU1 insertion looks just as engineered as SARS2’s, here are their alignments. Hopefully that should be enough.
>
> COVID:
>
> HKU1:
I’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works.
Surely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations).
The fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID.
Or am I missing something here?
> [The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal).
>
> Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products.
From [a Vox article](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/3/18/23644776/covid-origin-raccoon-dog-beijing-wuhan-coronavirus-zoonotic-lab-leak-sars) from March 2023:
> From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data.
>
> Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit.
>
> The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts.
>
> It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China.
>
> “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.”
>
> […] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago.
>
> “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.”
>
> The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
For what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this:
**December:** COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies
**Early January:** Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person
**Late January:** Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now.
**February:** Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes.
**March:** COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy.
**April:** Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission.
# 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak
---
### 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?
**randomstringofcharacters [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52651041):**
> Isn't [the pandemic starting near the lab] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past.
Many people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away.
During the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade).
This isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade.
# 3: Other Points That Came Up
---
### 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds
**quiet\_NaN [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52659235):**
> Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone.
>
> The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are):
>
> Peter -20.7
> Saar 2.7
> Eric -3.1
> Will -2.5
> Scott -1.2
> Daniel -1.4
>
> One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it "trolling", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market.
I might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying:
This is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc.
In an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me.
Peter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers.
Trying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be:
* During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.
* On his site, he properly adjusted for human fallibility.
* Peter, very reasonably responding to the numbers Saar gave during the debate and not the numbers he had elsewhere, trolled him by giving a set of numbers that came out to 10^25-to-one against lab leak.
* I put the numbers everyone had actually given into my spreadsheet.
* Saar asked me to replace with his adjusted numbers, which he conveniently had in a canonical location. Peter had never bothered coming up with adjusted numbers (because he wasn’t as interested in probabilistic analysis) and didn’t ask me to change anything, so I didn’t.
* The post made it look like Saar’s numbers were reasonable and Peter’s were crazy.
* In the part about why Saar thought the debate was unfair, I repeated his argument against Peter’s crazy numbers. And because I thought it was an interesting and true rationality point, I went over it myself and endorsed it separately from “it’s a thing Saar said”.
* This was unfair to Peter.
Over the past few weeks, I exchanged ~100 emails with Peter and Saar, and made dozens of tiny changes like this in response to one side or the other thinking my portrayal of them was unfair. Eventually I decided I would go crazy if I spent one more second talking to either of them and hit PUBLISH. This was unfair to them, and let a couple of smaller or harder-to-untangle misrepresentations get through, which I regret. But not as much as I would have regretted continuing the discussion.
### 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis
**Tobias Schneider [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52650103):**
> I have no horse in this particular race, but I do have a lot of expertise in some of the areas rootclaims "investigates" (especially the stuff related to Syria and chemical weapons) - where their analysis is so shoddy and laughable it's indistinguishable from Youtube conspiracies - and the biggest surprise to me here is that anybody really bothers with rootclaim in the first place? The more you learn...
Tobias is talking about [a Rootclaim analysis](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013) on who perpetrated a deadly chemical weapons attack in Syria (Rootclaim says it was rebels; Tobias presumably thinks it was the government).
This analysis is at the top of Rootclaim’s [Track Record page](https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-track-record), which says:
> Rootclaim’s conclusion contradicted all Western intelligence agencies, but years later was shown to be correct. This demonstrates that superior inference methodologies are far more important than privileged access to information.
Apparently Tobias disagrees that it “later was shown to be correct”. Of note, a Tobias Scheider is listed as editor of [Syria in Context](https://twitter.com/SyriaContext), a set of “weekly briefs covering key humanitarian, stabilization, and security policy developments in and around Syria”. Wikipedia and all Western governments agree with Tobias and not Saar.
After Saar repeated that his analysis turned out to be “spot on”, Joshua E [objected](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52686903):
> If you are going to claim your analysis is spot on, please link to a credible independent source. Otherwise this comes across as we believe this unlikely thing and used our analysis you find shoddy to conclude we were right so you should not consider our analysis shoddy.
And [Saar again](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52700709):
> Follow the link [[to a discussion on Rootclaim](https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/)]. It describes external forensic work which you can verify yourself . . . [Media] outlets have no incentive to publish such findings. Sadly these are the kinds of things you need to verify yourself.
The Rootclaim analysis says:
> The new findings are a result of what we believe to be the most impressive independent open-source investigation in history. It was initiated nearly a year ago by several volunteers who reviewed all the evidence from the attack and managed to uncover incontrovertible evidence implicating an opposition faction, confirming Rootclaim’s conclusion.
Which links to this report, somehow affiliated with Rootclaim and written by "Michael Kobs, Chris Kabusk, Adam larson, and many helpful citizen investigators." It looks like Saar and some other people who didn’t believe the standard theory worked together to do some video forensics, which they published in a report. But governments, intelligence agencies, the media, Wikipedia, etc, haven’t noticed the report or updated on it.
So when Saar says that his method has a great track record, what he means is that when he looks into it further, he becomes even more convinced of his previous position. He doesn’t mean that any kind of external consensus has shifted towards his results over time.
During my email discussions with Saar, he kept insisting his position was obviously right. He would send me emails like (not exact quotes) ‘Now that I’ve demolished all the evidence for zoonotic transmission, you have to agree with me, right?’ or ‘You must secretly agree I’m right, it’s just be hard for you to admit.’ I’m sympathetic to this way of thinking - my beliefs also intuitively feel so obvious that nobody could possibly disagree. But I eventually learned real life didn’t work this way; I think Rootclaim would benefit from a similar lesson.
### 3.3: Closing Thoughts On Rootclaim
In my post, I suggested that if Saar wants to convince people that Rootclaim works, instead of sponsoring debates he should train more people to use it, then test whether there’s inter-rater reliability (eg five people, each doing an independent Rootclaim analysis, all get similar probabilities on COVID origins. Saar responded:
> We don’t think this would be convincing to a wide audience outside people who think like Scott. However, we don’t really have any better ideas, and would love to hear ideas from readers.
I don’t think you should do this for me or people who think like me. I think you should do it for yourself.
Have you ever done a Rootclaim analysis on Rootclaim itself? Probability that Rootclaim works significantly better than a smart person using their normal intuitive reasoning methods? Why not?
Maybe this is wrong, but still. You’ve got to be curious if it works, right? And short of an oracle, proving inter-rater reliability is the best you’re going to get.
Even if you don’t want to convince yourself, this is the correct next step. Again by analogy to Tetlock - if he had started with just one superforecaster, and his thesis was “this guy is really smart, but I refuse to prove it”, nothing would have changed. Instead, his theory of change goes through publishing in a bunch of papers, to identifying other superforecasters, to teaching general principles of superforecasting, to superforecasting as a service (either through specific superforecasters at GJO, or through projects that seek to emulate them like Metaculus, FutureSearch, etc). If Rootclaim doesn’t scale, it either dies with Saar, or at best Saar lives a long life and puts out a few more dozen Rootclaim analyses but nothing else comes of it. You’ve got to start training other people eventually, and part of that process involves demonstrating you did it right, and that’s going to involve inter-rater reliability.
# 4: Conclusions And Updates
I don’t like getting in fights, and boy was this a fight.
And I don’t like making sweeping generalizations about The Nature Of Pseudoscience - it’s too likely to be incredibly embarrassing if it later turns out I was one in the wrong.
But I do feel like there’s a method going on here. It’s nothing sinister, just that the lab leak people have 100x more zealots and energy, and there are some strategies that make sense in that position, which no single individual necessarily chooses, but which are very noticeable from the other side.
The most glaring is the constant focus on “as of one minute ago, the case for the opposite side is in SHAMBLES”. The “as of one minute ago” makes it hard to trust institutional consensus or published papers - what if they just haven’t caught up to the new evidence? The “in SHAMBLES” is always a couple of papers that have “now debunked” the best papers of the other side. These come out on a regular schedule. They’re usually by people in unrelated fields - the ones I saw on COVID origins were by computer scientists, physicists, and agricultural scientists. They’re usually either preprints, or published in weird journals in unrelated fields. But they sure do look like Scientific Papers and have lots of equations in them, and they always end with “…and therefore this one peripheral argument in So-And-So Et Al 2020 is wrong.”
Once you collect, I don’t know, ten of these, you can spam a bunch of opposing discourse with “This didn’t even consider these ten new papers, all converging upon the fact that this case has now been debunked”. The very prestigious researchers who wrote the original paper probably won’t respond, because they don’t have time to respond to pre-prints by agricultural scientists. So it does kind of look, to an outsider, like all of the top papers of the side with more institutional support are debunked. Even if you spend hours and hours talking to the scientists involved and trying to figure out the flaws, it doesn’t matter, because there will be a new set of papers like that a few weeks later.
Some of this is inevitable - and it’s also what correct people have to do when arguing against incorrect papers. When people were still treating eg stereotype threat as state-of-the-art, I would respond to people talking about it by listing some of the papers that had debunked it, and probably that was annoying to supporters who didn’t want to have to defend it. So I don’t want to claim it’s all inexcusable bad behavior. And one insulting person in the middle of ten thoughtful people with good responses still poisons the barrel and makes things feel hostile. Still, this is something I’m more sensitive to now.
A lot of these problems center on a failure mode of hyperfocusing on little details. What if the exact set of cases Worobey et al uses is contaminated by ascertainment bias? Then we have to throw it out, right? Compare Worobey’s analysis in the supplementary text, where he shows robustness to up to half of the cases being totally false. Or consider his search for alternative uncontaminated datasets and then showing how those demonstrate the same pattern. Or consider that the first five cases ever detected were all from the market, and even that’s enough to prove at least a pared-down version of Worobey’s thesis. It’s fine to also want to make sure the official argument is exactly right and not biased. But *just* doing that seems like a failure of focus.
This is also how I feel about “There was a Brazilian case in November!” or “There was a weird case that might have been something in Italy in October!” or whatever. Instead of focusing on the exact sentences in a paper with “PEER-REVIEWED!” on the header, think about the big picture. If there had been lots of COVID in Brazil in November 2019, why didn’t it spread? Why wasn’t Rio locking down at the same time Wuhan was? Why didn’t governments notice and start banning flights from Brazil? If there were a bunch of cases floating around Wuhan in autumn 2019, why didn’t any of them form noticeable case clusters, the same way COVID did everywhere else? Sure, the 30,000 negative blood tests already refute this, but you shouldn’t need those!
(and this is *also* how I feel about all the “A/B intermediate found in Malaysia! A/B intermediate found in Shanghai!” claims. Okay, so there were 1 billion cases of A, 2 billion cases of B, and . . . a single-digit number of cases of the intermediate, detected months later? Why? I’m not saying this is unanswerable, I’m saying that the fact that lab leak doesn’t even wonder about this or start making arguments for it is why I feel like they don’t have a story - just a stamp collection of anomalies that fade away under closer observation).
I know this comments post won’t be the end of the story. I know that (just as with every other one of my posts, I’m not blaming origins debaters in particular here) someone’s going to go “Sure, Scott confronted 489 arguments. But hw failed to confront the strongest argument against his case - this one obscure article in a Nepalese journal that nobody except me has ever heard of. That means he’s a bad-faith actor strawmanning everyone he disagrees with!” I know that someone will find some detail I’m wrong about and spam it all over Twitter with “Scott didn’t realize that an 91Q mutation is different from a ZY6 mutation, how can you ever trust anything he says?” And I know that next month, someone will come up with another SMOKING GUN! - and if I don’t respond to it immediately they’ll say I’m scared and know I’ve lost and am refusing to admit I’m wrong out of sheer stubbornness, and twist some quote of mine to show I’ve admitted I’ve changed my mind.
(The one argument I know about, haven’t responded to, and it really *is* because I’m lazy and scared and bad is [Michael Weissman’s Bayesian analysis here](https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v50). It’s 25,000 words and uses a bunch of logits and calculus. Sorry, pass.)
If it helps, I’m currently working out terms for a 6-digit lab leak bet of my own (no guarantee this will come to fruition, most of these fall apart in the resolution criteria stage). I feel bad for not being willing to answer every possible lab leak argument going forward, but hopefully offering lab leakers a few hundred thousand dollars if I’m wrong will be a suitable consolation prize.
For now, I’m still at 90-10 zoonosis. | Scott Alexander | 143072255 | Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate | acx |
# Open Thread 324
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** This is your last chance to take [the 2024 ACX Survey](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/take-the-2024-acx-survey). I will close submissions Wednesday.
**2:** ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more. [See the Meetups List for details](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024).
**3:** The Less Wrong team is hosting a conference/festival for the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent blogosphere, [Less Online](http://less.online/), the weekend before Manifest. Berkeley CA, 5/31 - 6/2, $400 per ticket, some housing and childcare available. I’ll be there.
**4:** The hedge fund Bridgewater [is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/bridgewater/). US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting). | Scott Alexander | 143374272 | Open Thread 324 | acx |
# Links For April 2024
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** This blog has previously covered sinister-sounding British political titles like [Shadow Lord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Lord_Chancellor). But recently I learned there is also [a Night Czar](https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture/24-hour-london/night-czar).
**2:** In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that [The US Tried Permanent Daylight Savings In The ‘70s, [But] People Hated It](https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/). “While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42% three months later.” After less than a year, Congress bowed to popular opinion and re-instituted the time changes.
**3:** A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to [build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel](https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2022/03/09/tower-babel-coming-ark-encounter/). You might think “wait, this is the opposite of what the Bible wants you to do”, but they have [a blog post explaining why they disagree](https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/core-ministry/rebuilding-babel/):
> Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices.
When our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.
**4:** Current status of “missing heritability” claims: [being used as evidence for reincarnation](https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=130941).
**5:** In honor of International Women’s Day, Binance [has launched](https://tokenpost.com/Binance-Perfume-Launched-to-Bring-Crypto-Closer-to-Women-11371) “Binance Perfume” to “bring crypto[currency] closer to women”.
I was skeptical, but these sure are women.
**6:** [Chatbot Arena Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard) - if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score. Claude 3 and GPT-4 currently locked in a tight race for first.
**7:** From the subreddit: [If people want community so much, why aren’t we creating it?](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b7rtgf/if_people_want_community_so_much_why_arent_we/) Lots of comments from would-be community builders sharing their experiences with why it’s hard.
**8:** Matt Bruenig: [The ACLU Is Trying To Destroy The Biden [Labor Relations Board]](https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-aclu-is-trying-to-destroy-the). Story as I understand it: an Asian ACLU employee said during a phone call that she was "afraid to raise certain issues" with her boss, plus a few other comments along those lines. The ACLU found out and fired her for racism, because her boss was black. She appealed to the government's labor relation board; in order to fight back, the ACLU's lawyers are trying to redefine labor law to force disgruntled employees into company-approved arbitration. The pro-labor wing of the left is understandably upset. For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from [ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters](https://www.theonion.com/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headquarters-1819567187) to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
**9:** In [a Bay Area House Party post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party), I discussed the legality of bribing would-be politicians not to run. Turns out [someone tried this](https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/03/13/imperial-county-supervisor-candidate-offered-half-million-dollars-not-to-run/72761962007/) (with a $500K bribe, no less!) and it’s illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison.
**10:** Did you know: [President Eisenhower’s grandson married President Nixon’s daughter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eisenhower).
**11:** MichaelMF lists [his favorite up-and-coming bloggers](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bel00l/my_favorite_upandcoming_bloggers/).
**12:** Related: [Peter Singer has a Substack](https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/) now. And so does [Slavoj Zizek](https://slavoj.substack.com/).
**13:** For April Fools’ Day, the Less Wrong admin team pivoted to music and released an (AI-generated) album of some of their favorite Less Wrong and other rationalsphere posts. Here’s Basil Halperin’s [AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis: Markets Are Not Expecting AI In The Next 30 Years](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or):
…and a selection from my [Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/):
Full album [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lkel_FaGMybMxi90HGWzruoAMzObRMzqc), background and links to songs in other media [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMo5PuXnZDwRjhHhE/the-story-of-i-have-been-a-good-bing).
**14:** Elsewhere in rationalsphere April Fools: Linch et al announce [Open Asteroid Impact](https://openasteroidimpact.org/): “When Krishna said ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,’ I believe he was thinking about the impact on jobs.” Also: [Excerpts From The Effective Altruist Talmud](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/363kggkFJHz5ys5T7/excerpts-from-the-ea-talmud).
**15:** [Invasion Literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature) was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe. Popular sub-genres include "Germany invades Britain", "Germany invades America", "China invades Australia", and "Communists invade everywhere". Sometimes the attraction would be a story about how ordinary citizens banded together to protect their way of life; other times it would be biting social commentary on how the government was too weak to prevent invasion:
> Several of the books were written by or ghostwritten for military officers and experts of the day who believed that the nation would be saved if the particular tactic that they favoured was or would be adopted.
Also: “Le Queux and his publisher changed the ending depending on the language, so in the German print edition the Fatherland wins, while in the English edition the Germans lose.”
**16:** [New African company tries to do cellphone-based cash using crypto](https://www.observers.com/beyond-bitcoins-hype-real-use-cases-in-africa/). Kenya’s M-PESA cellphone cash really helped their economy; other African countries tried to replicate it but due to different governments and stakeholders weren’t able to make it work. I don’t know enough about the constraints to predict whether this avoids them, but I wish it well.
**17:** [Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men](https://default.blog/p/lesbians-who-only-date-men). There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender: if gender is non-biological and about how you identify, why can’t transgender status also be non-biological and about how you identify? That is, why can’t I (always male, never transitioned) identify as a “trans man” if I feel like the label resonates better with my inner self? So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”. But according to Default Friend, now something like this is happening in real life.
**18:** Amidst a rapidly-expanding YIMBY movement, continuing homelessness and rent affordability crises, and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to . . . [make it harder to build houses in San Francisco](https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/26/san-franciso-mayor-breed-peskin-housing-density/), and overturned the pro-YIMBY mayor’s veto.
(since there’s been some confusion - I like suburbs and am against YIMBYs’ obvious lust for destroying them. But if you want the suburban life, you shouldn’t be sitting on space in America’s second densest and most dynamic city. San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else. We don’t need to turn currently-habitable places into prisons, but it’s fine to say the prison is growing overcrowded and needs more cell blocks.)
**19:** Related: [Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise](https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-have-i-what-have-i-done-to-deserve-c5d) (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places). I think this is a brave post - people are going to make fun of him as an “old man” or whatever. But he’s completely right - I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on, and this is also a big part of why I rarely use public transit (though there are also [other reasons](https://twitter.com/SFBART/status/1773837127874162775)). Likely cause is de-policing making cities reluctant to enforce noise ordinances; I think the best option would be to reverse this. If the government refuses to enforce laws against criminals, then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos. I realize this sounds extreme, but there are plenty of other options for people who aren’t bad actors (eg headphones) and I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.
**20:** Amanda Askell (philosopher now working at Anthropic) [on what Hume can tell us about AGI:](https://twitter.com/AmandaAskell/status/1772010470456881172)
**21:** Updates from ACX grantees: [antiparasitic drug oxfendazole has been approved for Phase 2 trials (ie trials in humans) in Peru](https://oxfendazoledevelopmentgroup.org/). And Dr. Roy and his citizen drinking water surveillance project have [published a paper](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsestwater.4c00090) discussing some of their work over the past decade.
**22:** George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that [Increasing IQ Is Trivial](https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible) and the scientific consensus that it’s impossible is just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things (see also his counter to Gwern’s “Algernon” argument [here](https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-is-trivial)). He says that he was able to increase his IQ 7-9 points (after controlling properly for learning effects) and that the first two people to try to replicate his method got 10 and 11 point increases). He’s being a little coy about what exactly the method is, because he doesn’t want too many people trying it half-assed and messing it up, but says it involves:
> …targeted NIR interference therapy, short UV during the morning, a lot of inversion-based exercises where I focused on contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles, a few customized breathing exercises (think wim hof), figuring out the correct levels for a bunch of cholinergic vaso[dilators/modulators] (think noopept), massage therapies to reduce tension on the spine, some proprioception-heavy movement practices, a niche tibetan metta meditation series… and about 5 other things that are even harder to compress.
>
> The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work I think the core point of "how" is really unimportant, since I didn't do something optimal... not even close, I did something "silly" that I could execute part time with pocket change. So I don't want to bias people towards this particular method.
He’s now trying to get other people to replicate his results more formally. He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”. If you’re interested, email him and he’ll try to set something up with you via Zoom calls. He says he prefers to work with groups of 2-3 subjects who can provide a couple of controls each. You can reach him at george3d6@gmail.com . If you do, email me and let me know you’re doing it, as a sort of pre-registration and so I can follow up with you later. I have very high priors on these kinds of claims being false, and I think you should only do this if you think it would be a fun experiment even if it didn’t work. Related:
**23:** Did you know: [the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/23/world/asteroid-dinosaur-extinction-spring-scn/index.html).
**24:** [How The Alt-Right Won](https://newaltright.substack.com/p/how-the-alt-right-won), by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working. The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
**25:** Tech millionaire Yun-Fang Juan has [pledged $1 million to a "Scientific Integrity Fund"](https://www.science.org/content/article/science-integrity-sleuths-welcome-legal-aid-fund-whistleblowers) to defend science whistleblowers / "data detectives" against litigious authors (eg the Data Colada vs. Francesca Gino case).
**26:** [Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/have-the-liberal-arts-gone-conservative) [may be paywalled for some people], historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, *does* make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.
**27:** [Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) reviews nitric oxide nasal spray](https://acesounderglass.com/2024/02/04/nitric-oxide-for-covid-and-other-viral-infections/) / “Enovid”, a promising treatment for respiratory infections like colds and COVID (you spray the nitric oxide in your nasal passages, and it kills the viruses). I use this, but not enough to feel like I have an opinion on how well it works.
**28:** [Psychiatry At The Margins criticizes Mad In America](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/how-mad-in-america-misrepresents); I find MiA really deceptive and am happy to link people pushing back against them.
**29:** Did you know: “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant [cinnamon birds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon#History) collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests. Pliny the Elder wrote that . . . the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.”
**30:** Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down? And you know how sociologists say that after a religion’s predicted apocalypse fails to materialize, some believers become even more committed? [r/superstonk](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/) (FAQ [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/qig65g/welcome_rall_looking_to_catch_up_on_the_gme_saga/)) is the subreddit for people who believe that the *true* Gamestop short squeeze is still coming, that it will take down all of Wall Street, and that Gamestop will soon be worth “[from] $10,000 per share to $100 million per share - with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to.”
**31:** [List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse). It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”. | Scott Alexander | 143211970 | Links For April 2024 | acx |
# Open Thread 323
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Congratulations to Daniel M, aka SmallSingapore, who finally checked his email after a month and realized he’d won [the ACX Forecasting contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2023-prediction-contest)! Daniel describes himself as:
> A lowly data analyst with a background in economics, from Chicago IL. I placed bets on PredictIt during the 2016 election cycle and came out slightly behind after transaction fees, but otherwise have no formal forecasting experience. My "strategy" consisted of going with my gut (cue the Colbert clip) and skipping the questions where I had no prior information to go off of. I credit all success to luck and mindlessly absorbing copious amounts of information on Twitter (mostly TPOT accounts). If people want to contact me, they can do so at [smallsingapore[at]gmail[dot]com](mailto:smallsingapore@gmail.com) (I'll respond more promptly, I promise haha).
**2:** There were some technical difficulties with the forecasting score hashes last time. Here are some improved versions, total score only, sorry.
Blind Score Hash
60.2KB ∙ XLSX file
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/14ee735f-71a2-4751-95b5-85b97e00a8af.xlsx)
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/14ee735f-71a2-4751-95b5-85b97e00a8af.xlsx)
Full Score Hash
12.9KB ∙ XLSX file
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/1f74c54d-4a2e-4a1e-bc95-9d28ecff8cf3.xlsx)
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/1f74c54d-4a2e-4a1e-bc95-9d28ecff8cf3.xlsx)
Go to [this site](https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha256.html) and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages [on this graphic](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F14b48344-51fa-4a5d-bb06-c0f52c5ebd9c_720x468.png) from [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023). Thanks again to Leon for making this work.
**3:** Several things I’ve been asked to recommend this Open Thread, including:
* [Newspeak House](https://newspeak.house/) is a center of the London rationalist community. It describes itself as “an independent residential college since 2015” teaching “a one year course on Introduction To Political Technology” which is “designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions”. Given the name this all sounds slightly sinister, but next year’s course is open and [you can sign up here](https://newspeak.house/study-with-us).
* The [Tract](https://buildwithtract.com/) team is in the Bay this month and looking to connect with “YIMBY angel investors who are interested in tech solutions to vetocracy” as well as YIMBY campaigners, urban planners, and zoning nerds. If that’s you, contact them at jamie[at]buildwithtract[dot]com
* The Japanese AI safety community apparently exists and is holding a Technical AI Safety Conference in Tokyo in, uh, four days, so if you’re interested [sign up quickly](https://tais2024.cc/). Attendance is free, it looks like the talks are in English, and featured speakers include Dan Hendrycks and researchers from Anthropic and DeepMind.
* GiveWell [is looking for a new Head of Philanthropy](https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs/head-of-philanthropy), which I think means mostly fundraising. $200K+ salary, office/remote optional, international candidates welcome.
**4:** Several people have asked me to recommend their blog in the Substack Recommendations system. I have a blanket policy of always refusing, because otherwise I would worry about offending someone and stumble into recommending everybody. If your blog is good, I will hopefully come across it and recommend it without you asking me, sorry. | Scott Alexander | 143148901 | Open Thread 323 | acx |
# Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
1. Africa & Middle East
2. Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
3. Europe (including UK)
4. North America & Central America
5. South America
There should very shortly be a map of these meetups on [the LessWrong community page](https://www.lesswrong.com/community).
Within each region it’s alphabetized first by country then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, **A**ustria. The exception is the USA, where they’re also alphabetized by state - so the first entry in the USA is Phoenix, **A**rizona.
I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley meetup on June 5th. Skyler will provisionally be attending Northampton, Manhattan, Boston, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Burlington, and Berkeley.
**Extra Info For Potential Attendees**
**1.** If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
**2**. You don’t have to RSVP or contact the organizer to be able to attend (unless the event description says otherwise); RSVPs are mostly to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up, and let them tell you if there are last-second changes. I’ve also given email addresses or other contact information for organizers in case you have a question.
**Extra Info For Meetup Organizers:
1.** If you’re the host, bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere (or otherwise be identifiable).
**2.** Bring blank labels and markers for nametags.
**3.** Have people type their name and email address in a spreadsheet or in a Google Form (accessed via a bit.ly link or QR code), so you can start a mailing list to make organizing future meetups easier.
**4.** If it’s the first meetup, people are probably just going to want to talk, and if you try to organize some kind of “fun” “event” it’ll probably just be annoying.
**5.** It’s easier to schedule a followup meetup while you’re having the first, compared to trying to do it later on by email.
**6.** In case people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention [reciprocity.io](https://www.reciprocity.io/), the rationalist friend-finder/dating site.
**7.** If you didn’t make a LessWrong event for your meetup, the LessWrong team did it for you using the email address you gave here. To claim your event, log into LW (or create an account) using that email address, or message the LW team on Intercom (chat button in the bottom right corner of lesswrong.com).
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org.
# Africa & Middle East
## Israel
**HAIFA, ISRAEL**
Contact: Shai
Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com
Time: Tuesday, April 9th, 6:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the zikaron garden next to the city hall, in a picnic blanket on the grass and I will be wearing a red shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.If it rains we will meet up in a bookstore called 'goldmund' which is located at ekron street 6.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G4PRX7X+CQ>
**JERUSALEM, ISRAEL**
Contact: Gruns
Contact Info: aviram[dot]ben[dot]eliav[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 17th, 5:00 PM
Location: Gan Sacher near the gan sipur cafe
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G3QQ6J5+V4>
Notes: please email me so we can know how many people to expect
**TEL AVIV, ISRAEL**
Contact: Inbar
Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 25th, 5:00 PM
Location: Sarona Park, grass area close to the Benedict restaurant, will have ACX sign and red balloons
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MJ9>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361>
Notes: Everyone is welcome! Feel free to bring snacks.
## Nigeria
**ABUJA, NIGERIA**
Contact: Olaoluwa
Contact Info: akinloluwa[dot]olaoluwa[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:00 AM
Location: The 'High Table' at Habil Cafe, No 3 Atapkme Street, Wuse II, Abuja. There will be a small sign saying 'Abuja ACX Meetup'
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6FX93F9H+J9>
Notes: RSVP on LessWrong will be nice. Ended up eating all the food last time ):
**KADUNA, NIGERIA**
Contact: Abdul maleek
Contact Info: maleekcherry510[ a t]gmail[d ot ]c om
Time: Friday, May 31, 01:00 PM
Location: Almara Tech innovation Hub
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7F29GCHR+78>
## South Africa
**CAPE TOWN**
Contact: Yaseen
Contact Info: yaseen[at]mowzer[dot]co[dot]za
Time: Saturday, April 20, 11:00 AM
Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3
Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or email or WhatsApp +27 79 813 5144, so I know how big a table to book.
## **Turkey**
**ANTALYA, TURKEY**
Contact: Annalise
Contact Info: annalisetarhan[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Beach Park, Shakespeare, on the patio
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G8GVMMC+4VR>
**ISTANBUL, TURKEY**
Contact: Ozge
Contact Info: ozgeco[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 12:00 PM
Location: We meet in Kadıkoy at Kahve Dunyası at Yeni Iskele. Yeni Iskele is the seaport where we take ferry to get to Eminonu/Karakoy from Kadıkoy ( not to Besiktas). Please go upstairs, walk through the bookstore Istanbul Kitapcisi to meet me at the terrace. I will have a ACX MEETUP sign. If it rains, we meet inside the cafe, or under large cafe umbrellas.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VC+4R>
Notes: I hope we chat with coffee.
# Asia-Pacific
## Australia
**CAIRNS, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA**
Contact: Ben
Contact Info: greenblue4004[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 5:00 PM
Location: Near the Cairns Esplanade Fun Ship Playground. I will be wearing a green t shirt and a black legionnaire hat.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/5RM73QW7+383>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs.
**CANBERRA, ACT, AUSTRALIA**
Contact: Declan
Contact Info: declan\_t[at]hotmail[dot]com
Time: Monday, May 6th, 6:00 PM
Location: Grease Monkey, 19 Lonsdale St Braddon (probably outside tables)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RPFP4GM+R3>
Notes: Usually first Monday of each month. Cheap pizza. Please RSVP by email so I can book a table.
**MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA**
Contact: Ryan
Contact Info: xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 5th, 6:00 PM
Location: Queensberry hotel (dining room) 593 Swanston Street Carlton
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46>
Group Link: Whats app group: <https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hpdy92bVrVU6vn9Gke08E0> Facebook group: [Less Wrong Melbourne](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/)
Notes: Please RSVP by email/WhatsApp/Facebook for booking purposes (not a strict requirement)
**SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA**
Contact: Chris Waterguy
Contact Info: singkong[plus]rat[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 18th, 6:00 PM
Location: Club Sydney (RSL Sydney) 565 George St, Sydney NSW 2000 Instructions: entry needs photo ID. We meet on Level 2, the Chinese restaurant, in the glassed-off section.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/>
## China
**SHANGHAI**
Contact: SZ
Contact Info: asxsh[at]proton[dot]me
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 3:00 PM
Location: The Bunker（街垒）Pub, 190-3 Wulumuqi Rd North, Jing'an District. It's a small place, I'll have a sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8Q336CCR+XW7>
Notes: I'd prefer to see your email to know you're coming! No stress though, feel free to just show up. Drinks not required, come and hang out! It won't be just expats :)
## Hong Kong
**HONG KONG**
Contact: Max Bolingbroke
Contact Info: acx[at]alpha[dot]engineering
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM
Location: Private flat in The Oakhill, 28 Wood Road, Wan Chai
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7PJP75GG+HP>
Notes: Email me to RSVP and I will let you know which flat number to come to & give you an invite link to the ACX Hong Kong WhatsApp group. For those who couldn't RSVP in time I will also put an "ACX Meetup" sign outside the entrance of the building with the number of my flat on it.
## India
**BANGALORE, INDIA**
Contact: Nihal
Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 26th, 4:00 PM
Location: Matteo coffea - inside. This is where we have our regular meetups
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ>
Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong for the event of May
**HYDERABAD, INDIA**
Contact: Vatsal
Contact Info: mehra[dot]vatsal[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D-3, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana 500015, India
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7J9WFF4X+4P>
**MUMBAI, INDIA**
Contact: PB
Contact Info: e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 10:15 AM
Location: Versova Social, Juhu Versova Link Rd, Gharkul Society, Bharat Nagar, Versova, Andheri West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400061, India
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+H5>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4aAkHFJikMrtyhHZn/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024>
Group Link: LessWrong: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4>
Email List:<https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong and join our google group: <https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about>
## Indonesia
**JAKARTA, INDONESIA**
Contact: Jati (twitter @samsarigged)
Contact Info: Martius[dot]surya[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21, 02:00 PM
Location: Crematology X Senopati (South Jakarta)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6P58QR77+RG>
Group Link: There used to be one but it is now inactive.
Additional Notes: Please email me at martius.surya[at]gmail[dot]com, but it is also fine if you come unannounced!
**SEMINYAK, BALI, INDONESIA**
Contact: Maciej
Contact Info: maciej[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20, 01:00 PM
Location: Ingka Petitenget
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6P3Q85G5+XW>
Additional Notes: Try to drop me an email if you might be coming, so I can estimate if anybody is / how many people are coming
## Japan
**TOKYO**
Contact: JT
Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 10:00 AM
Location: Contact email for the address - location TBD in Meguro
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPP5+48>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/>
Notes: Please join our google group! We email once a month to announce meetups.
## Malaysia
**GEORGETOWN, PENANG, MALAYSIA**
Contact: Doris
Contact Info: siroddoris13[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 5:00 PM
Location: Hin Bus Deport, Matcha.Lah
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6PQ2C86H+V7>
**KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA**
Contact: Yi-Yang
Contact Info: yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: We'll be in Kings Hall Cafe @ Sec 13 (<https://maps.app.goo.gl/HXKPbcMKhvRsb4ue8>). Look for an "ACX meetup" sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6PM34J7R+R4>
## Singapore
**SINGAPORE**
Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 12th, 4:00 PM
Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W>
Group Link: <https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W>
Notes: We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct dates will be on <https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W> (our Group Link). Please send your RSVP email early because it would be immensely helpful. Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and shared with the other attendees.
## Taiwan
**TAIPEI**
Contact: Jake and Brandon
Contact Info: jakessolo[plus]acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 28th, 3:00 PM
Location: Daan Park - northeast field next to the basketball courts (backup: Learn Bar if it's raining)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+PG3>
Notes: Backup location coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7QQ32GMJ+GHR>
## Vietnam
**HANOI, VIETNAM**
Contact: Jord Nguyen
Contact Info: jordnguyen43[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 10:00 AM
Location: GUT Coffee, 13 Ngõ 120 Đường Võ Chí Công, Xuân La, Tây Hồ, Hà Nội, Vietnam.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7PH73R34+H4>
**HO CHI MINH, VIETNAM**
Contact: Hiep
Contact Info: hiepbq14408[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 9:00 AM
Location: In the library on the third floor of Trung Nguyen Legend coffee. The coffee shop is at 603 Tran Hung Dao St., Dist. 1 at an intersection.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7P28QM4P+H57>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/nSoF5ntooah7f4qzj>
# Europe
## Austria
**VIENNA**
Contact: Manuel
Contact Info: manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:30 PM
Location: Müllnergasse 4, 1090 Wien, Bell 11
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWR6997+W5>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/>
## Bulgaria
**SOFIA**
Contact: Dan
Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 5:00 PM
Location: The Mr. Pizza on Vasil Levski (Sofia Center, Vasil Levski Blvd 53, 1142 Sofia)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FM>
## Channel Islands
**GUERNSEY**
Contact: John
Contact Info: Jangliss[at]hotmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Dorset Arms Public Bar (right hand side)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CXVFF26+32J>
## Czechia
**BRNO, CZECHIA**
Contact: Michal Keda
Contact Info: adekcz[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 25, 07:00 PM
Location: probably Skautský institut Brno, see FB event before the meetup, for up to date info
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXR5JX4+W7>
Additional Notes: For further details see: <https://www.facebook.com/events/420155810598847>
**PRAGUE, CZECHIA**
Contact: Daniel Hnyk
Contact Info: betualphu[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM
Location: Fixed Point. Koperníkova 6, 120 00 Praha, Česká Republika
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F2P3CCR+3C>
Group Link: <https://fb.me/e/28OXui8Zy>
Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get.
## Denmark
**COPENHAGEN, DENMARK**
Contact: Søren Elverlin
Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFM>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/va9fsFSYcrWRkmFpH/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-9>
Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
**ESBJERG, DENMARK**
Contact: Martin
Contact Info: martinpetersen64[dot]mp[at]outlook[dot]dk
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 10:00 AM
Location: Meetup will be at a café named Bean Machine, at Kronprinsensgade 99, 6700 Esbjerg - Outside the Café there will be a little sign with "ACX Meetup" written upon it - and an additional sign will be at the relevant table.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F7CFCFX+G4>
Notes: I will be there from 10 o'clock in the morning If noone shows up I will be gone by 2 in the afternoon. After 2 the café will close. But there is place right next to the café named Spiritusklubben where the meetup can be continued or we might go to my private home nearby depending on what we feel like.
## Estonia
**TALLINN**
Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: andrew\_n\_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 7:00 PM
Location: Tops, Soo 15, Kalamaja. I'll bring a sign, hopefully.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9GF6CPWQ+8H>
## Finland
**HELSINKI**
Contact: Joe Nash
Contact Info: sschelsinkimeetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Tuesday, May 7th, 6:00 PM
Location: Kitty's Public House, Mannerheimintie 5. We'll be in the private room called Kitty's Lounge, find it and come in.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9GG65W9R+Q4>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/helsinki-rationalish/>
## France
**BORDEAUX, FRANCE**
Contact: Michael
Contact Info: acx-meetup-2024-05-25[at]weboroso[dot]anonaddy[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 25th, 2:00 PM
Location: Mériadeck, Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, between the fountain and Hôtel du Département (administrative building to the west / nearest short side of Esplanade to the fountain). I will have an A4 «ACX meetup» sign. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.83735/-0.58601
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CPXRCP7+WHG>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I see who is coming — email me your phone number if you are likely to be late and you want an SMS when we decide to move away from the meeting point. I will do a «wrap-up» point one hour after the beginning so that those who want to leave can leave and not miss any coordination stuff; I will stay at least two hours if anyone wants to stay that long (and possibly longer, we'll see).
**GRENOBLE, FRANCE**
Contact: Fantin
Contact Info: fantin[dot]seguin[at]live[dot]fr
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 5:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the Jardin de Ville, on the lawn near the cable car, with a small
ACX Meetup sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQ75PVG+3H>
Notes: I gave this meeting place but we can go to a bar or somewhere else afterwards
**LYON, FRANCE**
Contact: Gyrodiot
Contact Info: suboptimal[dot]channel[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 2:00 PM
Location: Parc de la Tête d'Or, south-east corner of Pelouse de la Coupole. I'll wear a blue shirt/sweater and have an owl plushie and books.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQ6QVF3+JM>
Group Link: <https://t.me/+m6nDCgibgSxiMWE0>
Notes: Check the Telegram group or contact me if it rains!
**MARSEILLE, FRANCE**
Contact: Félix
Contact Info: ffk[at]fastmail[dot]fr
Time: Tuesday, April 2nd, 7:30 PM
Location: Cours Julien, at the bar "Brasserie Communale"
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FM779VM+GCC>
Notes: We'll meet at the bar but can go to any place around if needed
**PARIS, FRANCE**
Contact: Épiphanie Gédéon (Épi)
Contact Info: iwonder[at]whatisthis[dot]world
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 6:00 PM
Location: We'll meet at the Parc Montsouris, just below Cité Universitaire, in front of the Avenue Reille and Avenue René Corty entrance and behind the statue on the grass. There will be an ACX meetup sign and tableclothes
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FW4R8FP+CJ>
Group Link: Discord: <https://discord.com/invite/2U9qhR2suc> ; mailing list: <https://framalistes.org/sympa/info/slatestarcodexparis>
## Georgia
**TBILISI**
Contact: Dmitrii
Contact Info: overfull\_jailbird656[at]simplelogin[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 12:00 PM
Location: <https://f0rth.space>
Event Link: <https://t.me/f0rthsp4ce/347>
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+MJ>
## Germany
**AACHEN, GERMANY**
Contact: Martin
Contact Info: acxac[at]enc0[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 7:00 PM
Location: At Cafe Papillon, table will have an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G>
Group Link: <https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6>
**AUGSBURG, GERMANY**
Contact: Jörn Stöhler
Contact Info: acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM
Location: 86156 Augsburg, Am Alten Gaswerk 9, 1st floor, Room O.16
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWG9VP8+R49>
**BERLIN, GERMANY**
Contact: Milli
Contact Info: acx-meetups[at]martinmilbradt[dot]de
Time: Sunday, May 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/A4ZYjHFnvMkifTxzf/berlin-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MGAtkuYmX3hZ6eeaw>
**BREMEN, GERMANY**
Contact: Rasmus
Contact Info: ad[dot]fontes[at]aol[dot]com
Time: Tuesday, April 30th, 7:00 PM
Location: Piano, Fehrfeld 64. I'll be carrying a Perplexus Epic Ball Labyrinth
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F5C3RFF+7J>
**COLOGNE, GERMANY**
Contact: Marcel Müller
Contact Info: marcel\_mueller[at]mail[dot]de
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 5:00 PM
Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln (Cologne)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+97>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/2QwpKyXvwiZ53G4HP>
**FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY**
Contact: Omar
Contact Info: info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de
Time: Friday, April 12th, 6:00 PM
Location: Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9 (inner courtyard), 79100 Freiburg
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gfehNpbqqCvu5Boxn/freiburg-acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-2024>
Group Link: <https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/>
**HAMBURG, GERMANY**
Contact: Peter W
Contact Info: mittgfu[plus]acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 1:00 PM
Location: Paledo - Soulfood & Drinks, Kegelhofstraße 46, 20251 Hamburg
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F5FHXWH+38R>
Notes: Please RSVP by email and optionally share your number. I'm expecting <= 4 people turnout and will change venue if more come.
**HEIDELBERG, GERMANY***(duplicate of Mannheim, Germany)*
**KARLSRUHE, GERMANY**
Contact: Marcus
Contact Info: acx[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: Leih-Lokal Freiräume, Gerwigstr. 41 76131 Karlsruhe
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXC2C5H+CR>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/kw7Zb8DLmZtsK8g3R>
**KIEL, GERMANY**
Contact: Niko
Contact Info: hamburger\_blues[at]disroot[dot]org
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 7:30 PM
Location: TraumGmbH | I'll carry ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F6G84M8+XQ>
**LEIPZIG, GERMANY**
Contact: Daniel Böttger
Contact Info: daniel[dot]boettger[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 17, 05:00 PM
Location: We'll meet at the Pavillon in the East corner of Johannapark, and will have a big sign with the ACX logo.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F3J89M8+XQ>
**MANNHEIM, GERMANY**
Contact: Simon
Contact Info: acxmannheim[at]mailbox[dot]org
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 7:00 PM
Location: Murphy's Law, Mannheim
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+5G>
Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email. Depending on how many people come, we might need to change location.
**MUNICH, GERMANY**
Contact: Levi
Contact Info: culyma[at]yahoo[dot]fr
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Botanical garden in Nymphenburg, under the roof of an east asian Pagoda
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWH5G63+P2V>
**STUTTGART, GERMANY**
Contact: Benjamin Rothenhäusler
Contact Info: b[dot]rothenhaeusler[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: We'll meet at the Jubiläumssäule at the Schlossplatz and then search for a nice spot nearby. Watch for the guy with the white hat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5HH+CW
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mbhk7hHvjggumgxvP/stuttgart-germany-acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-2024>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe Mela. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow.
**ULM, GERMANY**
Contact: Benjamin
Contact Info: b[dot]rothenhaeusler[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM
Location: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know a bit how much snacks to bring: If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe BellaVista. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWF9XWR+3VV>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024>
Group Link: There's no group so far (there's a small, local EA group). This event is thought to bring people together to maybe form such a group.
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know a bit how much snacks to bring: If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe BellaVista. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow.
## Greece
**ATHENS**
Contact: Spyros Dovas
Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[dot]greece[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, May 17th, 7:00 PM
Location: The meeting place is the plaza in front of the National Library in Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center complex in Faliro. There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP>
Notes: There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables, have a drink, chat or rant depending on the topic. Please RSVP on LessWrong and/or meetup.com.
## Hungary
**BUDAPEST**
Contact: Timothy Underwood
Contact Info: timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: The North East corner of Muzeumkert is the plan. There are a bunch of benches that we can move around to sit in a circle. If the weather is raining, or otherwise bad, we'll squeeze into the California Coffee co next to the Muzeumkert, which will hopefully have enough room since it will be on a Sunday.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest>
## Ireland
**DUBLIN**
Contact: Rían O Mahoney
Contact Info: romahone[at]tcd[dot]ie
Time: Thursday, April 25th, 6:30 PM
Location: Hotel Motel One Dublin, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220, Ireland
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o>
## Italy
**MILANO, ITALY**
Contact: Raffaele and Federico
Contact Info: raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 19th, 6:30 PM
Location: Primo Ventures, Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129, Milano (MI)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C>
**ROME, ITALY**
Contact: Giulio
Contact Info: giulio[dot]starace[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 3:00 PM
Location: Villa Doria Pamphili (park), just south of the "Cedro del Libano" on the grass opening.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FHJVCMX+PP>
Group Link: <https://tinyurl.com/RomeACX>
## Latvia
**RIGA**
Contact: Anastasia
Contact Info: riga[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 4:00 PM
Location: Puškina iela 11, Latgale Suburb, Rīga, Latvia. Go into the inner yard and then into the building on the left. We'll be on the second floor.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G86W4RC+PF>
## Lithuania
**VILNIUS**
Contact: Tom
Contact Info: acx[dot]vilnius[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 3:00 PM
Location: Lukiškių aikštė (Lukiškės Square). I'll be somewhere in the middle near the big flag pole holding an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G67M7QC+Q8>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/MrBxnNBKbA>
Notes: RSVP on LessWrong is preferred, but optional. Anyone even remotely interested in ACX, LW, or EA is welcome!
## Netherlands
**NIJMEGEN, NETHERLANDS**
Contact: Stian
Contact Info: stian[dot]sgronlund[at]outlook[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 2:00 PM
Location: The Yard Sportcafe in the Elinor Ostromgebouw, or possibly moving outside if there's nice weather.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F37RV96+GX>
Group Link: No dedicated place yet, but you can join the EA Nijmegen whatsapp group through <https://www.eanijmegen.nl/>
**ZWOLLE, NETHERLANDS** ~~Contact: Fedor
Contact Info: fedor [a t] beets[ do t] rocks
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 1:00 PM
Location: Stadscafé Het Refter, Bethlehemkerkplein, Zwolle, Netherlands
Coordinates:~~ [~~https://plus.codes/9F48G36V+9V~~](https://plus.codes/9F48G36V+9V) ~~Event Link:~~ [~~https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DAXy9KMiPBj7z9XTp/acx-zwolle-meetup~~](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DAXy9KMiPBj7z9XTp/acx-zwolle-meetup) ~~Group Link:~~ [~~https://discord.gg/9kfs8bXV~~](https://discord.gg/9kfs8bXV)
Notes: Canceled due to illness, but there’s a second attempt happening in June- see the group link for details
## Norway
**OSLO**
Contact: Anna
Contact Info: 2002anna[dot]anna2002[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: We'll meet up at the Songsvann metro station at 14:00, I'll be holding an ACX sign. If the weather is good, we'll be outside by the lake. If the weather is bad, we can go to my apartment in Kringsjå.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9FFGXP8M+WF>
Group Link: <https://meetu.ps/c/4ZQXG/YsDP4/d>
Notes: Please send an email if you plan on coming. If the weather is good, kids and dogs are very welcome!
## Poland
**KRAKÓW, POLAND**
Contact: Frank
Contact Info: phraneck[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 3:00 PM
Location: Rynek Dębnicki 3
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F2X3W2G+VQ>
Notes: The event is at an apartment. If you're coming please email me so I can tell you how to get in
**WARSAW, POLAND**
Contact: Jan Rzymkowski
Contact Info: j[dot]rzymkowski[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 12th, 4:00 PM
Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G4362G8+2V>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw>
Notes: We're usually given the room downstairs. I'll be wearing a pink t-shirt.
## Portugal
**LISBON**
Contact: Luis Campos
Contact Info: luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 3:00 PM
Location: We meet on top of a small hill East of the Linha d'Água café in Jardim Amália Rodrigues. Look for the tall person with a black backpack.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V9>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/iJzwL2ukGBAGNcwJq>
Notes: For comfort, bring sunglasses and a blanket to sit on. There is some natural shade. Also, it can get quite windy, so bring a jacket.
## Romania
**BUCHAREST**
Contact: Toni
Contact Info: skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: Splaiul Independenței 210, București 060012 - Grozavesti - Carrefour Orhideea Food Court - Popeyes
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GP8C3W7+35>
Notes: Please RSVP at the email address
## Russia
**MOSCOW, RUSSIA**
Contact: "teapot"
Contact Info: blastjoe41[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:00 AM
Location: Lefortovo Park, near the Rastrelli Grotto
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G7VQM7Q+GWP>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-in-moscow> exists, but has been defunct for years
Notes: you can also reach me as "unfriendlyteapot" on discord
**NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA**
Contact: ildar
Contact Info: niya3[at]mail[dot]ru
Time: Saturday, May 25th, 5:00 PM
Location: We will be sitting on benches next to the stage in the center of Pushkin Park. There will be an "ACX MEETUP" sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9H858X5W+FP>
**SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA**
Contact: Mak
Contact Info: kellendros95[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 5:00 PM
Location: пер. Гривцова 22, открытое пространство "Каледонский Лес", малый или средний зал
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9GFGW8H8+8Q>
## Serbia
**BELGRADE**
Contact: Tanja
Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36>
Group Link: <https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/>
Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone.
## Slovenia
**LJUBLJANA**
Contact: Demjan
Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, May 15th, 7:00 PM
Location: Vrt Lili Novy, at a table with some sort of sign that says ACX.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xo7QE9pjGDvqLd5Ao/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if possible, it helps with logistics to estimate the number.
## Spain
**~~ALICANTE, SPAIN~~** ~~Contact: Will
Contact Info: will[dot]worth[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:00 PM
Location: Parque Canalejas(park next to the esplanada and port, central Alicante)
Coordinates:~~ [~~https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6~~](https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6) ~~Notes: Hispanohablantes, sois bienvenidos/English speakers welcome~~
EDIT: The organizer needed to cancel. If anyone else wants to pick this up, let Skyler know, but no organizer is there.
**BARCELONA, SPAIN**
Contact: Melanie Brennan
Contact Info: melanie[dot]anne[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 4:00 PM
Location: Parc de la Ciutadella
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-barcelona/>
**MADRID, SPAIN**
Contact: Javier
Contact Info: javier[dot]prieto[dot]set[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 5:00 PM
Location: La Casa Encendida (ground floor cafeteria)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CGRC842+C2>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many people are coming
## Sweden
**GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN**
Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: acx\_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se
Time: Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 PM
Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR>
## Switzerland
**GENEVA, SWITZERLAND**
Contact: Carlos Rafael Giudice
Contact Info: carlosr[dot]giudice[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 6:00 PM
Location: La Jonquille, Chem. du 23-Août 3, 1205
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W>
**ZURICH, SWITZERLAND**
Contact: MB
Contact Info: acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden. If it rains we will be under the roof inside the chinese garden (free entry).
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+V8>
Notes: Please drop me a line at the email address given to be added to the mailing list.
## UK
**CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Hamish Todd
Contact Info: hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 2:00 PM
Location: Fort St George
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F42646H+X3>
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jpa8mJcsq4FsDr8oA/cambridge-acx-ssc-monthly-meetup-1
Notes: We meet third Saturday afternoon of every month, usually at a different location called The Bath House! If you want to be alerted every time, you have to email me asking for that, we \*don't\* usually have lesswrong event pages
**CANTERBURY, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Joel
Contact Info: joel[dot]jakubovic[at]cantab[dot]net
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM
Location: Arco Carpanel, Westgate Grove. I have long fair hair and will be carrying an "ACX MEETUP" sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F3373JG+F3>
Notes: I'd appreciate an e-mail if you're new and attending so that I have a sense of how many will be there
**EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK**
Contact: Sam
Contact Info: acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 2:00 PM
Location: Braid room, 2nd floor, Pleasance (turn right when you go under an archway into the courtyard)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW9+W7>
Group Link: We run ~monthly meetups; email acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com to join the mailing list and whatsapp group
Notes: We generally 'assign' 3 essays to lightly guide the discussion, so make sure you join the mailing list to find out what they'll be for this meetup (I haven't decided yet)
**LONDON, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Edward Saperia
Contact Info: ed[at]newspeak[dot]house
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:00 PM
Location: Newspeak House
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3XGWGH+3F7>
Event Link: <https://lu.ma/ACX-London-Apr-2024>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/acxlondon>
Notes: Please register: <https://lu.ma/ACX-London-Apr-2024>
**MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Lewis
Contact Info: acx[dot]manchester[at]lcwf[dot]de
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Ezra & Grill, 20 Hilton St, Manchester M1 1FR. I'll have a sign/whiteboard with 'ACX Meetup' on it. <https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFQDGHgNL3cJ6hk6A>
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5VFQJ8+RR>
Notes: Please RSVP by email so I can book a sufficiently sized table/know if we'll outgrow it!
**NEWCASTLE-DURHAM, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Chris Goodall
Contact Info: wardle[at]live[dot]fr
Time: Sunday, April 28th, 12:00 PM
Location: "The Food Pit" in the centre of Riverwalk mall, Framwelgate, Durham, next to the river. I will wear the Hawaiian shirt and hold the Astral Codex10 sign. Hopefully we'll make it up the steps to the cathedral but this is a step-free place to start.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C6WQCGC+VH>
Notes: If you're coming a long way by East Coast Main Line, be sure to check if breaking the journey saves you money.
**OXFORD, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Stan
Contact Info: stanislawmalinowski09[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 17th, 6:30 PM
Location: The Star, Rectory Road - We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign <3
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QM>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vnuaj5rCGnfXvaLac/oxrat-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/oxfordrationalish> <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/wQA8BE5e8mETeWb8A>
**READING, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Chris
Contact Info: ReadingACX[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM
Location: Double-Barrelled Brewery
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3WFX7Q+7W>
**SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND, UK**
Contact: Colin Z. Robertson
Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[dot]org[dot]uk
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M>
## Ukraine
**KYIV**
Contact: Artem Batogovsky (or Forux)
Contact Info: https://t[dot]me/forux
Time: Friday, April 5th, 7:00 PM
Location: Ziferblat Cafe (Циферблат кафе)
Group Link: <https://t.me/lwkyiv>
Notes: The meetup has been moved to online due to the situation in Ukraine. Use the group link.
# North America
## Canada
**CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA**
Contact: David P
Contact Info: qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 2:00 PM
Location: Side Street Pub: 1167 Kensington Crescent NW. I'll bring an "ACX" sign with red letters.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/95373W26+R8G>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
**EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA**
Contact: Joseph
Contact Info: ta1hynp09[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 18th, 7:00 PM
Location: Irrational Brewing Company, 10643 124 St #109, Edmonton, AB T5N 1S5. We will have an ACX sign! More information at https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fez72WdfeyDZAM796/acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-1
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fez72WdfeyDZAM796/acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-1
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG
Notes: Please do your best to RSVP on LessWrong so we know how much food to get
**HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA**
Contact: Noah
Contact Info: usernameneeded[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: We will be meeting at the Oxford Taproom. We'll be sitting at a table on the ground floor(to the right as you enter) and will have a blue pyramid on the table.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87PRJ9VX+PP>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/kXFaGQBB5h>
**KITCHENER, ONTARIO, CANADA***(duplicate of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)*
**MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC, CANADA**
Contact: Henri Lemoine
Contact Info: acxmontreal[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 1:00 PM
Location: Jeanne-Mance Park, at the corner of Duluth and Esplanade. We'll have an ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87Q8GC89+37>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8HEFDrXXm6EjGpDSM/acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024-montreal-qc>
Group Link: LessWrong group: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia> ; Mailing list: <http://eepurl.com/io5vZM> ; Discord: <https://discord.gg/K8gMNzqPVG> ; Facebook group: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/less.wrong.montreal/> ; Meetup.com group: <https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-montreal/>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8HEFDrXXm6EjGpDSM/acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024-montreal-qc>
**OTTAWA, CANADA**
Contact: Tess Walsh
Contact Info: rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 4:00 PM
Location: 70 Gloucester St (The LOOP apartment building), 28th floor rooftop patio! Buzzer is 2103 for entry to the building, and then come on up to the top floor. If rain happens to move us indoors on the 11th, we'll be meeting one floor down from the patio, in the Sky Lounge of 70 Gloucester. We should be the only group meeting in either of these places but we will still have "ACX" signs, and I will be identifiable as the one with the big orange scarf.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87Q6C894+P2>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4>, <https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa>, Attend a meetup to receive an invite to our discord!
Notes: Dinner will be provided in the evening, but feel free to bring snacks to share earlier on! Kids welcome. Please RSVP to help make planning smoother for me- by email to rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com, on Lesswrong, or on Facebook. Thank you!
**SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA**
Contact: Sergey
Contact Info: spam04321[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:30 AM
Location: McAllister Place food court, I'll have some kind of a small ACX MEETUP sign on the table.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+XJP>
Notes: Please RSVP if you have any intention of coming as the event will only proceed if there's at least someone interested in coming.
**TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA**
Contact: Sean A
Contact Info: k9i9m9ufh[at]mozmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM
Location: Mars Discovery District basement cafeteria. To get to the cafeteria, enter the Mars Atrium via University Avenue entrance. Enter from University Avenue and walk east until you see escalators. Take the escalators down. The food court is to the east of the escalators. If you are lost/confused, ask a security guard to direct you to the food court in the basement. I'll be wearing a bright neon yellow jacket.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87M2MJ56+XP>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/8ktnBi4AjxtCmGeXA>
**VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA**
Contact: Jordan
Contact Info: j[dot]verasamy[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 11:00 AM
Location: Dude Chilling Park, NW corner, with a big sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84XR7W73+P9>
**WATERLOO, ONTARIO, CANADA**
Contact: Jenn
Contact Info: jenn[at]kwrationality[dot]ca
Time: Thursday, May 9th, 7:00 PM
Location: Meeting Room A, Basement of Kitchener Public Library main branch (85 Queen St N)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86MXFG37+4C>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vwZsrqkp84YyfzRaR/2024-acx-spring-megameetup>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NiM9cQJ5qXqhdmP5p>
Notes: We run weekly meetups! Check out [kwrationality.ca](http://kwrationality.ca) for more info.
## Costa Rica
**TAMARINDO**
Contact: Timeless
Contact Info: pvspam-acxorganiser[at]hacklab[dot]net
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 1:00 PM
Location: El Mercadito Food Court
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/762P75X5+QMR>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. I will wear a nerdy t-shirt and stay close to Asian Fusion Sushi section of the court.
## Mexico
**MÉRIDA, MEXICO**
Contact: Silvia Fernández
Contact Info: silviafidelina[at]hotmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 6:00 PM
Location: Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Sociales y Culturales Efrain Calderon, calle 38 No. 453 por 35 y 37 Barrio Obrero: Jesús Carranza, Mérida, Mexico
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76GGX9JV+W6>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmerida>
Notes: Favor de reservar por mail
**MEXICO CITY, MEXICO**
Contact: Francisco
Contact Info: fagarrido[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 5:00 PM
Location: Cafebreria El Pendulo
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76F2CR6G+6R>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/uzTxYaFupgz9ZnCT5>
## USA
### Arizona
**PHOENIX, ARIZONA, USA**
Contact: Nathan
Contact Info: natoboo2000[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Encanto Park 2499 N 15th Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85007. We'll be at one of the picnic tables just south of the parking lot, with an ACX meetups sign at the table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8559FWG5+9RP
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KRcNWJusPhdLrvvxx/acx-phoenix-may-meetup>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/xSLmmoudDGM2w8JEG>
Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong appreciated: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KRcNWJusPhdLrvvxx/acx-phoenix-may-meetup>
### Arkansas
**FORT SMITH, ARKANSAS, USA**
Contact: Cristina
Contact Info: olsoncristina[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 25th, 6:00 PM
Location: Bakery District, 70 S 7th St, Fort Smith, AR 72901
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86779HMF+V6H>
### California
**ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Tyler S
Contact Info: Tylers[at]duck[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 25th, 1:00 PM
Location: “The pub at the creamery” in Arcata. 824 L St suite a, Arcata, CA 95521. I will have an ACX Meetup Sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84GQVW95+WC>
**BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Skyler and Scott
Contact Info: skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org
Time: Wednesday, June 5th, 6:30 PM
Location: 2740 Telegraph Avenue
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong>
Notes: Held between [Less.Online](http://Less.Online) and [Manifest 2](https://www.manifest.is/), we expect a lot of interesting out-of-town visitors. We’ll provide dinner, kids are welcome, no pets please!
**GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA**
*(duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)*
**GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Max Harms
Contact Info: Raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: The prospector statue in Condon Park if the weather is nice, otherwise my house nearby (send an email for the address)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4>
Notes: Please RSVP by email or on LessWrong
**LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Vishal
Contact Info: Contact "Vishal" on the LAR discord
Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 6:30 PM
Location: 11841 Wagner St., Culver City
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ziyNTuMGquENeYyaN/los-angeles-ca-acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-2024-lw-acx>
Group Link: Discord Server: <https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN> Website: https://losangelesrationality.com/
Notes: RSVPs on the LessWrong event are not necessary but recommended.
**NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Michael
Contact Info: michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/ytkHvpQrvLHFcyDhx>
Notes: By the time this annual Meetup happens we will have had over 60 meetups almost every single one of which was attended. I would say our attendance rate is about 96 or 97%. Sometimes it's just the two of us, but there have been as many as 15 people. Typical turnouts are three to five.
**PALM DESERT, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Todd
Contact Info: todd[dot]ramsey[dot]shopping[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: Palm Desert Civic Center Park. Picnic shelter 5 if available; if not, try picnic shelter 4; then 3, then 2, then 1. (I'm not reserving a space but will get there early to claim a picnic shelter) I'll be wearing a loud tie-dye tee shirt to help you identify me.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8555PJJ9+WV>
Notes: Please provide for your own food and drink.
**SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Julia and Andrew
Contact Info: amethyst[dot]eggplant[at]gmail[dot]com; nightfall9[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 1:00 PM
Location: A house at 22nd and W St in Midtown Sacramento
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+MV>
Group Link: Email for our discord
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. I'll have podcasting equipment set up if anyone wants to record a spicy conversation, opt in only obviously
**SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Julius
Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 1:00 PM
Location: Bird Park
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+P7>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/events/299717844/>
**SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Jill and Daniel
Contact Info: jill[dot]dma[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:00 AM
Location: We'll be outside the cafe at the Randall Museum in Corona Heights (near the Castro) in San Francisco. The Randall Museum has a cafe, Cafe Josephine - we'll be sitting at a public park bench (by the overlook) just outside the cafe. Randall Museum is kid-friendly and has free admission, bathrooms, etc. We'll bring an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/849VQH76+XW>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong>
Notes: We're bringing our kids (ages 1 and 3) - feel free to bring other small mammals. You can also get in touch with us at (415) 692-4814
**SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: David Friedman
Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM
Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+7Q
Group Link: <http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html>
Notes: Kids welcome. Let me know if you plan to come: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com. We feed dinner to those still here at dinner time.
**SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Denis
Contact Info: denis[dot]lantsman[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:00 PM
Location: Meadow Park, just south of the public restrooms
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/847X789R+4C>
**SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Sean
Contact Info: acxsean[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:30 PM
Location: Tables next to UCSB Lot 10 (near Engineering)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8562C575+XW>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/vKuJ4NfHkF>
Notes: Please join the discord to help me coordinate/calibrate group size
**SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA**
Contact: Gregg
Contact Info: gregg[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 28th, 1:30 PM
Location: NE corner of University Terrace Park, Meder St, Santa Cruz
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/848VXWFW+X6>
### Colorado
**BOULDER, COLORADO, USA**
Contact: Josh Sacks
Contact Info: josh[dot]sacks[plus]acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 3:00 PM
Location: (our house- same as previous meetups)- 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301. About 8 miles east of CU-Boulder
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GP2V96+HV>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/boulder-acx-ssc>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can estimate snacks.
**CARBONDALE, COLORADO, USA**
Contact: Nick Jarboe
Contact Info: naj[at]njarboe[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 17th, 5:00 PM
Location: Picnic tables in the center of Sopris Park
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85FJ9QXP+QM>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. Please come even if you don't RSVP
**DENVER, COLORADO, USA**
Contact: Eneasz Brodski
Contact Info: embrodski[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 12th, 3:00 PM
Location: Sloan's Lake Park, North Side. Park in the Sloan's Lake North Parking Lot, walk just past the stone structure that's right there, and we'll be on the other side of it. Should have a shade structure up, and a white board that says ACX MEETUP on it (assuming I don't forget the dry erase marker this time).
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85FPQX22+RM>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/969594296461197>
Notes: Public park, all ages welcome. We'll BBQ some burgers and hotdogs and have a variety of snacks and drinks. Some vegan dogs also available, but limited quantities. Eneasz of The Bayesian Conspiracy will almost certainly be there, as will Matt Freeman co-founder of The Guild Of the Rose. We don't have any structured activities, just hanging out and conversation and watching kiddos run around. We have monthly meetups, anyone who attends this is welcome to come to those as well :)
**FORT COLLINS, COLORADO, USA**
Contact: Spencer
Contact Info: focorats[at]posteo[dot]net
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM
Location: Wolverine farm, upstairs
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GPHWRG+7MQ>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/dks4PmoHn4dpK94MR>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can reserve tables
### Connecticut
**DANBURY, CONNECTICUT, USA**
Contact: Gesild Muka
Contact Info: gemuka[at]my[dot]bridgeport[dot]edu
Time: Friday, April 19th, 5:00 PM
Location: 255 White St, Danbury, CT 06810. I’ll be wearing a bright red shirt.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87H89HX7+VG>
Notes: It's a bar/restaurant, there are tables so kids are allowed. They're known for their wings.
### Washington DC
**WASHINGTON DC, USA**
Contact: EK
Contact Info: ek [a t] eleanorkonik [dot ] com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: Hook Hall, 3400 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20010.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87C4WXJG+WC>
Group Link: There exist two facebook groups for DC: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227/> and <https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595>
### Florida
**CAPE CORAL, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Shawn Spilman
Contact Info: Shawn[dot]Spilman[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 12:01 PM
Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RWH224+44>
**GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Russell
Contact Info: rchestnut1520[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Monday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM
Location: 4th Ave Food Park, outside picnic table. Will have a sign if it's not obvious.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5C2>
**GULF BREEZE, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Christian Williams
Contact Info: christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Wednesday, April 24th, 8:00 PM
Location: https://www.oldhickorywhiskeybar.com/
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X>
Notes: Email me if you want to meet. I'll only plan to be there if I hear from at least one person.
**HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Dante and Britt
Contact Info: danteac94[at]gmail[dot]com; miamiacx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:00 AM
Location: At the beach, on the Hollywood beach boulevard.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RX2V6M+CM>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/k2pzWUb9ss>
Notes: I might be there earlier to watch the sunrise and then having the morning at the beach
**MIAMI, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Eric
Contact Info: eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 5:00 PM
Location: 1111 Brickell Ave, Miami, FL 33131. If lobby doors are locked, enter through the Carrot Express.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76QXQR75+3C>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/k2pzWUb9ss>
**ORLANDO, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Ethan Huyck
Contact Info: ethanhuyck[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 26th, 7:00 PM
Location: UCF, at the covered pavilion near the Breezeway, I'll have a sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76WWJQ2X+72R>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/nfedbAnhPE>
Notes: please let me know in the discord if you will be there so I can plan snacks for everyone.
**WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, USA**
Contact: Charlie
Contact Info: chuckwilson477[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 11:00 AM
Location: Grandview Public Market. 1401 Clare Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. We'll be at the northeast outside area, sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot, and there may also be a free valet service.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP>
Notes: Hosted by the south Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray and many others. Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming!
### Georgia
**ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA**
Contact: Steve
Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW Atlanta, GA 30318, USA
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V>
Group Link: <https://acxatlanta.com/>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
### Idaho
**BOISE, IDAHO, USA**
Contact: Tim
Contact Info: tim[dot]r[dot]burr[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM
Location: Ann Morrison Park. I will bring my dog and some lawn games, and set up in the grass on the northwest side.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX>
Notes: Feel free to bring dogs, kids, games, tasty beverages...
### Illinois
**CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA**
Contact: Todd
Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: We'll be in Grant Park just between the train tracks and Columbus on the north side of Balbo. There's a shaded area with some trees.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+9>
Group Link: <https://chicagorationality.com>
**URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS, USA**
Contact: Ben
Contact Info: cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14, 3:00 PM
Location: UIUC, Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 3401
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/8BNujpU6XD>
### Indiana
**WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, USA**
Contact: NR
Contact Info: mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 12:00 PM
Location: Address: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room and wear a shirt with a lemur.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C>
Notes: We'll have a box of chips and possibly other food.
### **Louisiana**
**NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA**
Contact: Blake Bertuccelli-Booth
Contact Info: blake[at]philosophers[dot]group
Time: Sunday, May 5th, 11:11 AM
Location: Petite Clouet Cafe
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76XFXX74+H7>
Group Link: <http://philosophers.group>
Notes: Feel free to reach out to me on signal. My name: blake.1111
### Maryland
**BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, USA**
Contact: Rivka
Contact Info: rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 05th, 7:00 PM
Location: Outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building at UMBC. The address is 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250. There will be a sign that says "ACX Meetup".
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87F5774P+53>
Group Link: We have a mailing list and a discord. The mailing list is more for our weekly meetup reminders and the discord is more of a social environment. Here's a link to the discord: <https://discord.gg/h4z5UgeYVK>. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please email me.
Notes: Parking is free on the weekend. In case of rain or inclement weather, we will be inside on the first floor of the building. There will be food and drinks (likely pizza). RSVPs are useful so I know how much food to get, but are not required.
**FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, USA**
Contact: "Ferret"
Contact Info: meetup2024[dot]exposure178[at]passinbox[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 12:00 PM
Location: Burba Lake; Coordinator will \*not\* sponsor attendees to location
Coordinates: Email coordinator for precise location
Group Link: Email coordinator for group chat
Notes: Techies and family types alike are welcome. Title/position agnostic (wear comfortable clothes). 🦗 Czar note: meetup is on a government installation with controlled access; if you're not sure if you can attend you probably can't
### Massachusetts
**BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA***(duplicate of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)*
**CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA**
Contact: Skyler
Contact Info: Skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: JFK Memorial Park, Cambridge. Look for the tall blue and green hat. We'll have a canopy in case it rains.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87JC9VCG+8W>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/ssc-boston>
Notes: Please feel free to bring kids or pets! I'll be the one in the tall green and blue hat.
**NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA**
Contact: duck\_master
Contact Info: duckmaster0[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 07, 12:00 PM
Location: Upper Falls Greenway (Easy St, Newton, MA, USA 02461; just off Needham St, near the intersection with Dedham St and Winchester St)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87JC8Q8Q+QH>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HnrqwPvpX7TFtMwR9>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/j7xvKMy96W6Lcy77j/newton-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024>
Additional Notes: Mostly unstructured talking. Anywhere along the Upper Falls Greenway (between Easy St and the Charles River, paralleling Needham St) works, since I expect we'll be walking to and fro. However, newbies should show up \*\*at the Easy St end\*\* so we don't get lost. If there's demand for it we can also migrate to the footpath on the Needham side of the river as well (between Highland Ave and 2nd Ave). I plan on bringing my plush duck. I may or may not bring nametags. If I don't bring nametags, I'll ask everyone to introduce their names (internet names are ok for this meetup). Other types of people beyond rationalists (eg postrats, alignment researchers, predictors, EAs, etc.) are welcome!
**NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA**
Contact: Alex Liebowitz
Contact Info: alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 6:00 PM
Location: Common house at 100 Black Birch Trail, Northampton, MA 01062. The common house is the first building you see when coming into the community (but after the event parking, which lines the road leading in on the right). Facebook and Apple Maps show it as being in Florence, but Google Maps, Bing Maps and the official site show it as being in Northampton. (Florence is a village within Northampton, but both addresses are the same place.)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J9884H+VF>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/78BKdkLerGaBwGTx6/northampton-ma-acx-meetup-spring-2024-meetups-everywhere>
Group Link: There's a mailing list, but you just email me at alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com to get on.
Notes: Guest parking should be along the road leading in (Black Birch Trail), parking to the right as you drive in. There is an Event Parking sign but it is not the most visible. There are disabled spaces directly in front of the Common House (100 Black Birch Trail). If we overflow the road, people can use the resident lots to the left and right.
### Michigan
**ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, USA**
Contact: Joseph Pryor
Contact Info: jwpryorprojects[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:00 PM
Location: 1420 Hill Street Ann Arbor Michigan. We'll be meeting at the Friends Meetinghouse (euphemism for Quaker) in the back yard if weather allows, otherwise we'll meet in the corner room. 1-5pm. The restrooms are open.. Two small parking lots (~12 spaces total) are located by the alley at the rear of the property, plus a handicap parking space. Parking is available on Olivia and Lincoln streets all day Saturday.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+MQ>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/Ann-Arbor-SSC-Rationalist-Meetup-Group/>
Notes: RSVP here: <https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group/events/299819097/> and join the Meetup.com list to hear about our meetups every month, or text me at: 517-945-8084 and I'll add you to the text notification I send out. Bring snacks if the weather is good (no snacks allowed indoors)
**GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN, USA**
Contact: Peter
Contact Info: pjvh[at]umich[dot]edu
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM
Location: Lookout Park. I’ll have a nametag and a hammock (weather permitting).
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86JPX8GJ+VV>
Notes: Updates will be here- <https://petervh.com/GR-ACX>
### **Minnesota**
**ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA**
Contact: Aaron Kaufman
Contact Info: ironlordbyron[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 5:00 PM
Location: Party room in Davanni's Pizza, at 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+WX
Group Link: https://discord.gg/RnkfQW9dVK
### Missouri
**KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, USA**
Contact: Alex Hedtke
Contact Info: alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, May 10th, 5:00 PM
Location: 5200 Wornall Rd, Kansas City, MO 64112 (Jacob L. Loose Park) - We will be at the grill and the stone tables to the right of the entrance, between the entrance and the playground.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86F72CM4+QH>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea/>
Notes: There is a playground, so feel free to bring kids! Also, while not necessary, bring any cookout food potluck-style you'd like. There will be a grill.
**ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA**
Contact: John Buridan
Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 2:30 PM
Location: Tower Grove Park, Cypress Pavilion South
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86CFJQ32+XC>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids, gadgets, books-as-conversation starter. Invite friends. Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get.
### Nevada
**LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA**
Contact: Jonathan Ray
Contact Info: ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 11:00 AM
Location: Tree Top Park
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85865MR8+3JM>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/3gdefR43Pc?event=1216096364673499246>
Notes: Feel free to talk about anything you want to talk about! Please actually show up if you RSVP!
### New York
**BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA**
Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: stefanlenoach[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, May 17th, 7:00 PM
Location: My apartment
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G8P3G2+2G>
Notes: Please RSVP - my apartment can handle ~40 people.
**MANHATTAN, NEW YORK, USA**
Contact: Robi Rahman
Contact Info: robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: We'll meet at Pumphouse Park unless it's raining, in which case we'll be inside the adjacent building, Brookfield Place.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G7PX6M+RG>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc?pli=1>
Notes: If it is raining, we will meet in the atrium of Brookfield Place, located at <https://plus.codes/87G7PX7M+3R>. You might also be interested in the Brooklyn meetup the week after!
**MASSAPEQUA, NEW YORK, USA**
Contact: Gabriel Weil
Contact Info: gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 19th, 7:00 PM
Location: 47 Clinton Pl., Massapequa, NY 17758
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G8MG4F+3V>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or by email (gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com) so I know how much food to get.
**NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA**
(*duplicate of Manhattan, New York, USA)*
### North Carolina
**ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, USA**
Contact: Vicki Williams
Contact Info: Vickirwilliams[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 6:00 PM
Location: Biltmore Lake Fire Pit, 80 Lake Dr. Candler, NC. Parking in front of the basketball court, then walk along the lake to the fire pit behind the tennis court.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/867VG8MW+9G>
Notes: Please RSVP so I can get in touch in case of change in plans.
**GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, USA**
Contact: Randall Hayes
Contact Info: vsi[dot]beacon[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 5:00 PM
Location: Old Town Draught House, 1205 Spring Garden St, Greensboro, NC 27403 Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8782358Q+7P>
Notes: This is a place of business, so no outside food or drink. Sorry. https://oldtowndraught.com/ If you're interested in Sci-Fi, there's a con going on down the block!
**RALEIGH-DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA, USA**
Contact: Logan
Contact Info: Logan[dot]the[dot]word[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 1:00 PM
Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Co (219 Hood St, Durham). We'll be at the outdoor seating area with an ACX sign on the table
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8773X4Q3+QW>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/rtlw>
Notes: There will be pizza! The venue serves beer but is kid-friendly. I'll have more details on the Google group (see link)
### Ohio
**CLEVELAND, OHIO, USA**
Contact: Andy
Contact Info: ajl161[at]case[dot]edu
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 1:00 PM
Location: Tabletop Board Game Cafe- 1810 W 25th St, Cleveland, OH 44113 (I am very tall and will be hard to miss)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86HWF7PV+GRP>
Notes: board game cafe so bring your best catan strategies :)
**COLUMBUS, OHIO, USA**
Contact: Russell
Contact Info: russell[dot]emmer[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: Clifton Park Shelterhouse, Jeffrey Park, Bexley. We will be at one of the tables with an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86FVX3C3+QF>
Notes: Please send an email if you'd like to join our mailing list for future invitations.
### Oregon
**CORVALLIS, OREGON, USA**
Contact: Kenan
Contact Info: kbitikofer[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 19th, 6:00 PM
Location: Laughing Planet, downtown Corvallis, Oregon.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84PRHP7R+R7C>
Group Link: Willamette Valley EAs and Rationalists: <https://discord.gg/uBCcD7SxUa>
Notes: Kids/babies welcome.
**PORTLAND, OREGON, USA**
Contact: Sam Celarek
Contact Info: scelarek[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, April 19th, 6:00 PM
Location: 1548 NE 15th Ave, Portland, OR 97232 - There will be a large sign outside of a building with the print "Encorepreneur Cafe" on the outside. Call me at 513-432-3310 if you can't find it!
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84QVG8MX+MV4>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/portland-effective-altruism-and-rationality/>
Notes: Please RSVP on Meetup so I know how much food to get.
### Pennsylvania
**HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, USA**
Contact: Phil
Contact Info: acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM
Location: Zeroday Brewing Company Taproom, 925 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA 17102
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G57487+R7>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD>
**PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA**
Contact: Siddhesh
Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 11:00 AM
Location: La Colombe Coffee Roasters on 6th and Market (100 S Independence Mall W #110)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M>
Group Link: Email - <https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia>; Google Calendar - <https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t>; Meetup - <https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/>; Discord - <https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB>; Facebook - <https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly>
**PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA**
Contact: Justin
Contact Info: pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 1:30 PM
Location: DEFAULT OUTDOOR LOCATION: CMU Campus, Jared L Cohon University Center, at the picnic tables outside the east entrance (the side of the building that faces the track). Look for the "ACX" banner. CONTINGENCY INDOOR LOCATION (in case of rain): Jared L Cohon University Center, Danforth Lounge (upstairs, 2nd floor)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G2C3V5+6C>
Notes: The Pittsburgh ACX group meets around once a month, with most meetups taking place around Shady or East Liberty. If you'd like to be notified about future meetups, email pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com to be added to the mailing list.
### Rhode Island
**PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND**
Contact: Freya
Contact Info: rip[dot]my[dot]inbox[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 04, 01:00 PM
Location: Pizza J (967 Westminster St). I’ll be at a table with an ACX sign and some games.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87HCRH9G+27>
Additional Notes: Feel free to bring games if you have any!
### South Dakota
**SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA**
Contact: S.C.
Contact Info: Villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 19th, 5:00 PM
Location: Picnic shelter at McKennan Park, or tables south of it if it's occupied. Will have a sign saying "ACX."
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V>
Notes: Please RSVP on LW
### Tennessee
**MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, USA**
Contact: Michael
Contact Info: michael[at]postlibertarian[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 6th, 1:00 PM
Location: French Truck Coffee in Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium, 1350 Concourse Ave #167, Memphis, TN 38104. I'll be at a table with a sign that says ACX MEETUP
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/867F5X2P+QHW>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/yEGcbv4VPe>
### Texas
**AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA**
Contact: Silas Barta
Contact Info: sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 25th, 12:00 PM
Location: The Brewtorium, 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752, we'll be inside somewhere, just look for the Austin LessWrong and ACX Meetup signs
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/862487GM+96>
Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/
Notes: You can park on the streets in front of Brewtorium or the Milk Bank lot next door. If it really gets full, use the nearby residential streets. We'll be there until at least 5pm!
**COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS, USA**
Contact: Michael Frost
Contact Info: mikefrosttx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 5:00 PM
Location: On the porch of Torchy's on Texas Ave, 1037 Texas Ave, College Station, TX. I will have a yellow OneWheel.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8625JMFC+5J9>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that I know roughly how many people are coming!
**DALLAS, TEXAS, USA**
Contact: Ethan Morse
Contact Info: ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: Whole Foods off Preston and Forest (11700 Preston Rd Suite 714, Dallas, TX 75230). We'll be in the upstairs seating area closest to the windows.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8645W55W+2J>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/SdwuhENYWpA4BTrZT>
**HOUSTON, TEXAS, USA**
Contact: Joe Brenton
Contact Info: joe[dot]brenton[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 19th, 1:00 PM
Location: 711 Milby St, Houston, TX 77023 inside the IRONWORKS through the big orange door, look for the ACX MEETUP sign at the entrance
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76X6PMV6+V6>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. Food and drinks will be provided from Second Slice Sandwich Sandwich Shop.
**SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA**
Contact: James P
Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 12th, 12:00 PM
Location: Commonwealth Coffeehouse & Bakery Jones. 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV>
Group Link: <https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/>
### Utah
**SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA**
Contact: Adam
Contact Info: adam[dot]r[dot]isom[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: ~~Liberty Park, west side, near Chargepoint Station, we'll be on the grass in a circle of chairs~~ Changed due to weather, new location is 828 E Logan Ave, Salt Lake City
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GCP4MM+P3>
Group Link: email me and I'll add you to the mailing list and send you a discord invite
### Vermont
**BURLINGTON, VERMONT, USA**
Contact: Skyler
Contact Info: skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org
Time: Sunday, May 19th, 1:00 PM
Location: In the Oakledge park. I’ll be wearing a tall blue and green hat.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87P8FQ4F+5C>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/burlington-lwacx>
### Virginia
**BEDFORD, VIRGINIA, USA**
Contact: Eric F
Contact Info: Ericf14159[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 20th, 10:00 AM
Location: Bridge Street Cafe. 210 N Bridge St, Bedford, VA 24523
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87928FPG+6V>
**NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA, USA**
Contact: Daniel A is organizing the Newport News, VA meetup
Contact Info: daniel[dot]m[dot]adamiak[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 4th, 2:00 PM
Location: 12090 Jefferson Ave Ste 100, Newport News, VA 23606. There are benches outside of the Whole Foods that we will meet at. I will wear glasses and a red shirt. I will have a poorly made ACX sign. If you see someone with a well made sign, that's a different group.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87954G36+C4C>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/pLEbtx3BbdaLMXZKi>
Additional Notes: All are welcome. RSVPs are appreciated
**NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, USA**
Contact: Willa
Contact Info: walambert[at]pm[dot]me
Time: Saturday, May 18, 03:00 PM
Location: Botetourt Gardens; 1000 Botetourt Gardens, Norfolk, VA 23507. We will be directly across the street in a southwest direction from the main entrance of the Fred Heutte Center. Look for the people on the grass who have a canopy and one of them (me probably) is wearing a large silly yellow & green hat. If possible we will have an ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8785VP64+7M8>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/pLEbtx3BbdaLMXZKi>; <https://discord.gg/H2x2W5wshW>
Additional Notes: You are welcome to bring friends, family, kids, dogs, etc. as well as outdoor park games or snacks. We will likely bring healthy snacks of some kind, e.g. hummus and celery. There tends to be plenty of street parking by the park.
**RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, USA**
Contact: Ella Hoeppner
Contact Info: ellahoeppner[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM
Location: Whole Foods at 2024 W Broad Street, in the cafe area on the second floor
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8794HG5Q+7G>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/cYqpzHn2qU>
**WOODBRIDGE, VIRGINIA, USA**
Contact: Vast
Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]debtless191[at]passmail[dot]net
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM
Location: Chinn Park Library
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87C4MMC8+4M>
### Washington
**BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON, USA**
Contact: Alex
Contact Info: bellinghamrationalish[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: Elizabeth Station. 1400 W Holly St #101, Bellingham, WA 98225. Weather permitting, we'll sit outside under the tent shared with Narrative Coffee. If it's too cold out, we'll be inside. Either way, we'll have a cardboard sign that says "BELLINGHAM RATIONALISH" on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84WVQG45+XQF>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/bellingham-rationalish-community/>
Notes: Please RSVP on Meetup or LessWrong (preferably Meetup) Event link: <https://www.meetup.com/bellingham-rationalish-community/events/299992021/>
**SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA**
Contact: Nikita Sokolsky
Contact Info: Sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 28th, 5:00 PM
Location: Stoup Brewing, 1158 Broadway, Seattle, WA 98122
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4P>
Event Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cQBu6o8z894gRA6dj/acx-lw-seattle-spring-meetup-2024>
Group Link: <https://facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/> <https://www.facebook.com/events/925938142241186>
Notes: Meetup will be in a brewery, they serve alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks. You can bring your own food. Event is here - <https://www.facebook.com/events/925938142241186> If you need to get in touch 206-458-4791
### Wisconsin
**MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, USA**
Contact: Cory
Contact Info: cpf3rd[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM
Location: 1701 N Lincoln Memorial Dr, Milwaukee, WI 53202, The patio outside the Lakefront Colectivo. I will be wearing a red T-shirt
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86MJ3437+C8W>
**STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA**
Contact: A J
Contact Info: theswamp[dot]here[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 11th, 5:30 PM
Location: Stone Lake Lion's Hall, in the cafe area
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6>
# South America
## Argentina
**BUENOS AIRES**
Contact: David Rivadeneira
Contact Info: david[dot]f[dot]rivadeneira[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 11th, 7:00 PM
Location: Gorriti 5996, C1414 BKL, Buenos Aires
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/48Q3CH95+5C>
Group Link: <https://chat.whatsapp.com/LhvhRq8wyLILlyMoL1IJ4J>
## Brazil
**FLORIANÓPOLIS, BRAZIL**
Contact: Adiel
Contact Info: adiel[at]airpost[dot]net
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 4:00 PM
Location: Angeloni Beira Mar, at the food court. I'll be wearing a yellow hat.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/584HCFGF+326>
Notes: Everyone is welcome! Email me and I'll add you to the WhatsApp group.
**RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL**
Contact: Tiago Macedo
Contact Info: tiago[dot]s[dot]m[dot]macedo[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 28th, 3:00 PM
Location: Praça Nelson Mandela, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro. We will sit at a large circular bench in the middle of the square, right in front of a subway exit. I will have a piece of paper with a big "ACX" written on it. IMPORTANT: After some time, if a large group has joined, we might decide to go elsewhere nearby! Please contact the organizer.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/589R2RX8+P64>
Group Link: [Gist](https://gist.github.com/tiago-macedo/22e8bae2c691565c4143e142783cf1a7)
Notes: If you show up and don't see anyone, don't despair. The group might have decided to go somewhere close, either to eat or avoid the sun. Information on where we are will be posted to the meetup page, but feel free to contact me by email.
**SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL**
Contact: Bruno Vieira
Contact Info: vbruno2002[ at]g mail[do t ]com
Time: Friday, May 10th, 6:00 PM
Location: INOVA USP
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25>
Group Link: <https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB>
Additional Notes: Se você não conhece o INOVA, manda uma mensagem que eu te ajudo a chegar! (É bem de boa)
## Chile
**SANTIAGO**
Contact: Iñaki
Contact Info: inaki[dot]escarate[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 11:30 AM
Location: Parque Bicentenario, next to the Vitacura municipality, next to the stairs and fountain. We'll have a sign that says "ACX"
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+RF>
Notes: Both English and Spanish speakers are welcome. Anyone can come, family and pets welcome.
## Paraguay
**ASUNCIÓN**
Contact: Nuño Sempere
Contact Info: nuno[dot]semperelh[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 13th, 6:00 PM
Location: Mburicao; RSVP to nuno.semperelh[at]protonmail[dot]com at least one hour beforehand to get the precise location
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/5864P92W+9V>
Notes: Meetup is at my apartment. RSVP to nuno.semperelh[at]protonmail[dot]com to get the precise location | Skyler | 143046941 | Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 | acx |
# Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
# I. Saar’s COV-2
Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.
But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody - not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me - tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.
Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until they were satisfied their method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls. Then they started posting analyses of different open problems to their site, [rootclaim.com](https://www.rootclaim.com/). Here are three:
For example, [does Putin have cancer](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/putin-cancer)? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad.
This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a [celebrity Israeli murder case](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/tair-rada), Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up.
One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker.
So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges.
Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I [argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you), people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar [took him up on it](https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/), although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year.
Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this [on an old ACX comment thread](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism/comment/12792183), fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet.
At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis.
Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email):
> It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me.
>
> I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon.
If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter [told blogger Philipp Markolin](https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses-100-000-in-his-own-debate-0c3930ccd443) that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.”
Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants [put out a call for judges](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14ngubx/seeking_judges_for_a_debate_on_covids_origins/) on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on:
* Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
* Eric Stansifer, an applied mathematician with a PhD from MIT and experience in mathematical virology.
…both of whom received $5,000 as payment for their ~100[1](#footnote-1) hours of work, paid by the two contestants along with their $100,000 table stakes[2](#footnote-2).
The format would be three sessions, each consisting of hour-and-a-half arguments by both sides, then three hours for the debaters to answer questions from the judges and each other.
# II. The Debate
Below, I’ve included the videos from each session, plus my (long) summary if you prefer text. In the second session (on viral genetics) biotech entrepreneur and lab leak expert Yuri Deigin stood in for Saar; Peter continued to represent himself.
### Session 1: Epidemiology
**Peter:** The [first officially confirmed COVID case](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626128/) was a vendor at the Wuhan wet market. So were the next four, and half of the next 40. A heat map of early cases is obviously centered on the wet market, not on the lab. The wet market and the lab are about 6 miles away as the crow flies, or a 15 mile / half hour drive.
Location of COVID cases in December 2020. Source: [NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/26/science/covid-virus-wuhan-origins.html), slightly edited.
A map of cases at the wet market itself shows a clear pattern in favor of the very southwest corner:
The southwest corner is where most of the wildlife was being sold. Rumor said that included a stall with raccoon-dogs, an animal which is generally teeming with weird coronaviruses, and is a plausible intermediate host between humans and bats:
Awwww, come on, you can’t stay mad at this little guy.
China said this rumor was false and refused to release any information. Scientists were finally able to confirm the existence of the raccoon-dog shop in the funniest possible way: a virologist had visited Wuhan in 2014, saw the awful conditions in the shop, and took a picture as an example of the kind of place that a future pandemic might start.
Source: [NPR](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/03/17/1164226694/who-calls-on-china-to-share-data-on-raccoon-dog-link-to-pandemic-heres-what-we-k). To be fair, we have only the scientist’s word that this is why he had the picture. But he definitely did have it.
People say it would be a surprising coincidence if a zoonotic coronavirus pandemic just so happened to start in a city with a big coronavirus research lab, and this is true. But it would be an even more surprising coincidence if a lab-leak coronavirus pandemic just so happened to first get detected at a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market!
**Saar:** It’s not clear that the first case was at the wet market; a certain Mr. Chen, with no connection to the market, seems to have fallen sick on December 8. An SCMP article suggested there were 92 previously-undetected cases suspicious for COVID as far back as November. And even if half of the first forty universally-agreed-upon cases had market connections that means another half didn’t.
There was a bias towards detecting cases at the market: because authorities thought the market was the origin, and because everyone was thinking about zoonosis after SARS1, they only screened/diagnosed people with a market connection. One of the few non-market-connected COVID cases detected during this period was only detected because he was the relative of a hospital worker; the worker noticed the signs and insisted they go to the hospital despite the lack of a wet market connection.
Although the map of positive samples and cases at the market was centered near the raccoon-dog stall, that could be because that area was sampled more; it’s also close to the mahjong room, where visitors and vendors at the market would go and unwind in a tight, poorly ventilated area.
The next session will focus more on the WIV, but the short version is that they were doing lots of gain of function research. So one story compatible with the evidence is that a worker at WIV got infected with their modified coronavirus and passed it to his contacts. COVID started spreading quietly a few weeks to months before the first market-related case was detected. This accounts for the 92 earlier cases, Mr. Chen’s case, and the half of officially-detected cases with no wet market association. Then an infected person went to the market, causing a super-spreader event. Some of the infected market patrons went to the hospital, where doctors traced it back to the market and told other doctors to be on the lookout for wet market patrons coming in with weird viral pneumonias. They found some, declared victory, and the few anomalies - like the hospital worker’s relative - were forgotten, or assumed to have wet market connections that nobody could find. China quashed all evidence of the lab research (as was done in previous lab leak cases, eg the USSR) so all we have is the apparent wet market links that Peter found so convincing.
**Peter:** The supposed pre-wet-market cases are confirmed fakes.
Yes, the WHO did an investigation of whether there might have been COVID cases circulating before the wet market, and identified 92 unusual pneumonias that merited further review. But their final investigation, which included testing samples from these people after good tests became available, [found that](https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-joint-report_origins-studies-6-april-201.pdf) none of these people really had COVID.
As for [Mr. Chen](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-wuhan-market-lab-leak.html), he said in an interview that he was hospitalized for dental issues on December 8, caught COVID in the hospital on December 16, and then was erroneously reported as “hospitalized for COVID on December 8”. The December 16 date is after the first wet market cases.
Further, it seems epidemiologically impossible for COVID to have been circulating much before the first cases were officially detected December 11. The COVID pandemic doubles every 3.5 days. So if the first infection was much earlier - let’s say November 11 - we would expect 256x as much COVID as we actually saw. Even if the first couple of cases were missed because nobody was looking for them, the number of hospitalizations, deaths, etc, in January or whenever were all consistent with the number of people you’d expect if the pandemic started in early December - and not consistent with 256x that many people.
So probably we should just accept that the first reported case - a wet market vendor, December 11 - was very early in the pandemic. She wasn’t literally the first case - that would most likely have been someone who worked at the raccoon-dog shop, whose case might (like 95% of COVID cases) have been mild enough not to come to medical attention. But she was certainly very early.
Although authorities eventually decided COVID spread through a wet market and started deliberately looking for wet market connections, this only happened on December 30. So the earliest cases - including the 40 very earliest cases where half came from the wet market - weren’t biased (at least not through that particular route). So the claim that “the first case, and half of the first 40 cases, had wet market connections” stands as real and convincing evidence.
Although the exact center of the map of positive COVID samples in the wet market was the mahjong room, the samples taken from the mahjong room were not, themselves, positive (cf: although a low-resolution population density map of New York might show Central Park in the exact center of the population density gradient, Central Park does not itself have population).
There was no real “super-spreader event” at the wet market. There was a slow burn - one case the first day, a few more the next day, a few more the day after that. It’s hard to see how a single visit from an infected lab worker could do that.
So the only way it could possibly be a lab leak is if the lab leaked sometime in late November, infected exactly one lab worker, that worker went straight to the wet market, infected a vendor, then went home, quarantined, recovered, and all other cases were downstream of that first infected wet market vendor. This is unparsimonious.
**Saar:** The only source saying that Mr. Chen got sick early was an anonymous interview. And even if he was later than the first wet market cases, nobody was able to find any wet market connections. This means that whoever infected him was earlier than the index case and not linked to the wet market.
Peter argued that COVID couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old when the first wet market cases were detected. But this was based on its known doubling rate. If pre-discovery COVID had a slower doubling time than known COVID, it could have been around longer. And post-lockdown serology suggested numbers that were larger than claimed at the time. So contra Peter’s claims, the infection could have been going on longer, which wouldn’t require the first lab worker to go straight to the market. It could have been weeks.
Dr. Jesse Bloom’s investigation of the wet market samples, considered the final and most conclusive, [failed to find a clear connection between COVID and raccoon-dogs](https://theintercept.com/2023/05/10/covid-pandemic-origin-raccoon-dog/) or any other animals. Although the concentration of positive samples seemed highest near the raccoon dog stall, if you do a formal statistical analysis of which animals’ DNA was found near COVID samples most often, raccoon dogs are near the bottom. The top is wide-mouth bass, which can’t get COVID. This is obviously contamination, probably from infected humans touching wide-mouth bass tanks or something.
Although the Chinese data included a negative sample from a mahjong table, it included a mention of poultry being sold nearby, which might mean this wasn’t the mahjong room itself, but some other mahjong table at a poultry shop elsewhere in the market, and (dry) mahjong tables might not hold the virus well anyway.
**Peter:** Raccoon-dogs were sold in various cages at various stalls, separated by air gaps big enough to present a challenge for COVID transmission, and there’s no reason to think that one raccoon-dog would automatically pass it to all the others. The statistical analysis just proves there were many raccoon-dogs who didn’t have COVID. But you only need one. The raccoon dog shop and the drain leading out of the raccoon dog shop had some of the highest positive sample rates, which is more interesting than a statistical analysis which everyone agrees must be wrong (since it favors bass).
It’s unclear why the negative mahjong sample says something about poultry, but based on the stated location, it’s definitely the one in the mahjong room.
### Session 1.5: Lineages
This was technically part of Session 2, but formed enough of a discrete topic that I found it confusing to intermix it with all the other viral genetics points. I’m spinning it out into a separate summary, but the videos are all in the next session.
**Yuri:** The coronavirus eventually mutated into many different strains. But the first big split, seen in some of the earliest samples, is between two different sub-strains called Lineage A and Lineage B, which differ by two mutations. In these two mutations, Lineage A is the same as BANAL-52, a bat virus which is the closest-known relative of COVID, but Lineage B is different. Since COVID probably evolved from something like BANAL-52, Lineage A must have come first, spread for a while, and then gotten two new mutations, turning it into Lineage B.
All of the cases at the wet market, including the first detected case, were Lineage B. Lineage A wasn’t discovered until about a week later, and none of the Lineage A patients had been to the wet market.
Lineage A (left) was used by the Minoan Cretans, but has never been deciphered. Lineage B (right) was used by the Mycaeneans for lists of palace goods.
This matches Saar’s story above. The lab leaked to somewhere else in Wuhan, not the wet market. The virus spread undetected in the population for a while. During this time, it mutated to Lineage B. Then one of the people with Lineage B went to the wet market and started a superspreader event. The authorities sampled the patients, found Lineage B, then started looking elsewhere. Later they detected some of the earlier Lineage A cases.
The market is unlikely to be the origin of the pandemic, because the original Lineage A strain wasn’t found there.
**Peter:** Although Lineage A is evolutionarily older, Lineage B started spreading in humans first.
We know this because Lineage B is more common. Throughout the early pandemic, until the D614G variant drove all other strains extinct, a consistent 2/3 of the cases were B, compared to 1/3 A. Both strains spread at the same rate, so the best explanation is that B started earlier than A. Since COVID doubles every 3-4 days, probably Lineage B started 3-4 days earlier than Lineage A, which explains why it’s always been twice as many cases.
But also, Lineage B also has more internal genetic diversity than Lineage A. In general, older viruses have more genetic diversity (the “molecular clock”). This is further evidence that B started spreading first. [Pekar 2022](https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abp8337) and [Pipes 2021](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7798932/) do analyses with known parameters for spread rate and diversity, and find 90%+ odds that Lineage B was the first one in humans.
Why did the older strain start spreading later? Probably the virus crossed from bats into raccoon-dogs on some raccoon-dog farm out in the country. It spread in the raccoon-dogs for a while, racking up mutations, including the (less mutated) Lineage A strain and the (slightly more mutated) Lineage B strain. Then several raccoon-dogs were taken to Wuhan for sale, including one with Lineage A and another with Lineage B. The one with Lineage B passed its virus to humans earlier. Then 3-4 days later, the Lineage A one passed *its* virus to humans.
Lineage A was first found in a Wuhan neighborhood right next to the wet market (closer to the wet market than 97% of Wuhan’s population). Again, it would be a bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic was first detected at a wet market. But it would be an even *more* bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic separated into two strains, and *both* were first detected at a wet market!
Although no known wet market cases were Lineage A, a positive Lineage A environmental sample was found at the wet market, and everyone agrees most cases went undetected. So maybe the Lineage B raccoon-dog spread its virus to a vendor, and that sub-strain mostly stayed in the market. But the Lineage A raccoon-dog spread its virus to a customer, who went back to his house nearby, and that strain spread in the neighborhoods next to the market.
This is the only story that explains the evolutionary precedence of A, the greater spread and older molecular clock of B, and the fact that both strains were first found very close to the wet market.
**Yuri/Saar:** Lineage B could be more common and diverse because it got the advantage of a super-spreader event in the wet market.
There are a few scattered cases of intermediates between A and B, and a few other scattered cases of lineages that seem even more ancestral (ie closer to the bat virus) than either. This doesn’t make sense in a double spillover hypothesis. But it does make sense if the lineages separated in human transmission somewhere between the lab and the first super-spreader event at the wet market.
**Peter:** Again, the wet market wasn’t a super-spreader event. COVID spread in the wet market at exactly its normal spread rate, doubling about once every 3.5 days. Stop calling the wet market a super-spreader event.
The scattered cases of “intermediates” are sequencing errors. They were all found by the same computer software, which “autofills” unsequenced bases in a genome to the most plausible guess. Because Lineage B was already in the software, depending on which part of a Lineage A virus you sequenced, you might get one half or the other autofilled as Lineage B, which looked like an “intermediate”. We know this because all the supposed “intermediates” were partial cases sequenced by this particular software. We can confirm this by noting that there are *too many* intermediates! That is, where Lineage A is (T/C) and Lineage B is (C/T), the software found *both* (T/T) “intermediates” and (C/C) “intermediates”. But obviously there can only be one real intermediate form, and we have to dismiss one or the other. But in fact we can dismiss both, because they were both caused by the same software bug.
The scattered “progenitor” cases - those closer to the ancestral bat virus than either A or B - are reversions, ie cases where a new mutation in the virus happened to hit an already-mutated base and shift it back towards the ancestral virus. We know this because all of these “progenitors” were scattered cases found months after the pandemic started, often in entirely different countries from Wuhan. If these were real progenitor viruses, they would have either fizzled out or exploded into a substantial portion of all cases, not be found one time in one guy in Malaysia. Given the number of mutations the virus developed over the course of the pandemic, it’s inevitable that some of them would be mutations that bring it closer to the original bat virus, and in fact we find the number of “progenitors” found very nicely matches the number of progenitor-appearing viruses we would expect by chance. And in many cases, we *know* the “progenitors” are newer than the original lineages, because they also have some of the later mutations that Lineage A or B picked up along the way, alongside their apparent ancestral-bat-virus-like mutations.
### Session 2: Viral Genetics
**Yuri:** Two years before COVID, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with colleagues at the University of North Carolina, sent in a grant proposal for the DEFUSE program. This program, intended to locate and better understand potential future pandemic viruses, involved going into bat caves and collecting new coronaviruses. Once they had them, they would do gain-of-function: specifically, they would add a furin cleavage site to make them more infectious and see what happened.
(quick interlude: COVID’s spike protein has two sections: one binds to human cells through the ACE2 receptor, the other helps fuse with the cell after binding. In order to avoid the immune system, it hides both of these into one spike. But when it reaches a cell, it needs to separate them again. It takes advantage of a human respiratory enzyme, furin, to do the separation - this also ensures that it only infects its primary target, human respiratory cells. The part of COVID that lets it get separated by furin is called the “furin cleavage site”. COVID’s bat-virus ancestors were gastrointestinal viruses; the addition of a furin cleavage site was what made them respiratory viruses.)
We’ve found two close relatives of COVID: bat viruses called RATG-13 and BANAL-52. In particular, COVID looks more or less like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site.
There are 1500 sarbecoviruses, members of the family of viruses that includes SARS and SARS2/COVID. None of them except COVID have furin cleavage sites. BANAL-52, COVID’s closest ancestor, doesn’t even have anything resembling one that could mutate into a functional furin cleavage site like COVID’s.
Instead, COVID - which mostly just resembles BANAL-52 with a few scattered single-point mutations - has twelve completely new nucleotides in a row - a fully formed furin cleavage site that came out of nowhere. There is nowhere else in the genome that COVID differs from BANAL-52 in such a profound way. It’s just BANAL-52 plus a little bit of random mutation plus a fully-formed furin cleavage site that came out of nowhere.
Further, the furin cleavage site is weird. It uses the protein arginine twice. But instead of the nucleotides coding for arginine in the usual viral way, both times it uses the codons CGG - the way that higher animals code for arginine. This works fine - it’s just not how viruses do it.
So the obvious conclusion is that WIV, which said in 2018 that it was going to find viruses and add furin cleavage sites to them, found a close relative of BANAL-52 and added a furin cleavage site. Since they were humans, and most familiar with the human way of encoding arginine, they added it as CGG both times.
COVID seemed surprisingly optimized for infecting humans. Of fifty animals it was tested in, including the usual coronavirus intermediate hosts (pangolins, raccoon-dogs, etc), it was best at infecting human cells. Further, a virus that enters a new species will usually show a burst of mutations as it “figures out” the best way to adapt to that species’ unique biology. But COVID has had a pretty constant mutation rate in humans, from the beginning of the pandemic to the end. That suggests it was already adapted to humans. This could be because the lab screened for viruses with existing adaptations, because they passed it through humanized mice in the lab, or because it adapted in the hundreds of undetected cases that happened between the lab and detection in the wet market.
Usually, research with potentially dangerous coronaviruses is done in BSL-3 or 4, ie high to very-high security. But WIV was irresponsibly doing it in BSL-2, ie medium security. The researchers weren’t even required to wear masks. In general, about 1/500 labs will leak any given pathogen they’re working on (?!). But because WIV was researching such an infectious virus in such an irresponsible way, the odds of a leak were much higher.
The most likely explanation for all these facts is that WIV went ahead and did the gain-of-function research they said they were going to do (the particular DEFUSE grant proposal we know about got rejected, but it proves that Wuhan wanted to do this, and they could easily have gotten funding somewhere else, or done it out of their regular budget). They found a close relative of BANAL-52 and added a furin cleavage site as a simple twelve-nucleotide insertion, using the human method of encoding arginine that their genetic engineers were familiar with. Then it leaked, spread for a while in the general Wuhan population, and eventually made it to the wet market where it got detected.
**Peter:** As mentioned earlier, the DEFUSE grant was rejected. Further, the grant said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for finding the viruses, and the University of North Carolina would do all the gain-of-function research. This was a reasonable division of labor, since UNC was actually good at gain-of-function research, and WIV mostly wasn’t. They had done a few very simple gain-of-function projects before, but weren’t really set up for this particular proposal and were happy to leave it for their American colleagues.
Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.
Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.
Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.
COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to *its* furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains.
Sometimes insertions happen because of a mistake in viral replication. Other times the virus gets confused between its own RNA and its host’s, and splices a bit of the host RNA into the virus. This would neatly explain why the insertion used the unusual coding CGG for arginine, which is common in animals but rare in viruses. On the other hand, it’s not *that* rare in viruses - COVID uses CGG for arginine about 3% of the time. And human engineers don’t necessarily use it any more than that - Peter was able to find one example of humans adding arginine to a virus, and 0 out of the 5 arginines added were CGG.
COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form.
Further, COVID’s furin cleavage site was inserted via what seems to be a frameshift mutation - it wasn’t a clean insertion of the amino acids that formed the site, it was an insertion of a sequence which changed the context of the surrounding nucleotides into the amino acids that formed the site. This is a pointless too-clever-by-half “flourish” that there would be no reason for a human engineer to do. But it’s exactly the kind of weird thing that happens in the random chance of evolution.
COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site). As for raccoon-dogs, it sure does seems suspicious that the virus is already suited to them.
The claim that COVID is uniquely adapted to humans is false. The paper that claimed that defined how well COVID was adapted to different animals by those animals’ difference (on the relevant cell receptors) from humans. So in its methodology, humans came out #1 by default. If you don’t do that, COVID is better-adapted to many other animals.
It’s not necessarily true that viruses see a burst of mutations when they enter a new host. COVID spread to deer and mink, and in neither case was there a burst of mutations. COVID has a pretty simple job of infecting respiratory cells and is already very good at it, regardless of species.
In Yuri’s model, Wuhan Institute of Virology picked up a discarded grant and decided to do the gain-of-function half allotted to a different university, despite their relative inexperience. They skipped over all the SARS-like viruses they were supposed to work on, and all the standard gain-of-function model backbones, in favor of BANAL-52, a virus which would not be discovered for another two years, but which they somehow had samples of, which they had for some reason decided to keep secret despite its total lack of interestingness. Then they would have had to eschew all usual gain-of-function practices in favor of inserting a weird furin cleavage site that shouldn’t have worked according to the theory they had at the time, via a frameshift mutation. Then they would have had to culture it, a technique beyond their limited capabilities. *Then* it would have had to leak, and magically show up again in front of the raccoon-dog stall at a wet market.
**Yuri:** WIV wouldn’t have needed to keep BANAL-52 “secret” in some kind of sinister way. Plenty of researchers have backlogs of work they haven’t published yet. Probably they a found BANAL relative in one of their normal sampling trips, did some preliminary studies on it, and planned to publish it later once they cleaned up their data. Everyone works like this.
The part of DEFUSE saying that they would only work on viruses that were 95% similar to SARS is unclear and might mean something else. It looks more like they say they’ll start with those viruses, but also do some work on novel viruses. BANAL-52 could have been one of the novel viruses.
The furin cleavage site is weird, but the researchers might have done that on purpose, to make the virus easier to keep track of, or to test different furin cleavage sites. Depending on the exact BANAL-52 relative they used, it might not even be a frameshift; there’s a particular way to spell serine that would make the insertion more natural.
The claims that COVID can’t be cultured in normal media are based on speculative original research by Peter and might not hold up.
**Peter:** WIV did most of its virus-gathering in a trip to a Yunnan cave between 2010 and 2015. All those viruses have long since been processed and added to the database. There’s no sign that they made more trips to Yunnan caves, and no reason for them to keep that secret. So the idea that they might just have some new viruses they didn’t publish doesn’t hold up.
But suppose they did make more trips. Given the amount of time between the DEFUSE proposal and COVID, if they kept to their normal virus-collection rate, they would have gotten about thirty new viruses. What’s the chance that one of those was BANAL-52? There are thousands of bat viruses, and BANAL-52 is so rare that it wasn’t found until well after the pandemic started and people were looking for it very hard. So the chance that one of their 30 would be BANAL-52 is low. Also, they said in DEFUSE that they planned to go back to the same Yunnan cave. But BANAL-52 was found far away from that cave, so unless it ranged over a wide area, they probably couldn’t have found it even if they got very lucky.
### Session 3: Closing Arguments
This third debate was supposed to be about “inference”, ie how much Bayesian evidence was provided by each of the facts given so far, and how to fit them into the Rootclaim probabilistic model. I’m going to relegate my summary of the more probabilistic half to the next section of this post, and just include the closing arguments here.
**Saar:** Peter’s case hinges on the idea that it’s very improbable that a lab leak pandemic would first show up at a wet market. But this isn’t necessarily improbable. The Huanan Seafood Market had several factors that made it a likely location for a superspreader event. It was busy, with over 10,000 visitors a day. Many of the people there (eg the 1,000 vendors) came back daily, letting them reinfect each other. It had poor ventilation, especially in the high-positivity area near the raccoon-dog stall. It had cold wet surfaces on which the virus could survive for long periods. It was indoors, which prevented UV light from killing the virus. Given a small amount of sporadic COVID going around Wuhan, it’s not surprising for the first place it started spreading en masse to be a wet market.
In fact, we have several examples of this. When China was COVID Zero, there would occasionally be small outbreaks that the authorities would have to contain. Most of these were at wet markets. For example, the big COVID outbreak in Beijing started at Xinfadi Market, their local seafood market. This couldn’t be an animal spillover, because there were no raccoon-dogs or other weird wildlife there. So it must be that wet markets are natural places for superspreader events. There are several other examples, which make up about half of the total outbreaks in Zero COVID era China, plus others in Singapore and Thailand. Since COVID clusters concentrate in wet markets even when there is no animal spillover, we should accept this as a property of the virus, and not attribute any significance to the fact that this happened in Wuhan too.
**Peter:** About 1/10,000 citizens of Wuhan was a wet market vendor. So there’s a 1/10,000 chance that the first known COVID case should be a wet market vendor by chance alone. Weibo lists the most popular places for people to check in to their network on their phones, and the wet market was the 1600th most popular place in Wuhan, meaning that if you weight locations by busy-ness, there’s a less than 1/1600 chance that the first cases would be in the wet market.
Yes, the wet market is indoors, has mediocre ventilation, has repeat visitors, etc. So do thousands of other places in Wuhan, like schools, hospitals, workplaces, places of worship. The wet market isn’t special in any way. And again, it wasn’t a superspreader event! COVID spread at the same rate in the wet market as it does everywhere else: doubling once per 3.5 days. It doesn’t matter what kinds of arguments you can come up with for why the wet market *should have* been the perfect superspreader event location, we can look at it and see that it wasn’t. It’s an environment that spreads COVID at exactly the normal rate.
Zero COVID era Chinese outbreaks were concentrated in wet markets because they received infected animal products. We know why there was an outbreak in the Xinfadi Market in Beijing: it was because the seafood stall got frozen fish from some non-Zero-COVID country, the fish had COVID particles on it, and the vendor got infected and spread it to everyone else. Something like this is true for the other Chinese wet market based outbreaks we know about it. So this makes the opposite point you think it does: wet markets start outbreaks because there are infected goods being sold there. Then the virus spreads through the wet market at a completely normal rate.
**Saar:** The Weibo list of 1600 places bigger than the wet market is likely inaccurate, because it's based on check-in data and people don't check in to seafood markets. Most of those 1600 places aren't amenable to superspread. The 70 markets supposedly bigger than Huanan are irrelevant, because they're supermarkets, open air markets, etc. Huanan is the largest seafood market in central China, and a more likely place for the first cluster of cases to be noticed.
Markets weren't a common spillover location in SARS1, so the zoonosis hypothesis hasn't "called" this event in a way that should give them a high Bayes factor.
And there’s still plenty of evidence for isolated (though not super-spreading) pre-market cases. A British expatriate in Wuhan, Connor Reed, [says](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8075633/First-British-victim-25-describes-coronavirus.html) he got sick in November, three weeks before the first wet market case. Later the hospital tested his samples and said it was COVID. Another paper reports 90 cases before the first wet market one.
**Peter:** Connor Reed was lying. The case wasn’t reported in any peer-reviewed paper. It was reported in the tabloid *The Daily Mail*, months after it supposedly happened. He also told the *Mail* that his cat died of coronavirus too, which is rare-to-impossible. Also, to get a positive hospital test, he would have had to go to the hospital, but he was 25 years old and almost no 25-year-olds go to the hospital for coronavirus. His only evidence that it was COVID was that two months later, the hospital supposedly “notified” him that it was. The hospital never informed anyone else of this extremely surprising fact which would be the biggest scientific story of the year if true. So probably he was lying. Incidentally, he died of a drug overdose shortly after giving the *Mail* that story; while not all drug addicts are liars, given all the other implausibilities in his story, this certainly doesn’t make him seem more credible. And in any case, he claimed he got his case at a market “like in the media”
The other 90 cases are also fake. A lab leak guy found a paper that mentioned 90 more cases than other papers, and made up a conspiracy theory where the author was trying to secretly communicate that there had been 90 secret cases before any of the confirmed cases, even though there was nothing about this in the text of the paper. But actually that paper just counted cases differently than other papers, and they were referring to normal cases after the pandemic officially started.
---
Again, I’ll come back to the discussion about inference later, but for now, here’s a table of both sides’ reasoning. This exact presentation comparing both analyses is mine[3](#footnote-3), but you can see Saar’s version [here](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2), and Peter’s starting at 45:33 of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sOcdexHKnk).
Slightly made up; the two sides didn’t express their probabilities in the same way and I had to make editorial decisions to match them. Note that these aren't entirely comparable because Peter is being laxer about out-of-model probability than Saar. Although Saar's final odds here are 533-to-1, this just the central estimate. Rootclaim’s real final probability is 94% lab leak. You can see their analysis [here](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2).
### And The Winner Is . . .
…
…
…
…
…
Peter and the zoonosis hypothesis.
This was a decisive victory. There were two judges, who each gave separate verdicts (or were allowed to declare a draw). Both judges decided in favor of Peter.
You can see the judges’ own summary of their reasoning here ([Will](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YhmkYB32RpGsXvQTsX4xZ0Yul1wiwh8Z/view), [Eric](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aHlhPd-16EOabzXhiajT5PBm3uVCAG3T/view))
Manifold [agreed](https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-bsp9000-win-the-rootclaim-chal) with the judges. There was a prediction market on who would win. It started out 70-30 in favor of lab leak. As the videos came out, zoonosis started doing better and better. I don’t want to take the exact final numbers too seriously, since I think some of the later price increases involved hints from the participants’ behavior. But it’s clear which way viewers thought the wind was blowing[4](#footnote-4).
Around the same time, the Good Judgment Project - Philip Tetlock’s group studying superforecasters - [put out a report on the lab leak hypothesis](https://goodjudgment.substack.com/p/superforecasting-the-origins-of-the). After studying it in depth, his forecasters ended up 75-25 in favor of zoonosis. The Rootclaim debate was one of ten sources they said they found especially interesting.
And also around the same time, and unrelated to any of this, the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute [surveyed experts](https://gcrinstitute.org/covid-origin/) (“168 virologists, infectious disease epidemiologists, and other scientists from 47 countries”) and found the same thing (though [see here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/28hnPFiAoMkJssmf3/most-experts-believe-covid-19-was-probably-not-a-lab-leak) for some potential problems with the survey):
For what it’s worth, I was close to 50-50 before the debate, and now I’m 90-10 in favor of zoonosis.
# III. The Math And The Aftermath
The third debate session was about “inference”, how to put evidence together. I put this part off until after disclosing the winner, because I wanted to talk about some of these issues at more length.
### The Math: Judges
Both judges included a probabilistic analysis in their written decision. Here’s the same table as above, expanded to add the judges:
I shoehorned the judges’ factors into the categories I already had; some of them were actually subtly different from Peter’s, Saar’s, and each other’s. The “priors” category is especially a mess here.
We’ll go over these later, but I get the impression that they both thought of probabilistic analyses as an afterthought. For example, Judge Eric wrote 30,000 words about which considerations moved him, and only then includes the analysis, saying:
> I am not convinced that this Bayesian calculation is even an appropriate way to estimate the relative posterior probability of Z and LL; it just seemed fair that after criticizing Rootclaim’s calculations at length I should make an attempt at it myself.
Judge Will’s decision ran to 10,000 words. He said he independently tried both reasoning it out intuitively, and running the Bayesian analysis, and was relieved when these two methods returned the same result. He said:
> I am skeptical that the Bayesian decision making/evaluation methods are any more "objective" than [intuitive reasoning]. I think they maximize legibility, not objectivity, and tend to hide the intuitive/heuristic portion in the data inclusion step and values, where it’s harder to see . . . I am not skilled in the Bayesian method, and I am sure I made significant mistakes. More time and practice would improve and refine my estimates. At the fundamental rules of the universe level, Bayesian analysis must be the best way to evaluate evidence. However, I am unsure that it’s a good strategy for a human given our cognitive limitations, and doubly unsure it’s truly being used (in the dispassionate sense) where the outcome is social desirability/fame/Twitter likes.
I’m focusing on this because Saar’s opinion is that the debate went wrong (for his side) because he didn’t realize the judges were going to use Bayesian math, they did the math wrong (because Saar hadn’t done enough work explaining how to do it right), and so they got the wrong answer. I want to discuss the math errors he thinks the judges made, but this discussion would be incomplete without mentioning that the judges themselves say the numbers were only a supplement for their intuitive reasoning.
That having been said, let’s look deeper into some of Saar’s concerns.
### The Math: Extreme Odds
Saar complained that Peter’s odds were too extreme. For example, Peter said there was only a 1/10,000 chance that a lab leak pandemic would first show up at a wet market.
Peter’s argument went something like: obviously a zoonotic pandemic would start at a site selling weird animals. But a lab leak pandemic - if it didn’t start at the lab - could show up anywhere. 1/10,000 Wuhan citizens work at the wet market. So if a lab leak was going to show up somewhere random, the wet market was a 1/10,000 chance.
Saar had specific arguments against this, but he also had a more general argument: you should rarely see odds like 1/10,000 outside of well-understood domains. In his blog post, he gave this example:
> A prosecutor shows the court a statistical analysis of which DNA markers matched the defendant and their prevalence, arriving at a 1E-9 probability they would all match a random person, implying a Bayes factor near 1E9 for guilty.
>
> But if we try to estimate p(DNA|~guilty) by truly assuming innocence, it is immediately evident how ridiculous it is to claim only 1 out of a billion innocent suspects will have a DNA match to the crime scene. There are obviously far better explanations like a lab mistake, framing, an object of the suspect being brought by someone to the scene, etc.
So the real p(wet market|lab leak) isn’t the 1/10,000 chance a pandemic arising in a random place hits the wet market, but the (higher?) probability that there’s something wrong with Peter’s argument.
Then Saar tried to show specific things that might be wrong with Peter’s argument. I didn’t find his specific examples convincing. But maybe the question shouldn’t be whether I *agreed with* him. It should be whether I’m *so confident* he’s wrong that I would give it 10,000-to-1 odds.
This makes total sense, it’s absolutely true, and I want to be *really, really* careful with it. If you take this kind of reasoning too far, you can convince yourself that the sun won’t rise tomorrow morning. All you have to do is propose 100 different reasons the sunrise might not happen. For example:
1. The sun might go nova.
2. An asteroid might hit the Earth, stopping its rotation.
3. An unexpected eclipse might blot out the sun.
4. God exists and wants to stop the sunrise for some reason.
5. This is a simulation, and the simulators will prevent the sunrise as a prank.
6. Aliens will destroy the sun.
…and so on until you reach 100. On the one hand, there are 100 of these reasons. But on the other, they’re each fantastically unlikely - let’s say 99.9999999999% chance each one doesn’t happen - so it doesn’t matter.
But suppose you get too humble. Sure, you might *think* you have a great model of how eclipses work and you know they never happen off schedule - but can you really be 99.9999999999% sure you understood your astronomy professor correctly? Can you be 99.9999999999% sure you’re not insane, and that your “reasoning” isn’t just random seizings of neurons that aren’t connecting to reality at any point? Seems like you can’t. So maybe you should lower your disbelief in each hypothesis to something more reasonable, like 99%. But now the chance that the sun rises tomorrow is 0.99^100, aka 36%. Seems bad.
Also, suppose I agree I shouldn’t use numbers like 1-in-10,000. What should my real numbers be? Saar says it’s the strength of the strongest hypothesis for why I might be wrong. But I can’t think of any good reasons I might be wrong here. Should I feel okay after adjusting it down to 1-in-1,000? 1-in-100? 1-in-10?
Saar said he “could have” argued that there was only a one-in-a-million chance COVID’s furin cleavage site evolved naturally. Instead, he gave a Bayes factor of 1-in-20, because he wanted to leave room for out-of-model error. But (as Saar understands it) the judges’ probabilistic analysis took Peter’s unadjusted 1-in-10,000 wet market claim seriously *and* Saar’s fully-adjusted 1-in-20 furin cleavage site claim literally, compared them, found Peter’s evidence stronger, and gave him the victory. You can see why he’s upset.
(again, the judges deny basing their verdict solely on the probabilistic models)
At some point you have to take your best guess about how confusing a given field is and how wrong you could be - how often do labs overstate their DNA results? How much do you know about how viruses get furin cleavage sites? How sure are you about the demographics of Wuhan? How tightly does your “there have been at least a million days without aliens destroying the sun, therefore aliens will not destroy the sun tomorrow” argument hang together? - and choose a number.
### The Math: Extreme Odds, Part II
During the debate, Peter showed this slide:
Okay, this one is just awful.
It takes the risky gambit above - giving extreme odds to something - then doubles down on it by multiplying across twenty different stages to get a stupendously low probability of 1/5\*10^25. If we believe this, it’s more likely that we win the lottery three times in a row than that we learn lab leak was true after all.
Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this the [Multiple Stage Fallacy](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154036150109228). Even aside from the failure mode in the sunrise example above (where people are too reluctant to give strong probabilities), it fails because people don’t think enough about the correlations between stages. For example, maybe there’s only 1/10 odds that the Wuhan scientists would choose the suboptimal RRAR furin cleavage site. And maybe there’s only 1/20 odds that they would add a proline in front to make it PRRAR. But are these really two separate forms of weirdness, such that we can multiply them together and get 1/200? Or are scientists who do one weird thing with a furin cleavage site more likely to do another? Mightn’t they be pursuing some general strategy of testing weird furin cleavage sites?
(For example, Yuri proposed that, because the scientists wanted to understand how pandemic coronaviruses originate in nature, they might deliberately pick more natural-looking features over more designed-looking ones, which would neatly explain many features seemingly inconsistent with lab leak. Is this a conspiracy theory? Rootclaim is able to successfully route around this question. If the probability of a feature happening in nature is X, then the probability of it happening in this variant of lab leak scenario is X \* [chance that the scientists wanted to imitate nature). This gives it a (deserved) complexity penalty without ruling out this (non-zero and potentially important) possibility.)
In any case, Peter didn’t care as much about probabilistic analysis as Saar, he didn’t make his case hinge on this slide, and he might have been kind of using it to troll Rootclaim (which definitely worked). He might not have been making any of the mistakes above. But anyone who took this slide seriously would end up dramatically miscalibrated.
### The Math: Big Pictures
Another of Saar’s concerns with the verdict was that Peter was an extraordinary debater, to the point where it could have overwhelmed the signal from the evidence.
It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech. I sometimes get accused of overdoing things, but I can’t imagine how many mutations it would take to make me even a fraction as competent as Peter was.
Saar’s closing argument included the admission:
> Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He's invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He's much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point.
Once you’ve described your opponent that way in your closing argument, what’s left of your case?
Saar thought a lot was left. Throughout the debate, he tried to make a point about how getting the inference right was more important than winning sub-sub-sub-debates about individual lines of evidence. Although Peter won most specific points of contention, Saar thought that if the judges could just keep their mind on the big picture, they would realize a lab leak was more likely.
I’m potentially sympathetic to arguments like Saar’s. Imagine a debate about UFOs. Imaginary-Saar says “UFOs can’t be real, because it doesn’t make sense for aliens to come to Earth, circle around a few fields in Kansas, then leave without providing any other evidence of their existence.” Imaginary-Peter says “John Smith of Topeka saw a UFO at 4:52 PM on 6/12/2010, and everyone agrees he’s an honorable person who wouldn’t lie, so what’s your explanation of that?” Saar says “I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something?” Peter says “Ha, I’ve hacked his cell phone records and geolocated him to coordinates XYZ, which is a mosque. My analysis finds that he’s there on 99.5% of Islamic holy days, which proves he’s a very religious Muslim. And religious Muslims don’t drink! Your argument is invalid!” On the one hand, imaginary-Peter is very impressive and sure did shoot down Saar’s point. On the other, imaginary-Saar never really claimed to have a great explanation for this particular UFO sighting, and his argument doesn’t depend on it. Instead of debating whether Smith could or couldn’t have been drunk, we need to zoom out and realize that the aliens explanation makes no sense.
The problem was, Saar couldn’t effectively communicate what his big picture was. Neither deployed some kind of amazingly elegant prior. They both used the same kind of evidence. The only difference was that Peter’s evidence hung together, and Saar’s evidence fell apart on cross-examination.
I think - not because Saar really explained it, but just reading between the lines - Saar thought the un-ignorable big picture evidence was the origin in a city with a coronavirus gain-of-function lab, and the twelve-nucleotide insertion in the furin cleavage site.
To some degree, Peter just ate the loss on those questions. No matter how you slice it, it really is a weird coincidence that the epidemic started so close to Asia’s biggest coronavirus laboratory. Peter tried to deflect this - he pointed out there were other BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. But this was a rare question where he unambiguously came out looking worse - the other cities’ labs had much less coronavirus-specific research. Wuhan really was unique (aside from the other big coronavirus lab in North Carolina).
Peter did better when he tried to control the damage: there are a couple hundred million people in the South Asian areas where people eat weird animals exposed to virus-infected bats, Wuhan has a population of about 12 million, so maybe 1.5% of all potential zoonotic pandemics should start in Wuhan. Peter tried to argue that Wuhan was a local trade center, so maybe we should up that to 5 - 10%. 5 - 10% coincidences aren’t that rare. Even 1.5% coincidences happen sometimes.
Likewise, the furin cleavage site really does stand on a genetic map. I didn’t feel like either side did much math to quantify how weird it was. Naively, I might think of this as “30,000 bases in COVID, only one insertion, it’s in what’s obviously the most interesting place - sounds like 30,000-to-one odds against”. Against that, a virus with a boring insertion would never have become a pandemic, so maybe you need to multiply this by however much viral evolution is going on in weird caves in Laos, and then you would get the odds that at least *one* virus would have an insertion interesting enough to go global. Neither participant calculated this in a way that satisfied me (though [see here](https://twitter.com/MichaelWorobey/status/1438202006678630404) for related discussion). Instead, Peter tried to undermine the furin argument by showing that, as surprising as the site was under a natural origin, it would be an even more surprising choice for human engineers. Saar argued it wasn’t - but because of his policy of giving adjusted-for-model-error odds, he only gave this a factor of 30 in his analysis. Since Peter gave it a *higher* factor of 50 in *his* analysis, it looked from the outside like Saar had already conceded this point, and the judges were mostly happy to go with Saar’s artificially-low estimate.
### The Math: Double Coincidences
Saar brought up an interesting point halfway through the debate: you should rarely see high Bayes factors on both sides of an argument.
That is, suppose you accept that there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that the pandemic starts at a wet market under lab leak. And suppose you accept there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that COVID’s furin cleavage site could evolve naturally.
If lab leak is true, then you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for zoonosis[5](#footnote-5).
Likewise, if zoonosis is true, you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for this true thing. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak.
Either way, you’re accepting that a 1-in-10,000 freak coincidence happened. Isn’t it more likely you’ve bungled your analysis?
I was following along at home, and I definitely bungled this point; I had some high Bayes factors on both sides. I adjusted some of them downward based on Saar’s good point, but how far should we take it?
Here I remember [The Pyramid And The Garden](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/): you can get very strong coincidences if you have many degrees of freedom, ie buy a lot of lottery tickets. So for example, suppose there are fifty things about a virus. You should expect at least one of those to have a one-in-fifty coincidence by pure chance.
What about more than that? You might be able to get away with this by saying there are an infinite number of possible conspiracy theories, and some from that infinite set are brought into existence when a strong enough coincidence makes them plausible. For example, it’s really weird that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted, I could form a conspiracy theory about a group of weird assassins obsessed with killing Founding Fathers on important dates, and then Jefferson and Adams’ deaths would be 1/10,000 evidence for that theory. But this is the [Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy), which Saar warned against several times.
I don’t know if “the virus started in Wuhan, which is where they’re doing this research” gets a Texas Sharpshooter penalty, or how high that penalty should be. But the furin cleavage site doesn’t - people were talking about lab leak before anyone noticed it.
### The Aftermath: Peter
Peter seemed satisfied with the result, in an understated sort of way:
> It seemed like an interesting experiment in monetizing the debunking of a conspiracy theory. I think there's usually a big asymmetry where it's easy to get rich spreading bullshit (like, the top anti-vaxxers during the pandemic all made a million dollars a year on substack), but it's almost impossible to make money on debunking it. The Rootclaim challenge seemed like one rare case where the opposite was true.
>
> Beyond that, I don't know what it's good for. It does seem like there could be a positive social impact from more people understanding that the lab leak hypothesis is (almost certainly) false.
### The Aftermath: Saar
Saar says the debate didn’t change his mind. In fact, by the end of the debate, Rootclaim released an updated analysis that placed an even higher probability on lab leak than when they started.
In his [blog post](https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/), he discussed the issues above, and said the judges had erred in not considering them. He respects the judges, he appreciates their efforts, he just thinks they got it wrong. Although he respected their decision, he wanted the judges to correct what he saw as mistakes in their published statements, which delayed the public verdict and which which Viewers Like You did not appreciate:
I ran an early draft of this post by him. There was some miscommunication about the exact publication date, so he hasn’t had time to write up a full response, but he has some quick thoughts (and I’ll link the full response when he writes it). He says:
> We will provide a full response to this post soon, but the main problem with it is fairly simple:
>
> There is general agreement that the main evidence for zoonosis is HSM (Huanan Seafood Market) forming an early cluster of cases. The contention is whether it is amazing 10,000x evidence, or is it negligible. All other evidence points to a lab leak, and if HSM is shown to be weak, lab leak is a clear winner.
>
> We provided an analysis of why it is negligible that is as close to mathematical proof as such things can be. [Read it here](https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/).
>
> Scott and I exchanged a few emails on this issue and Scott preferred to discuss more intuitive analyses of HSM, using rules of thumb that likely served him well in the past.
>
> While I believe I managed to mostly explain where these failed, and Scott understands HSM is far weaker evidence than he initially thought[6](#footnote-6), he still has a very strong intuitive feeling (based on years of dealing with probabilities) that this is some exceptional coincidence, and that prevents him from properly updating his posterior.
>
> At the end of the day, this cannot be settled without going through our semi-formal derivation, understanding it, and either identifying the problem with it or accepting it (and thereby accepting lab-leak to be more likely).
>
> Here is a quick summary of the mistakes made by those claiming HSM is strong evidence:
>
> 1. The first mistake is conflating Bayes factors with conditional probabilities. 1/10000 is the supposed conditional probability p(HSM|Lab Leak), That should be divided by the conditional probability of HSM under Zoonosis. Markets were not identified as a high-risk location prior to this outbreak (This will be elaborated in the full response), and in SARS1 the spillovers were mostly at restaurants and other food handlers that deal more closely with wildlife.
> While it's cool to point to the raccoon dog photo, that was a result of a retrospective search (we don't know what other photos they took which in retrospect would be brought up as premonition). Unbiased data shows markets are not a likely spillover location for zoonosis. We originally estimated p(HSM|Zoonosis)<0.1. Following more research we did to answer Scott's questions, this is more likely <0.03.
> 2. Even if it's unclear how strong HSM is as an amplifier, it is clearly not some random location, with its high traffic (that alone should be at least 10x), many permanent residents, and the recurrence of early clusters in other seafood markets. It's highly overconfident to claim it is less than a 1% location - It means Wuhan is somehow unique in that its largest seafood market is different from others and won't form an early cluster. So the conditional probabilities under both hypotheses are fairly similar
> 3. The obvious lack of evidence for a wildlife spillover in HSM further reduces this factor, making HSM negligible evidence.
Saar remains as committed to Rootclaim as ever. He’s even still committed to $100,000 bets on Rootclaim findings, settled via debate. He’d even be willing to re-debate Peter on lab leak! (Peter declined)
He does want to make some changes to the debate format - specifically, switching from video to text, and checking in more often with the judges to get feedback on their thought processes.
The switch from video to text seems reasonable. Saar was clearly flummoxed by Peter’s memory and agility, and wants a format where ability to remember/think on your feet is less important, and where you can do lots of research before having to think up a response.
The part with the feedback seems to be Saar wanting even more of an opportunity to identify disagreements with the judges early, and get a chance to tell them beforehand about issues like the ones above.
I’m sympathetic to both these changes, but I don’t think they would have changed the outcome of this debate.
### The Aftermath: Rootclaim
Rootclaim is an admirable idea. Somebody called it “heroic Bayesian analysis”, and I like the moniker. Regular human reasoning doesn’t seem to be doing a great job puncturing false beliefs these days, and lots of people have converged on something something Bayes as a solution. But the something something remains elusive. While everyone else tries “pop Bayesianism” and “Bayes-inspired toolboxes”, Rootclaim asks: what if you just directly apply Bayes to the world’s hardest problems? There’s something pure about that, in a way nobody else is trying.
Unfortunately, the reason nobody else is trying this is because it doesn’t work. There’s too much evidence, and it’s too hard to figure out how to quantify it.
Peter, Saar, and the two judges all did their own Bayesian analysis. I followed along at home[7](#footnote-7) and tried the same. Daniel Filan, who [also watched](https://twitter.com/freed_dfilan/status/1747786990198907265) the debate, [did one too](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qzLC55jRfdS55oSqXJZTFItsvFsawWgNlgLxWqhCuyo/edit#heading=h.p8ipjsffq6wq). Here’s a comparison of all of our results:
Again, most people didn’t use these exact categories, I’m putting them in this format to make them easy to compare, and any errors are mine....
The six estimates span twenty-three orders of magnitude. Even if we remove Peter (who’s kind of trolling), the remaining estimates span a range of ~7 OOMs. And even if we remove Saar (limiting the analysis to neutral non-participants), we’re still left with a factor-of-50 difference.
50x sounds good compared to 23 OOMs. But it only sounds good because everyone except Saar leaned heavily towards zoonosis. If raters were closer to even, it would become problematic: even a factor of 50x is enough to change 80-20 lab leak to 80-20 natural.
Saar’s perspective is that true theories should have many orders of magnitude more evidence than false theories (most of the Rootclaim analyses end up with normal-sounding percentages like “94% sure”, but that’s after they correct for potential model error). If that’s true, a 50x fudge factor shouldn’t be fatal.
But 23 orders of magnitude is fatal any way you slice it. The best one can say is that maybe this is no worse than normal reasoning. Among normal people who don’t use Rootclaim, many are sure lab leak is true, and many others are sure it’s false. If we interpret “sure” as 99%, then even normal people without Rootclaim are a factor of 10,000x away from each other. If we interpret “sure” as including more nines than that, maybe normal people are 23 OOMs away from each other, who knows? In this model, Rootclaim is no worse than anything else; it’s just legible enough that we notice these discrepancies. We’ve gotten inured to people failing to agree on difficult issues. Maybe Rootclaim gets credit for showing us exactly where we fail, and putting numbers on the failure.
Still, this is faint praise for a method that hoped to be able to resolve these kinds of disagreements. In the end, I think Saar has two options:
1. Abandon the Rootclaim methodology, and go back to normal boring impure reasoning like the rest of us, where you vaguely gesture at Bayesian math but certainly don’t try anything as extreme as actually using it.
2. Claim that he, Saar, through his years of experience testing Rootclaim, has some kind of special *metis* at using it, and everyone else is screwing up.
Saar gestured at (2) in the debate, repeatedly emphasizing that Rootclaim was difficult and subtle. But he mostly talked about things like the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which all participants already knew about and were trying to avoid. Maybe he should go further.
This wouldn’t necessarily be special pleading. When psychoanalysts claim their therapies work, they don’t mean that someone who just read a two page “What Is Psychoanalysis?” pamphlet can do good therapy. They mean that someone who spent ten years training under someone who spent ten years training and so on in a lineage back to Freud can do good therapy. When scientists say the scientific method works, they don’t mean that any crackpot who reads an Intro To Science textbook can figure out the mysteries of the universe. They mean someone who’s trained under other scientists and absorbed their way of thinking can do it.
If Saar wants to convince people, I think he should abandon his debates - which wouldn’t help even if he won, and certainly don’t help when he loses - and train five people who aren’t him in how to do Rootclaim, up to standards where he admits they’re as good at it as he is. Then he should prove that those five people can reliably get the same answers to difficult questions, even when they’re not allowed to compare notes beforehand. *That* would be compelling evidence
### The Aftermath: Pseudoscience
Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it?
The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true.
Still, it’s awkward to use “conspiracy theory” as an insult when the conspiracies were real. Maybe a better question is whether lab leak is “pseudoscience”.
The argument against: lots of smart people and experts believed it was a lab leak. There were all those virologists giving 50-50 odds in their internal conversations. Even Peter says *he* started out leaning lab leak, back in 2021 when everyone was talking about it.
The argument in favor: since 2021, experts (and Peter) have shifted pretty far in favor of zoonosis. They’ve been convinced by new work - the identification of early cases, the wet market surveys, the genetic analysis.
What category of noun does the adjective“pseudoscientific” describe? It doesn’t necessarily describe *theories*: Newtonian mechanics wasn’t pseudoscience when Newton discovered it, but if someone argued for it today (against relativity), that *would* be pseudoscientific. It doesn’t even describe *arguments*: “we don’t have enough data to confirm global warming” was a strong argument against global warming before there were good data, and a pseudoscientific one now. Might we place the locus of pseudoscientificness in people, communities, and norms of discussion?
Peter’s position is that, although the lab leak theory is inherently plausible and didn’t start as pseudoscience, it gradually accreted a community around it with bad epistemic norms. Once lab leak became A Thing - after people became obsessed with getting one over on the experts - they developed dozens of further arguments which ranged from flawed to completely false. Peter spent most of the debate debunking these - Mr. Chen’s supposed 12/8 COVID case, Connor Reed’s supposed 11/25 COVID case, the rumors of WIV researchers falling sick, the 90 early cases supposedly “hidden” in a random paper, etc, etc, etc. Peter compares this to QAnon, where an early “seed” idea created an entire community of people riffing off of it to create more and more bad facts and arguments until they had constructed an entire alternative epistemic edifice.
If we don’t accept the judges’ verdict, and think lab leak is true, are we worried the zoonosis side has some misbehavior of its own? Yuri and Saar didn’t talk about that as much. High-status people misbehave in different ways from low-status people; I think the zoonosis side has plenty of things to feel bad about (eg the conspiracies), but pseudoscience probably isn’t the right descriptor.
### The Aftermath: Ebb And Flow
During the debate, Peter accused the lab leak side of being constantly left flat-footed by new evidence. Sure, it had seemed plausible back in 2020, but they’d had to scramble to explain a steady stream of pro-zoonosis papers.
Afterwards, Saar and Yuri got some new evidence of their own. A Chinese team [appeared to have found](https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/veae020/7619252?login=false) a T/T intermediate strain of COVID in Shanghai, possibly imported from very early in Wuhan. If true, it would provide new evidence against a double spillover, instead supporting Lineage A mutating into B in humans.
(You can see Peter’s response [here](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1765565049203253687) - basically that we’re not sure it’s a true intermediate and not a reversion - if it were true, how come the two strains on either side of it got millions of cases, and it just got one guy in Shanghai? But if it were true, it would still be compatible with zoonosis - Lineage A would have spread from an animal and quickly mutated into B, the first A case would have been someone who left the wet market for a nearby area, and the first B case would have been someone who stayed in the wet market.)
Also, a new Freedom of Information Act request [got early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal with new details](https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/scientists-proposed-making-viruses-with-unique-features-of-sars-cov-2-in-wuhan/), of which the most explosive was a comment by the American half of the team, reassuring the Chinese half that even though the proposal focused on American work to please funders, they would let the Chinese side do some “assays”. Lab leakers say this disproves the argument that, because DEFUSE said the work would be done in the US, the Wuhan Institute of Virology couldn’t/wouldn’t do advanced gain-of-function research.
(I asked Peter his response - he said the original draft of DEFUSE also said that the Chinese side would do “live virus binding assays”, and this isn’t the kind of gain-of-function research necessary to make COVID.)
In an email, Saar and Yuri suggested it was an “interesting coincidence” that all the new evidence that came out after the debate favored their side. I’ve decided against updating on these considerations - either Peter’s version or Saar/Yuri’s. My impression is that anyone who starts out believing something at time t will also believe all the new evidence after time t favors that thing.
There’s also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they’ve obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit.
Overall I don’t think it’s useful to update on the exact contours of the ebb and flow of new evidence. Just treat new evidence the same as old evidence, updating your model the same amount as everything else.
### The Aftermath: Debate
Some skeptic blogs [picked up this story](https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses-100-000-in-his-own-debate-0c3930ccd443) last month, and one of the points they made was that even if this one turned out well for their side, in general they’re against this kind of thing.
Part of their argument was that debating “conspiracy theories” just helps spread and legitimize them. I’ve [made fun of this position before](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism), and I’ll make fun of it again now. According to [polling](https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/45389-americans-believe-covid-origin-lab), about 66% of Americans believe lab leak, compared to 16% who believe natural origin and 17% who aren’t sure. That means that people with an opinion on the issue are more than 4:1 in favor of lab leak. At some point you have to start debating! What are you waiting for? If you hold off so long that finally every single person in the world except you believes lab leak, would you still be sitting there, pristine in your imperturbability, saying from your lofty height “I refuse to engage, because that would be providing the rest of you oxygen”?
The other part of the argument was that saying “I will debate all comers for an $X bet” is annoying, and we shouldn’t encourage that kind of thing. Certainly this technique has been used by bad actors - for example, the Holocaust denial group Institute For Historical Review offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could prove the Holocaust happened (it was eventually won by an Auschwitz survivor whose “proof” was that he saw his family led to the gas chambers; IHR failed to accept this; the survivor sued and won). Likewise, anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch has offered to bet $500,000 on the results of a debate about vaccines not working[9](#footnote-9) (Saar took him up on it and they’re continuing to hammer out the specifics).
I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate. And taking people up on their offer, having a great debate that leaves everybody more enlightened and serves as a model for rational discourse, then having the right side win in the end - seems like the opposite of delegitimizing this strategy.
I guess I classify this with all the other examples in [Less Utilitarian Than Thou](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou). Cool Machiavellian plot you have there, but maybe the fact that you’re losing 16%-66% should make you question whether you’re really as smart as you think you are, and whether your plan to suppress all discussion for the greater good is really the mastermind-level strategy you hoped it would be.
It’s good to assert the true fact that these kinds of challenges are often dumb/rigged/useless, and that “nobody has yet responded to my challenge” isn’t a valid argument that someone’s necessarily right. But I stop short of trying to set some kind of social norm that nobody may respond to anyone else’s challenges, even if they think that person is being honest and has organized the challenge well (as Saar was and did). That almost seems like *itself* legitimizing the whole thing, in the sense of accepting that if someone loses a challenge then it means something important. I would rather place the illegitimacy where it belongs (a challenge really doesn’t prove anything, separate from the arguments made in it) and let people do what they want.
I want to see more debates like this. I learned more watching the 15 hours of Rootclaim debate than I think I would have researching on my own for 15 hours. But a lot of things had to come together to make this work. Most of all, this debate worked out because the judges were two very smart scientists with relevant expertise. To get such good judges, lots of things had to fall into place.
First, the debate itself had to be expensive enough that neither side begrudged paying the extra $5,000 per judge to hire the best people.
And second, the debate had to be about a topic where lots of intelligent people haven’t yet made up their minds. If the debate was about flat earth, I would despair of finding good judges. Either the judges would already be convinced the Earth was round (which the flat Earth side would understandably refuse to accept). Or they would be 50-50, which would mean they were extremely weird people whose reasoning couldn’t be trusted. Flat Earth is an extreme example, but even a debate about COVID vaccines would be pushing it here.
(since writing this, I learned Peter had made this same argument and analogy [in a blog post on Kirsch](https://medium.com/@tgof137/prove-the-earth-is-round-win-a-million-dollars-4a220092ab0c); sorry for the unintentional plagiarism)
I think I would genuinely update on the conclusion of any other Rootclaim debate with the same caliber of participants as this one, but not necessarily on whatever Steve Kirsch or the Institute of Historical Review comes up with, nor the next person to hit on the strategy of “I’ll pay you $100,000 if you prove me wrong!”[10](#footnote-10)
### The Aftermath: Conclusion
This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons.
First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. It’s a weird rabbit hole, which I’m not yet entirely out of. I have a weird urge to visit Wuhan as a tourist, see the Wuhan Institute of Virology, stroll through the Huanan Central Seafood Market (unfortunately closed), maybe eat a raccoon-dog.
Second, some of the lessons of this debate are actionable. I’ve written before about how we should learn the lessons of lab leak even if it turns out to be false this time; that hasn’t changed. But this was a good reminder to also learn the lessons of zoonosis, for the same reason. We need more attention on closing wet markets and tracking weird Chinese wildlife. The DEFUSE proposal wanted to immunize bats - is this still a worthwhile idea? The virologists got a bad rap for wanting to gain-of-function exactly the pathogen that caused the century’s worst pandemic, but in a way that speaks well of them - they clearly knew what to be worried about. Has anyone mumbled an apology and asked them if they have any other useful predictions?
Third, John Nerst has written about [erisology](https://everythingstudies.com/what-is-erisology/), the study of disagreements. This was surely one of history’s greatest erisological studies. Two very smart people spent fifteen hours hashing out every argument and counterargument in good faith, then quantified all of their beliefs in a way that lets us figure out exactly where they differed and by how much. This isn’t entirely a victory - as a newly minted member of team zoonosis, I still can’t trace exactly why Saar is so sure I’m wrong. But if the COVID origin story fascinates me as this peek deep into a pestiferous underworld of sinister laboratories and reeking wet markets, something about this debate felt like analogous peek into the creepy subconscious swamps where disagreements begin.
Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.
But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.
I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet.
## Other Resources
* [Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate](https://twitter.com/freed_dfilan/status/1747786990198907265)
* [Daniel’s Bayesian analysis Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qzLC55jRfdS55oSqXJZTFItsvFsawWgNlgLxWqhCuyo/edit#heading=h.p8ipjsffq6wq)
* [Peter’s blog](https://medium.com/@tgof137), with some articles on his COVID investigation
* [Rootclaim site](https://www.rootclaim.com/)
* [Philipp Markolin’s article](https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses-100-000-in-his-own-debate-0c3930ccd443) (preachy, annoying, but has good interview with Peter)
* Another debate paralleling this one on Less Wrong, starting with [Roko for lab leak](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdNyKE5yC4YjXGzfG/a-back-of-the-envelope-calculation-on-how-unlikely-the), and with [viking\_math](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NrKQGyggC7jcersuJ/on-coincidences-and-bayesian-reasoning-as-applied-to-the) and [EZ97](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bAEPBD7JBsf9XKCuT/everything-wrong-with-roko-s-claims-about-an-engineered) on the zoonosis side.
* Both sides emailed me excitedly about this claim by Marc Johnson to have [found COVID regressing back to its original gut virus form](https://twitter.com/SolidEvidence/status/1772329032287404326). Johnson claims the regression pattern suggests COVID spent significant time in some non-bat animal before progressing to humans, although this doesn’t distinguish between an intermediate host (eg raccoon-dog) or an animal-based culture medium at a lab (eg human airway cells). [Yuri thinks you might be able to run COVID ancestors through different animals and media](https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1773081153999655109) to see which one produces COVID-characteristic mutations, which might help resolve this debate.
* [Interview with Saar about Rootclaim](https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/316718) (not the lab leak debate) in Israeli news
* Michael Weissman has [an excellent Bayesian analysis favoring lab leak](https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v50), which I unfortunately didn’t include in my table because it would have taken too long to translate his language into mine.
* Judge Eric has [a site about the debate](https://ermsta.com/covid_debate/) and [a blog](https://ermsta.com/posts/) including [a response to Michael Weissman](https://ermsta.com/posts/20240301).
* If you want to try doing your own analysis in the same style as the ones above, I’ve put a calculator up [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tm9ajpJudn-gjsZ1QsMoeYzY94JWEzzS/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102507007302924510638&rtpof=true&sd=true). You’ll have to copy it to your own Google Drive before adding your own numbers. If you do try it, please link your results here (after setting share settings to “anyone with the link”) so I can try to aggregate everybody’s work later. The calculator has not been exhaustively tested and might be wrong/buggy, please let me know if you notice problems.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
15 hours of watching/moderating the debate, and the rest was a combination of research (to double-check participants’ claims) and writing their verdicts.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Potential conflict of interest notice: I handled escrow for this bet, and was paid $1,000.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Making these tables was tough, both because everyone’s analysis had a slightly different structure, and because you have to be careful not to accidentally double-count factors. Peter and I got in an argument over whether having a prior for a given pandemic being lab leak, a factor for the pandemic starting in Wuhan in particular, and a factor for how likely the virus was to escape from WIV was implicitly double-counting things. I eventually settled for something like his presentation, but I’ve probably managed to mess it up somehow. Sorry in advance if this analysis turns out not to make sense.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
A separate [market on the lab leak hypothesis itself](https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory) shifted less, from about 70% to 60%. This could either be because bettors thought Peter was a great debater but wasn’t actually right, or because most people in this (very large) market didn’t even watch the debate. In general I’m not optimistic about markets with no plausible way of ever being resolved.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
In a discussion on this point, Saar says he’s suspicious even of 1-in-10,000 level evidence on *one* side, because even if you’re right, you might be ignoring outside-of-model error. I accept that this is a valid point, but counter with this article on how [Strong Evidence Is Common](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JD7fwtRQ27yc8NoqS/strong-evidence-is-common). For example, suppose I win the lottery, I’m told I win the lottery, the lottery company gives me a big check, I cash the check, and I become rich. Given that there were 1-in-100-million odds against me winning the lottery, the lottery company giving me the check and so on must be at least 100-million-to-1-level evidence - otherwise I should refuse to believe I really won the lottery, even as I enjoy my newfound wealth! This is a kind of stupid and trivial point, but I still think it’s useful to remember. The reason 1-in-10,000 level odds are rare in arguments isn’t because they’re rare in real life, it’s because if there’s an argument it means there’s a smart person on the other side who’s not interpreting the odds the same way you do, so you might be wrong.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
I wouldn’t really describe our interaction this way. I started with a 10,000x Bayes factor on the market, but it was extremely lightly considered and not really adjusted for out-of-model error. Based on our discussions, I divided by four based on Saar’s good point that the market represented less than 100% of the possible zoonotic spread opportunity in Wuhan (I cashed this out as it representing 25% of opportunity, though with high error bars). Then I divided by an extra factor of five representing some sort of blind outside view adjustment based on how strongly Saar holds his position (this was kind of also a decision to explicitly include potential outside-the-model error because that would make discussing it with Saar easier).
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
The end probability on my analysis (95% zoonosis) is pretty close to my genuinely held probability (~90% zoonosis). But this is a coincidence - my original calculation had some errors, it returned 99.999% zoonosis, and I planned to ignore it and continued to believe ~90% zoonosis. I don’t claim to be good enough at explicit probabilistic analysis that you should take my results seriously.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Or he should enter forecasting contests. I hope to talk to him more about specifics of this option.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
Some people have since claimed that Kirsch’s debate offer isn’t honest - see <https://twitter.com/SkepticJonGuy/status/1665071649555906561> and <https://twitter.com/SwaledaleMutton/status/1721170306788630713>.
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
It would also be interesting to have a respected central institution that runs these kinds of debates, just as [longbets.org](https://longbets.org/) is a respected central institution that runs bets. | Scott Alexander | 142476535 | Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate | acx |
# Take The 2024 ACX Survey
Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who’s reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate a bunch of psych findings, and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include [birth order effects](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/), [mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/15/kernel-of-doubt-testing-math-preference-vs-corn-eating-style/), [sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/17/ssc-survey-results-sexual-harassment-levels-by-field/), [whether all our kids are going to have autism](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/), and [wisdom of inner crowds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd).
This year’s survey will probably take 15 - 30 minutes (source: it took me 10 minutes, but I knew all the questions beforehand, so it might take other people longer). As an incentive to go through this, I’ll give free one-year paid subscriptions to five randomly-selected survey respondents. The survey will be open until about April 10, so try to take it before then.
**[Click here to take the survey.](https://forms.gle/4JnQV2MwQrNgLgGBA)** If you notice any problems, please ask yourself *“Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?”* - and if the answer is yes, comment here so I can fix it. | Scott Alexander | 142966319 | Take The 2024 ACX Survey | acx |
# Open Thread 322
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** The previous attempt to email people their Forecasting Contest score didn’t work. So new plan: here’s a list of everyone’s scores, associated with a hash of their email address:
Blind Score Hash
59.5KB ∙ XLSX file
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/072fbf4b-615e-4dc0-96eb-b4551fdede4d.xlsx)
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/072fbf4b-615e-4dc0-96eb-b4551fdede4d.xlsx)
Go to [this site](https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha256.html) and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages [on this graphic](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F14b48344-51fa-4a5d-bb06-c0f52c5ebd9c_720x468.png) from [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023). Eight people had hash collisions and their scores will be ambiguous; if that’s you, email me if you really want to know. Thanks to Legionnaire for putting this together; I’ll update you when I know if there are any plans for Full Mode.
**2:** echometer on the subreddit made [a mobile-friendly reader for Astral Codex Ten](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bhoozm/i_made_a_mobilefriendly_fast_reader_for_astral/) in case you need the page to load a little faster. Again, the last time I told Substack about speed issues, they said they’ve “got plans to improve” it | Scott Alexander | 142931631 | Open Thread 322 | acx |
# In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities
It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example:
* What is the probability that Joe Biden will win the 2024 election?
* What is the probability that people will land on Mars before 2050?
* What is the probability that AI will destroy humanity this century?
The argument against: usually we use probability to represent an outcome from some well-behaved distribution. For example, if there are 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 40%. If you pulled out 100 balls, close to 40 of them would be white. You can literally pull out the balls and do the experiment.
In contrast, saying “there’s a 45% probability people will land on Mars before 2050” seems to come out of nowhere. How do you know? If you were to say “the probability humans will land on Mars is exactly 45.11782%”, you would sound like a loon. But how is saying that it’s 45% any better? With balls in an urn, the probability might very well be 45.11782%, and you can prove it. But with humanity landing on Mars, aren’t you just making this number up?
Since people on social media have been talking about this again, let’s go over it one more depressing, fruitless time.
## 1. Probabilities Are Linguistically Convenient
I think everyone agrees it’s meaningful and useful to say things like “Humanity probably won’t land on Mars before 2050”.
That is, suppose NASA and ESA and SpaceX hire a team of experts to calculate whether they can make it to Mars by 2050. They examine all the evidence and find that going to Mars is much harder than anyone thinks, all the rockets that people plan to use for the task are fatally flawed, and it would take decades to invent better ones. They don’t come up with a mathematical model or form a distribution, they just intuitively notice all these things, and how they add up. When giving her report, the leader of the team says “We don’t think humanity can land on Mars before 2050.” This person hasn’t done anything wrong - it’s impossible to communicate useful information without doing something like this.
How unlikely is it? Again, it seems like there might be different degrees of unlikelihood. For example, it might be that it’s pretty hard to make it to Mars by 2050, but with a strong effort and very good luck, we could manage it. Or it might be that it’s insane to even consider that we could make it to Mars by 2050, there are twenty unsolvable problems in the way and everyone who claims to be working on them is a total fraud. So probably the leader of the team should be allowed to say either “It’s pretty unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050” or “It’s very unlikely we can make it to Mars by 2050.”
Suppose she says “it’s very unlikely”. We might still want to know more information. It’s “very unlikely” humans can make it to Pluto by 2050, and also “very unlikely” we can make it to the Andromeda Galaxy by 2050, but these seem like different levels of unlikeliness. You can *sort of* imagine a scenario where everything goes right and we make it to Pluto, but the Andromeda Galaxy would require totally new science that suspends apparently ironclad physical law. So maybe we need at least two levels of “very unlikely” - one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Pluto, and one corresponding to the likelihood of getting to Andromeda. We could call these “very unlikely” and “extraordinarily unlikely bordering on impossible”.
How many terms like “slightly unlikely”, “very unlikely”, “extraordinarily unlikely”, etc do we need, and how will we make sure that everyone knows what they mean? It seems like having these terms is strictly worse than using a simple percent scale, where the leader of the Mars investigation team says “I think there’s about a 5% chance we can make it to Mars by 2050”. This is obviously clearer than “I think it’s unlikely” and prevents you from having to answer a bunch of followup questions. There are lots of people and space agencies who want to do different things if the chance of making it to Mars is 5% vs. 25%, and collapsing those both under “unlikely” or making people strain to figure out the meaning of “unlikely” vs. “very unlikely” and which one corresponds to 5% vs. 25% feels stupid, like deliberately introducing noise into your communication and asking people to solve a Twenty Questions game before they figure out your true opinion.
To put it differently, saying “likely” vs. “unlikely” gives you two options. Saying “very likely”, “somewhat likely”, “somewhat unlikely”, and “very likely” gives you four options. Giving an integer percent probability gives you 100 options. Sometimes having 100 options helps you speak more clearly.
A counterargument against doing this might be that it falsely introduces more precision than you can back up. But this isn’t true. Studies find that people who use probabilities often are well-calibrated - ie when they say something is 20% likely, it happens 20% of the time. [Other studies find](https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/tetlock-and-gardners-superforecasting-the-art-and-science-of-prediction) that when superforecasters give a very precise probability (like 23%) the extra digit adds information (ie the thing really does happen closer to 23% of the time than to 20% of the time).
In this case, demanding that people stop using probability and go back to saying things like “I think it’s moderately likely” is crippling their ability to communicate clearly for no reason.
## 2. Probabilities Don’t Describe Your Level Of Information, And Don’t Have To
Lots of people seem to think that naming a probability conveys something about how much information you have (eg “How can you say that about such a fuzzy and poorly-understood domain?”). Some people even demand that probabilities come with “meta-probabilities”, an abstruse philosophical concept that isn’t even well-defined outside of certain toy situations. I think it’s easy to prove that none of this is necessary. Consider the following:
1. What’s the probability that a fair coin comes up heads?
2. What’s the probability that a coin, which you suspect is biased but you’re not sure to which side, comes up heads?
3. Consider some object or process which might or might not be a coin - perhaps it’s a dice, or a roulette wheel, or a US presidential election. We divide its outcomes into two possible bins - evens vs. odds, reds vs. blacks, Democrats vs. Republicans - one of which I have arbitrarily designated “heads” and the other “tails” (you don’t get to know which side is which). It may or may not be fair. What’s the probability it comes out heads?
The answer to all of these is exactly the same - 50% - even though you have wildly different amounts of knowledge about each. This is because 50% isn’t a description of how much knowledge you have, it’s a description of the balance between different outcomes.
Is it bad that one term can mean both perfect information (as in 1) and total lack of information (as in 3)? No. This is no different from how we discuss things when we’re not using probability.
Do vaccines cause autism? No. Does drinking monkey blood cause autism? Also no. My evidence on the vaccines question is dozens of excellent studies, conducted so effectively that we’re as sure about this as we are about anything in biology. My evidence on the monkey blood question is that nobody’s ever proposed this and it would be weird if it were true. Still, it’s perfectly fine to say the single-word answer “no” to both of them to describe where I currently stand. If someone wants to know how much evidence/certainty is behind my “no”, they can ask, and I’ll tell them.
Likewise, is there a God? Maybe you ask the world’s top philosopher of religion, who has spent his entire life thinking about this question, and he says “I’m not sure”. Then you ask a random teenager who has given it two seconds’ thought, and she also says “I’m not sure”. Neither of these people has done anything wrong. Their identical answers conceal a vastly different amount of thought that’s gone into the question. But it’s your job to ask each person how much thought they put in, not the job of the English language to design a way of saying the words “I’m not sure” that communicates level of effort and expertise.
Likewise, if I answer there’s a 0.001% chance vaccines cause autism, and a 0.001% chance monkey blood causes autism, it’s not the job of probability theory to tell you how much effort went into that assessment and how much of an expert I am. If you care about that, you can ask me!
## 3. What Is Samotsvety Better Than You At?
Samotsvety Forecasting is a team of some of the top forecasters in the world. Their job is to assign probabilities to future events. They seem very good at it. They win forecasting contests. They make lots of money on prediction markets. They [get featured in media articles](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock). Sometimes people hire them as consultants when they have some forecasting question relevant to their business.
Sometimes some client will ask Samotsvety for a prediction relative to their business, for example whether Joe Biden will get impeached, and they will give a number like “it’s 17% likely that this thing will happen”. This number has some valuable properties:
* It’s well-calibrated. Things that they assign 17% probability to will happen about 17% of the time. If you randomly change this number (eg round it to 20%, or invert it to 83%) you will be less well-calibrated.
* It’s pretty close to what prediction markets, experts, and other superforecasters would independently converge on.
* Whenever something happens that makes Joe Biden’s impeachment more likely, this number will go up, and vice versa for things that make his impeachment less likely, and most people will agree that the size of the update seems to track how much more or less likely impeachment is.
* If you were someone whose job involved adjusting for situations like these - for example, an oil trader who thought that Joe Biden getting impeached would change oil prices - you would do better at your job, over the long run, by treating it as 17% likely that Joe Biden would be impeached then by guessing randomly, or consistently taking some number 5% higher than Samotsvety’s number, or using some other method. If there were two oil companies, and one consistently used Samotsvety’s numbers to make decisions, and the other consistently took a random number 1-100 and made decisions with that, the one that used Samotsvety’s numbers would do better.
In other words, there’s something special about the number 17% on this question. It has properties that other numbers like 38% or 99.9999% don’t have. If someone asked *you* (rather than Samotsvety) for this number, you would give a less good number that didn’t have these special properties. If by some chance you actually were better at finding these kinds of numbers than Samotsvety, you could probably get a job as a forecasting consultant. Or you could make lots of play money on Manifold, or lots of real money on the stock market, or help your preferred political party as a campaign strategist.
The search for these special numbers seems to be socially valuable. At the very least, hedge funds would pay quite a bit of money for someone who could come up with a special number that worked even better than Samotsvety’s. Also, if Samotsvety’s number for a question like “will your hometown be nuked in the next hour” ever reached 99.999%, you would really want to know this.
I think the best way to describe this kind of special number is “it’s the chance of the thing happening”, for example, the chance that Joe Biden will be impeached.
The only reason not to do this is some sort of metaphysical objection. “Yes, this number behaves in every way *as if* it were the chance that Joe Biden will be impeached, and you should treat it as the chance that Joe Biden will be impeached, and you can benefit from thinking of it as the chance that Joe Biden will be impeached - but on a metaphysical level, it’s not the chance that Joe Biden will be impeached. It’s a different kind of thing that we have no name for.”
I don’t understand why you would want to do this. If you do, then fine, let’s call it shmrobability. My shmrobability that Joe Biden will be impeached is 17%, my shmrobability that humans will land on Mars before 2050 is 66%, and my shmrobability that AI will destroy all humans before 2100 is 20%, and you should treat all of these exactly like probability estimates, even though they aren’t.
## 4. Do People Use Probability “As A Substitute For Reasoning”?
This is one of the claims going around on social media right now, somehow.
A probability is the output of a reasoning process. For example, you might think about something for hundreds of hours, make models, consider all the different arguments, and then decide it’s extremely unlikely, maybe only 1%. Then you would say “my probability of this happening is 1%”.
Sometimes this reasoning process is very weak. You might have never thought about something before, but when someone demands an answer, you say “I don’t know, seems unlikely, maybe 1%”. This claim neither demands nor posits more evidence than just “I don’t know, seems unlikely”. Nobody would claim that saying “This seems unlikely” is a substitute for reasoning.
Sometimes this reasoning process is formal, like when you create a model and calculate it out. Other times it’s informal, like when you think really hard about the case for and against something. There’s nothing wrong with informal reasoning. In fact, since there’s more than one possible model to apply to each problem, people *have to* use informal reasoning to figure out how much they trust each model and where their final answer lands. All answers, whether they’re “I’m sure this is true” or “I give this 75% probability”, are the product of formal reasoning filtered through informal reasoning.
Some people get really mad if you mention that Yoshua Bengio said the probability of AI causing a global catastrophe is 20%. They might say “I have this whole argument for why it’s much lower, how dare you respond to an argument with a probability!” This is a type error. Saying “Yoshua Bengio’s p(doom) is 20%” is the same type as saying “Climatologists believe global warming is real”. If someone gives some long complicated argument against global warming, it’s perfectly fine to respond with “Okay, but climatologists have said global warming is definitely real, so I think you’re missing something”. That’s not an argument. It’s a pointer to the fact that climatologists have lots of arguments; the fact that these arguments have convinced climatologists (who are domain experts) ought to be convincing to you. If you want to know why the climatologists think this, read their papers. Likewise, if you want to find out why Yosuha Bengio thinks there’s 20% chance of AI catastrophe, you should read his blog, or the papers he’s written, or listen to any of the interviews he’s given on the subject - not just say “Ha ha, some dumb people think probabilities are a substitute for thinking!”
A claim “this knowledgeable scientist has a probability of X” is a statement of the same type as “this knowledgeable scientist believes X”. A claim “ordinary people have a probability of X” is of the same type as “ordinary people believe X”. I don’t care super hard what ordinary people believe about whether global warming is true. But giving their probabilities rather than their binary answers doesn’t make me care *less*.
The only case where probabilities might take a different type than a normal binary answer is when people try to do wisdom-of-crowds with them. I think this is justified by the fact that wisdom of crowds [works](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd) [very well](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2023-prediction-contest). But I don’t think this is what people are complaining about.
## 5. Is AI Even More Unmodelable Than Mars Landings Or Politics?
A remaining objection: we at least know, sort of, how rockets work. We at least know who controls Congress and what impeachment is and approximately what kind of guy Joe Biden is. So we have *some* starting point for modeling these questions. We barely know anything about the future of AI. So even if you can come up with a probability of Joe Biden’s impeachment, probabilities about the future of AI are bunk.
I agree that, because of the thorniness of the question, probabilities about AI are *more lightly held* than probabilities about Mars or impeachment (which in turn are more lightly held than the weatherman’s probability about whether it will rain tomorrow, which in turn is more lightly held than probabilities about coin flips). But I think the best way to represent your lightly held opinion is with a probability.
If you actually had zero knowledge about whether AI was capable of destroying the world, your probability should be 50%. If you object to this claim - like most people do! - that’s because you actually know quite a lot of things. For example, you know that most technologies don’t destroy the world, and in fact the world has gone eons without being destroyed. That alone should give you a low prior that AI destroys the world. But AI is probably more likely to destroy the world than, eg, a new way of cracking walnuts is, so you can’t get your prior *exactly* by counting up the number of technologies and considering AI a typical member of the set.
So given all the things you know - like the rarity of the world being destroyed, but the fact that some people have some stories about how it might happen for AI - and all the things you don’t know, where do you land?
If you land at some specific point, then naming that point isn’t a claim to be a smart expert who has lots of information. It’s just weighing the various arguments for and against it happening, and landing at “yeah, seems kind of likely” or “no, this seems crazy”. Except instead of using vague words, you use a non-vague system of 100 words which can be easily compared to the points where other people landed.
Nobody knows anything for sure about human extinction from AI, but some people, like Yoshua Bengio and Sam Altman, have more information than usual, or have thought about it a lot. It seems useful for them to be able to convey the results of their thinking to the rest of us. If you ban them from using probability because of some kind of metaphysical objection, you’re just forcing them to to say unclear things like “well, it’s a little likely, but not super likely, but not . . . no! back up! More likely than that!”, and confusing everyone for no possible gain. | Scott Alexander | 140237071 | In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities | acx |
# The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
I have data from two big Internet surveys, [Less Wrong 2014](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YAkpzvjC768Jm2TYb/2014-survey-results) and [Clearer Thinking 2023](https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1681775113065070592). Both asked questions about IQ:
* The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138.
* The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130.
These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average.
Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, [corresponding to](https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/satiq.aspx) IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, [corresponding to](https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/satiq.aspx) IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right.
And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly *higher* IQ (average 140) than everyone else.
Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on.
## Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong
Thanks to Sebastian Jensen [for pointing this out!](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/converting-sat-and-act-to-iq) He writes:
> A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [[rca]](https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/06/18/on-sat-act-iq-and-other-psychometric-test-correlations/), [[my analysis]](https://twitter.com/sebjenseb/status/1670608674291855361), [[emil article]](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/03/intelligence-and-pisa-timss-etc-at-the-individual-level/), [[scholarly article]](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00687.x). The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [[psychometric test]](https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.intell.2012.01.009), [[GCSE grades]](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289606000171). This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability.
>
> In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has [changed](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Change-in-Total-SAT-Score-US_fig1_333384662) over time due to changes in the content of the test.
>
> Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient.
Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124.
So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start!
## Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test
The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is.
Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly.
He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100.
But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110.
This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay.
But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong?
## Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs
Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find:
* People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.
* People who took the SAT but “don’t remember” their score have tested-IQ 104.
* People who took the SAT and do remember their score have tested-IQ 116.
Either smarter people are more likely to remember their SAT scores, or people who did well on the SAT are more likely to make a point of remembering!
Since the only reported SAT scores come from people who remember them, this means that SAT scores overestimate the full-sample IQ, at least in this case.
We previously had a gap between the 124 IQ from SAT conversion and the 110 observed IQ. This resolves about half of the gap, bringing it down to 124 predicted vs. 116 observed.
## Problem #3: Something Is Wrong With Self-Reported IQ Test Scores
The ClearerThinking sample has a tested-IQ of 110. But the subset of people who report having taken a past IQ test say they got an average score of 131. What’s going on?
It could either be that only the smartest people remember their IQ test scores (as with SATs), or that these people are lying/misremembering/deluded. Which is it?
The tested-IQ of this subgroup who report their scores is 114. So although they are a little smarter than the overall sample, most of the difference seems to be coming from some kind of falsehood/delusion.
But it’s a surprisingly well-behaved falsehood/delusion. Self-reported IQ test score correlates 0.54 with tested IQ. So people are getting their rank order mostly right, they’re just wrong about the specific number.
It looks like up to about 140, self-reported IQ and normed IQ rise together, and then the relationship breaks down. Sure enough, looking at the subset of self-reported IQ scores below 140, the correlation with tested IQ rises to .6, and looking at the subset *above* 140, the correlation is nonsignificantat *-*0.02. I don’t want to assert that the breakpoint is exactly 140, but I do think the test stops working somewhere in the 130 - 140 range.
But this can’t be the whole problem. Notice that people who reported getting scores around 100 on previous IQ tests overwhelmingly got scores *less than* 100 on this one.
So are people just taking terrible Internet IQ tests that inflate their score about 20 points?
The ClearerThinking sample didn’t ask people what IQ test they took, but the LessWrong sample did. It found approximately the same score from WAIS, WISC, Stanford-Binet, and Mensa - all of which were about 10 points above what you would predict from SAT scores.
So I think there are two things going on:
* The main problem in the LessWrong sample, and the far right end of the ClearerThinking sample, is that even official IQ tests are gobbledygook over 135. Any numbers above this should be rounded down to 135, no matter how venerable the test involved.
* The main problem in most of the ClearerThinking sample is that people took unreliable Internet IQ tests.
## Conclusion
We have three ways of estimating IQ in these samples: demographic norming based on education levels, self-reports from past IQ tests, and self-reported SAT scores converted into IQ. All of these contradict each other.
The self-report numbers are probably wrong because some people use bad tests, and other people use good tests that can’t measure above 135 accurately.
The SAT numbers are probably wrong because of selection: smarter people are more likely to take the SAT and remember their score. This probably becomes less important in overall smarter samples, where most people have taken the SAT and nobody has a score which is truly embarrassing.
The demographically normed numbers are . . . maybe not wrong? They’re the lowest of the three, which is tempting since our original problem was unbelievably high numbers. Still, I’m not completely comfortable with them for a few reasons.
First, Spencer did his demographic norming properly, but I extended it to the Less Wrong survey just by eyeballing.
Second, they won’t apply to people who have a mismatch between their intelligence and education level, eg smart slackers. The Internet seems full of these, and the demographic method will underestimate their intelligence.
Third, it has a ceiling effect: you can’t get more education than being a PhD, so it will underestimate the intelligence of a sample where a significant percent of subjects have PhDs or other advanced degrees.
Based on these, I would guess the ClearerThinking sample is around **111**, right where the demographic norms method puts it. And the LessWrong sample is around **128**, somewhere between the demographic norms method and the SAT method.
I don’t think either of these are too implausible. 1/30 people have IQs of 128 or above. Most people don’t read long articles online about statistics. 1/30 sounds like as good an estimate as any other for the sort of person who would find that comprehensible and interesting.
Each year, I collect data on readers, including self-reported intelligence scores, which I use for various psychological experiments. Based on this research, I plan to either ask for reliable test scores only and lop off everything above 135 - or just subtract 10-15 points from whatever you give me. | Scott Alexander | 136151229 | The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs | acx |
# Open Thread 320
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Update on the 2023 [Forecasting Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023): We’re now working on sending everyone their scores. You should either have already gotten this email (from autoastralcodexten@gmail.com) or get it sometime in the next few days. Thanks to Leon for making this happen.
**2:** But also, in the process of sending these emails, we discovered that there was an ambiguity in the scoring criteria. By one possible algorithm, the winners were the people named in the original post. By the other, the winners were:
* **Datscilly,** aMetaculus Pro Forecaster who was ranked #1 on the Metaculus leaderboard from 2018 to 2021 for baseline accuracy.
* **Shahar Avin,** a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
* **Josh King,** a technology lawyer, former wireless M&A guy, and advisor to startups who lives in Tucson, AZ and works as General Counsel for Realself.com.
* **Phil G,** a software engineer in the US interested in AI and urbanism, who can be found on Twitter at <https://twitter.com/pgodzin>
* **Jan Kulveit**, who leads [ACSresearch.org](https://acsresearch.org/), a research group working on how to have complex systems composed of AIs and humans exist in harmony. He sometimes teaches at events about rationality and epistemics organized by [Fabric](https://www.fabric.camp/).
Some other winners from last time have moved up a spot in the new algorithm, including Ezra Karger (1st in Full Mode), Peter Wildeford (2nd in Full Mode) and Adam (1st in Blind Mode). Sorry for the ambiguity, and I’ll try to be more careful next time.
**3:** The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including [growing blood vessels in the lab](https://manifund.com/projects/growing-human-bl), an [online psychiatry/psychology journal](https://manifund.com/projects/start-an-online-), and [a swarm of robotic bees](https://manifund.com/projects/running-a-bio-in). In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall **[ACX Grants impact market is here](https://manifund.com/causes/acx-grants-2024?tab=certs)**, and my explanation of what’s going on is [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-followup-impact-market).
**4:** Comment of the week - sort of, kind of, in a terrible warning type of way - is [this Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/comments/1bemixy/verses_on_five_people_being_killed_by_a_falling/) on an AI-generated reading of my recent poem [Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/verses-on-five-people-being-killed). The commenters first “discover” that the poem must be written by an AI (because it has bullet points!), and then that “it is clear as day” that “at least half” of ACX commenters are AIs. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other *ad infinitum* of being AIs (“haven’t you heard of Dead Internet Theory?!”), while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background. | Scott Alexander | 142716666 | Open Thread 320 | acx |
# In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture
Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and [my defense of it](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate) shared the same villain - “therapy culture”, the idea that you should prioritize “finding your true self” and make drastic changes if your current role doesn’t seem “authentically you”.
A friend recently suggested a defense of this framework, which surprised me enough that I now relay it to you.
(I don’t think any of this is too related to specific therapies for specific mental health problems, like exposure therapy for panic disorder - but real-world therapy is at least as likely to be the generic “therapy culture” type as the specific types, so I think it’s fair to use the phrase “therapy culture” to describe this. None of this applies to the more specific and targeted stuff.)
Consider [alexithymia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia). This is the psych term for people who aren’t in touch with their emotions. They *have* the emotions, they just aren’t in touch with them. An alexithymic may, without conscious deception, say “I’m not angry!” even while yelling at you and slamming doors. Or they might say “I feel fine” while withdrawing from the world and being obviously depressed.
Less discussed - so much so I don’t know if there’s a Greek word for it - is something like *alexithymia of preferences*. Here I think back to [a friend’s claim](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/) that until they were a teenager, they didn’t know they had food preferences. If someone asked them their favorite food, they would name a food which that was popular, or healthy, or the sort of thing their demographic *should* like:
> You know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you actually believe you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention, all my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”.
They didn’t realize they were doing this - or they didn’t realize that other people were doing something different, or at least there was *something* they weren’t realizing. Probably not coincidentally, that friend was very thin and frequently skipped meals. At some point during teenagerhood, they realized they could like some foods more than other foods, and started eating a healthier amount.
Imagine someone with generalized preference alexithymia. Presumably they don’t really get that one person can be a better partner for them than another, so they marry the quarterback or the cheerleader or whoever else it’s high status to marry. But then they never spend much time with their spouse, and their marriage feels kind of dead. They go to therapy. Their therapist helps them get the same kind of insight my friend got as a teenager - “Oh! Wait! I have preferences!” Then they realize their spouse is the kind of person who they don’t prefer, and being married to them is like having to eat your least favorite food forever. Maybe they’ve learned something big and obvious about themselves, like that they’re gay. But maybe they’re straight and they’ve just learned the normal sorts of [hard-to-quantify preferences](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating) that come up during love.
I think I previously made fun of therapy culture because the people who go through it always sound so *smug* about it - “I’ve advanced beyond the rest of you squares and discovered my True Self; you probably can’t imagine a spiritual journey like mine”. But [nobody necessarily knows where they are](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones-are-you-missing/) relative to anyone else on the spectrum of more vs. less advanced psychological development. Maybe “finding your true self” just means “being able to access your preferences, the same way non-alexithymics do as a matter of course”.
This doesn’t fully exculpate therapy culture, because preferences aren’t always sitting there in the back of the brain, waiting to be discovered. It’s easy to convince people they have preferences they don’t, especially if you’re an authority figure like a therapist. Maybe many of the people who go to therapy to find their True Self are non-alexithymics who are already in touch with as True a Self as they’re going to get, and the therapy tricks them into thinking there’s an even Truer Self lurking somewhere that they’ve *got* to find. But that’s the same kind of complaint as “sometimes people without ADHD take Adderall”, not “Adderall is a scam”.
Weirdly, the original complaint a lot of people happened with the polyamory memoir that started this discussion (disclaimer: I haven’t read the memoir, I’m just repeating other people’s opinions) was that the writer clearly didn’t enjoy being poly, but didn’t seem to realize this. Maybe she needed more therapy, not less! Or, at least, *better* therapy. | Scott Alexander | 142438918 | In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture | acx |
# Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid
*(inspired by [Aid Airdrop Kills Five People In Gaza After Parachute Fails](https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/3/8/fatal-aid-drop-over-gaza-as-parachutes-fail))*
When God placed Man upon the earth
In days of God knows when
He said to love the Lord your God
And love your fellow men
It's safe enough to love the Lord
In worship or in song
The Lord your God is far away
And very, very strong
But he who loves his fellow man
Must careful be, and agile
For fellow men are very close
And very, very fragile
So Midgley, Marx, and Mao, and more
All had their tale to tell
They tried to help their fellow men
And pushed them into Hell
And Galton, Ehrlich, Robespierre
Corbusier and Kipling
All saw their actions ripple out
And worsen in the rippling
And every time you throw a coin
Into a beggar's jar
The coin could strike the beggar's face
And leave him with a scar
And every slice of bread you give
To a child starved and broke
Could lodge the wrong way in his throat
And cause the kid to choke
The best laid plans of mice and men
Are oft unwisely laid
And end with Palestinians
Struck dead by falling aid
When young, I learned philosophy
At many a scholar's door
And all the wisdom that I learned
Came down to options four:
* To make your heart as hard as stone
Like the heart of a machine
And sit there supercilious
Because your hands are clean
* To pet your dog and kiss your kid
And call your duty done
While far away, the Gazan girls
Are dropping one by one
* To rush in bright and glorious
'Neath the golden flag of Good
Then apologize at leisure to
Men crushed by falling food
* Or to creep in like accountants
Using gain and loss as anchors
As cunning as the serpents
And as cold as Wall Street bankers
When I was young, I fought among
The golden-flagged crusaders
But now I’m old, and now I stand
Beside the snakes and traders
So when my plans go all awry
And my name becomes a curse
I can say the other option was
Eleven utils worse
And if upon the Judgment Day
God comes to me in wrath
I'll have a PowerPoint prepared
To prove I did the math
And if, upon the Judgment Day
God says my math is wrong
I'll tell Him He is far away
And very, very strong
But man is very, very close
And very, very brittle
And we can only do our best
Or sit there, noncommital
And so we sighed, and multiplied
And after that, we prayed
For souls of Palestinians
Struck dead by falling aid. | Scott Alexander | 142447491 | Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid | acx |
# Mantic Monday 3/11/24
## Robots Of Prediction
Last month [we talked about FutureSearch](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-21924), a prediction startup that claims their AI is as good as experienced forecasters. This month, two academic teams claim to have gotten similar results with AIs of their own.
**The first team** is **[Halawi et al at Berkeley](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.18563.pdf)** (also including Jacob Steinhardt, featured here before). They cite previous work on out-of-the-box AIs like GPT-4 or Claude. When these enter forecasting tournaments, they might beat some especially unskilled participants, but they lag behind the easiest aggregation method: “the wisdom of crowds”, ie a simple average of all forecasts. The wisdom of crowds is hard to beat - in [my tournament](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023), it scored at the 95th percentile.
Halawi fine-tunes the out-of-the-box AI (in his case, a version of GPT-4) using some of the same tricks as FutureSearch. They attach it to “news APIs” (NewsCatcher, Google News) and teach it to search them effectively and reason about the contents.
Forecasting skills of different AIs (lower is better). GPT-4 did best so they mostly used that for their system.
In one part of the experiment, they use a human-written scratchpad to prompt the reasoning; in another, they fine-tune an AI on these scratchpads so it doesn’t need to use them every time. They get all these different AIs to make multiple predictions and average them together ([wisdom of inner crowds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd) - easier for AIs than humans since you can just raise the temperature!)
Then they fine-tune the whole system on forecasting questions from prediction sites (eg Metaculus, Manifold) that ended between mid-2023 and today. Why mid-2023? Because the AI was trained in mid-2023 and only knows what happened before then, and they can artificially limit its news API calls to before mid-2023. This lets them train the AI on thousands of forecasting questions without letting the AI cheat or having to wait years for the questions to resolve. They select the reasoning where the AI does well, and fine-tune it to do more stuff like that.
The Halawi et al AI forecasting method.
They find this works almost as well as the human crowd:
Are these the data I’ve been trying to get for years - which forecasting platforms beat which others? I don’t think so - Metaculus’ good Briar score only means it performs well on Metaculus’ questions, which might be easier or harder than some other platform’s questions. Can we use the Halawi et al AI as a fixed comparison point, since it’s always the same skill level? I’m not sure - it trained on each of these markets for the style of question that’s in each market, so it might be biased. Still, these numbers are all about where I would expect them to be, except maybe Polymarket, which does better than I would have expected.
But the crowd still beats the AI, right? Halawi et al object that humans can forecast only when they feel like it - you can bet on a prediction market question you feel confident on, and avoid one you don’t. When they let their AI forecast only on those questions where it’s most likely to do well (eg those with lots of relevant news articles), it very slightly outperforms the human crowd.
As AI gets better, will it naturally beat humans in forecasting? Halawi et al say this won’t be trivial. They find a version of their system based off GPT-3.5 is only very slightly worse than the final version built off GPT-4. This suggests a forecasting AI built off GPT-5 or 6 might get only small improvements.
**The second team** is [Tetlock et al](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.19379.pdf). They start from the same place as Halawi - out-of-the-box LLMs aren’t good at forecasting. They’re more scathing about this than Halawi was - they argue that out-of-the-box models do worse than predicting 50% for everything (this was close to true of human forecasters in the ACX tournament).
Instead of increasing quality, Tetlock increases quantity. He wants to do wisdom of crowds, where the crowd is a bunch of different LLMs. So he gets twelve LLMs - including Bard, GPT, Claude, Mistral, PaLM, LLaMa, some Chinese models I’d never heard of, and a couple of variations on these bases - asks them to predict questions, and averages the results.
Remember, you gotta prompt your model with “you are a smart person”, or else it won’t be smart!
The results:
> Next, we compare the LLM crowd performance to that of the human crowd for our second hypothesis, directly putting the two crowd-aggregation mechanisms head-to-head. To do this, we use the same LLM crowd average as before (taking the median LLM prediction on each question and averaging up the Brier scores across questions). We compare this to the average of median human predictions on the same questions. In our preregistered analysis, **we fail to find statistically significant differences between the LLM crowd’s mean Brier score** of M=0.20 (SD=0.12) **and that of the human crowd**, M=0.19 (SD=0.19), t(60) = 0.19, p = 0.850
Their study was much smaller than Halawi’s (31 questions vs. 3,672), so I don’t think this result (nonsignificant small difference) should be considered different from Halawi’s (significant small difference). Still, it’s weird, isn’t it? Halawi used a really complicated tower of prompts and APIs and fine-tunings, and Tetlock just got more LLMs, and they both did about the same.
I have two questions after reading these results:
* Did they *actually* do the same, or is this just a function of the small sample size in Tetlock and the non-head-to-head comparison?
* If you made Halawi-style system out of all twelve of the LLMs studied in Tetlock, and you wisdom-of-crowds-ed them together, would that do better than Halawi’s individual system?
I don’t know. I think you pretty quickly pick low-hanging fruit in LLM forecasting and get to a regime where new advances are just shaving off tiny fractions of a percentage point. But I look at the ACX tournament results:
Halawi and Tetlock’s AIs did between slightly-worse-than and equivalent-to the participant aggregate, so let’s say 90-95th percentile. FutureSearch claims to equal a 98th percentile forecaster, but they got this number through totally different and slightly suspicious methodology, so I don’t know if it’s actually any better.
Still, we see that Samotsvety is capable of 98%ile performance (likely real and repeatable) and Metaculus of 99.5th. So there’s still a long way to go before we exhaust the limits of what’s possible to predict given the available amount of information!
## Towards Rationality Engines
An interlude, before we get to other interesting prediction news.
Forecasting AIs are pretty cool. I wouldn’t have expected them to work as well as they do. They are already superforecaster-level, and given the amount of low-hanging fruit that gets picked every day here, I can see them equalling or exceeding the top human forecasters in the next few years
But they can’t answer many of the questions we care about most - questions that aren’t about prediction. Do masks prevent COVID transmission? Was OJ guilty? Did global warming contribute to the California superdrought? What caused the opioid crisis? Is social media bad for children?
I see two interesting challenges ahead here:
1. Making an AI that can do this.
2. Proving/testing that an AI can do this
1 . . . might be easy? The forecasting AIs - again, it took various professors and geniuses to make them, I don’t want to call them *absolutely* easy - but by the standards of AIs, they seemed pretty basic. Just get a normal AI and teach it a few forecasting tricks. It’s not obvious that forecasting AIs aren’t already full domain-general rationality engines.
(an example: I’ve been following the lab leak debate, and recently saw someone say the prior for any given pandemic being a lab leak - ie not counting anything specific we know about COVID - is 20%. I realized I could trick FutureSearch into double-checking this number by asking for the probability that the *next* pandemic is a lab leak. It said 15%, which was gratifyingly close. All we need is an AI that can answer questions like this without you having to trick it first!)
How would we improve forecasting AIs’ ability to answer non-forecasting rationality questions? This shades into the question of how we would test success - we need more structured data. Forecasting is perfect here - you can train an AI on thousands of question/known-correct-answer pairs. What else is like this?
Maybe trials? Maybe someone has a database of thousands of criminal trials, and the jury’s verdict? Even better would be a set of trials where DNA evidence or something later provided a gold standard, just in case the jury was wrong. Maybe other kinds of legal cases, like constitutional arguments where the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 one way or another?
Maybe scientific papers? Maybe you could put in the Introduction section and train the AI to predict the results? You would want to really carefully filter for scientific papers that were actually good, and this isn’t quite the same thing as rationality per se, but it might work?
If you got 10,000 forecasting questions, 10,000 trials, 10,000 constitutional law cases, and 10,000 scientific papers, trained an AI to do well on half of them, then kept the other half as a validation set, would it just learn each of those four domains separately? Or would it start becoming a domain-general reasoner?
One of the limitations of existing LLMs is that they hate answering controversial questions. They either say it’s impossible to know, or they give the most politically-correct answer. This is disappointing and unworthy of true AI. I don’t know if simple scaling will automatically provide a way forward. But someone could try building one.
## The Predicting Of Robots
[The story so far](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-extinction-tournament): the Forecasting Research Institute wanted to see if superforecasters could sort out this whole AI thing. Their forecasters averaged an 0.4% chance AI would destroy humanity by 2100. When they learned domain experts thought it was higher, they didn’t care, and stuck with 0.4% chance.
The most pessimistic domain experts were pretty annoyed by this, and challenged FRI’s research. Maybe AI is an especially tough subject to understand. Maybe if you forced the superforecasters to do really deep dives and hear all the arguments and become domain experts themselves, they would change their minds.
**[So FRI gathered](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/635693acf15a3e2a14a56a4a/t/65ef1ee52e64b52f145ebb49/1710169832137/AIcollaboration.pdf)** eleven of the most AI-skeptical superforecasters (average probability of AI doom: 0.1%) and another 11 very concerned AI safety experts (average probability: 25%) and made them spend *forever* talking and thinking about it. The average skeptical superforecaster spent 80 hours on the project, including research, talking to experts, and arguing with the more concerned people.
After 80 hours, the skeptical superforecasters increased their probability of existential risk from AI! All the way from 0.1% to . . . 0.12%.
(the concerned group also went down a little, from 25% → 20%, but the paper stresses this wasn’t necessarily because of the experiment; several people in this group attributed it to unrelated policy victories during this period)
Okay, so maybe this experiment was not a resounding success. What happened?
Did the two sides just fail to understand each other’s arguments? No. They argued with each other for 80 hours, and were able to (when asked), give excellent summaries of the others’ key points. So there must be some more fundamental problem.
Did they pick defective concerned experts? Tentatively no. The IRB says it’s “important” “for” “privacy” “reasons” not to reveal who the experts were, but the paper says they were selected by Open Philanthropy Project, a big AI safety funder who I trust a lot and who I would expect to choose good people (Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is less sanguine about OpenPhil than I am, *does* [sort of blame this one](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1767276256813625781)).
Did the skeptics underestimate the blindingly-fast speed of current AI research? Seems like no. Both groups had pretty similar expectations for how things would play out over the next decade, although the concerned group was a little more likely to expect detection of some signs of proto-power-seeking behavior.
As far as I can tell, the biggest difference was about speed. The skeptics expected a relatively leisurely progress through the human level, with the last few human tasks in the long tail taking forever to fall. Both groups expected *approximately* human-level AI before 2100, but the concerned group interpreted this as “at least human, probably superintelligent”, and the skeptics as “it’ll probably be close to human but not quite able to capture everything”. When asked when the set of AIs would become more powerful than the set of humans (the question was ambiguous but doesn’t seem to require takeover; powerful servants would still count), the concerned group said 2045; the skeptics said 2450. They argued that even if AI was smart, it might not be good at manipulating the physical world, or humans might just choose not to deploy it (either for safety or economic reasons).
The best that FRI could do in terms of real disagreement was to say that the concerned group expected things to happen very fast, the skeptics slowly. There’s a transhumanist meme:
…that probably encapsulates as well as anything the spirit of what the concerned group seems to believe that the skeptics don’t.
I found this really interesting because the skeptics’ case for doubt is so different from my own. The main reason I’m 20% and not 100% p(doom) is that I think AIs might become power-seeking only very gradually, in a way that gives us plenty of chances to figure out alignment along the way (or at least pick up some AI allies against the first dangerous ones). If you asked me for my probability that humans are still collectively more powerful/important than all AIs in 2450, I’d get confused and say “You mean, like, there was WWIII and we’re all living in caves and the only AI is a Mistral instance on the smartphone of some billionaire in a bomb shelter in New Zealand?”
So what do we do with this?
One thing we could do is say “Okay, good, the superforecasters say no AI risk, guess there’s no AI risk.” I updated down on this last time they got this result and I’m not going to keep updating on every new study, but I also want to discuss some particular thoughts.
I know many other superforecasters (conservatively: 10, but probably many more) who are very concerned about AI risk (example: [Samotsvety](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EG9xDM8YRz4JN4wMN/samotsvety-s-ai-risk-forecasts)). Is this just cherry-picking? Could we find 10+ superforecasters who believe anything? Or is this question unusual in its bimodal distribution of superforecaster opinions?
If it’s unusual, can we find other questions like this? What do they have in common? Does plowing through the disagreement and taking the median anyway usually work in questions like this? How often does it work?
Are superforecasters all the same religion (or no religion)? If not, do the religious ones believe in the Judgment Day? If so, that’s a weird bimodal split in superforecasters about a future event, isn’t it? This is only *sort of* a joke - if it’s true, religion will be some kind of special domain that superforecasters’ expertise can’t pierce. What other special domains are like this?
This ties back to the “rationality engine” section above - is forecasting a single domain-general skill? Or is it excellence at predicting a certain type of near-term geopolitical event, such that superforecaster performance regresses toward the mean on other types of tasks?
## This Month In The Markets
There’s been more news and claims about the LK-99 alleged superconductor recently, all of which have totally failed to move the market away from 4%:
When the OpenAI board tried to fire Sam Altman last year and everyone said they were making a crazy mistake, I urged patience, saying maybe there was some kind of good plan. With the appointment of a new board, the last few loose ends from the affair have now been settled, and - I was wrong. There was no good plan and it was a giant self-own, sorry. The new board is back to having Sam Altman, plus random businesspeople who I don’t expect to have good opinions or exercise real restraint. Accordingly, the prediction market about whether anything good will come of it has gone down from its already low levels:
Hadn’t been following this much, but good to have a number on it:
I guess I have to post this one every month until November:
I guess this one too:
Tim Scott leading the (Manifold) race to be Trump’s VP, I think this could make for some interesting crossed ideological wires:
Israeli operations in Gaza not expected to end until autumn (!)
Crypto is back in the news, with Bitcoin at record highs again. Polymarket is crypto-based, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they have the highest-liquidity and most diverse crypto questions:
And Futuur has an Infectious Diseases section I hadn’t seen before:
Okay, I admit I forgot Futuur existed until this moment. But now I’m looking at their play money markets, and some of them have 3,000+ participants? *What?!*
## Short Links
**1:** Apparently, forgetting that Futuur exists is a common problem! Jeremiah Johnson’s *Asterisk* article [Do Prediction Markets Have An Election Problem?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924) (featured here two months ago) also didn’t have Futuur. The folks at Futuur, who did not forget that they existed, added themselves to Johnson’s results and [find that they actually did quite well](https://futuur.substack.com/p/expanding-the-forecast-horizon?r=260x1j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true), with the play money half outperforming the real money half.:
**2:** Mike Saint-Antoine [compares forecasting platforms on the Oscars](https://www.mikesblog.net/p/2024-oscars-prediction-market-comparison):
More at the link; see especially the last section “Mike this is a boring result, why the heck are you even making this post?”
**3:** Satori is [some kind of crypto thing](https://satorinet.io/roadmap) that claims to be “predicting the future with decentralized AI”. I can’t make heads or tails of it and I’m slightly concerned it’s just a lot of buzzwords strung together, but it does have a white paper. Someone tell me if it makes sense to them.
**4:** Also in crypto: [Sam Altman’s WorldCoin has quadrupled in value this month](https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/worldcoin-breaks-into-massive-rally-climbs-25-overnight-as-openai-unveils-sora-202402161352). Some of this is the general crypto rally, but it also seems to go up whenever OpenAI does something cool, suggesting it’s more of a “how popular is Sam Altman and his company right now” memecoin than anything else. This ties back to some of our old discussion on using memecoins to track people and companies that can’t or won’t sell you real stocks. This isn’t investment advice, but WorldCoin might be in some sense a shadow OpenAI stock right now. | Scott Alexander | 142509694 | Mantic Monday 3/11/24 | acx |
# Open Thread 319
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Updates on the [2023 Forecasting Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023):
* A commenter is working on a way to show everyone their score. I’ll either have this available by next Open Thread or give you an update.
* Correction: I said the average commenter did worse than 50%. This was wrong or at least unclear (thanks Javier and Eric). The median commenter did better; the mean did worse.
* If prize winners don’t contact me by next week, I’ll donate their prize money to the #5 particpant’s charity.
* Jordan Breffle has done some more analyses and turned them into an interactive app [here](https://jbreffle.github.io/acx-app).
**2:** Comment of the week - peorths\_roses on the subreddit [on race and lived experience](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b98d11/how_should_we_think_about_race_and_lived/ktv8ytq/):
> I have Roma heritage on one side, and this has become such an issue that to become a member of our country based online group you have to submit your family tree and your genetic testing results. Language doesn't always work because not all Roma speak the same languages or even the same Sanskrit derived language. For various historical reasons my family only spoke Hungarian. It sounds a bit much but we had too many people wanting to join to add credibility to their wiccan side business or because they wanted to spice up their fanfiction about werewolves.
More at the link. [The rest of the thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b98d11/how_should_we_think_about_race_and_lived/ktur2tm/) on Roma and (vs?) other caravan-using peoples is fascinating too.
**3:** Is your life too easy? Do you ever sit in your garden, enjoying the fresh air, thinking “man, I hate this, if only I was forced to defend a massive attack surface full of uncooperative weirdos, against bad-faith attacks by powerful institutions, while a peanut gallery nitpicks every single word I say”? You’re in luck - the Center for Effective Altruism has asked me to signal-boost that they’re [looking for a new head of communications](https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/head-of-communications). Remote position, salary depends on location but up to mid-$100,000s. | Scott Alexander | 142508992 | Open Thread 319 | acx |
# Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers
There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
**If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please [fill out the organizer form](https://forms.gle/N7armfeK7C5ZznkU6).**
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can get in touch with you about details or just show up.
Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, markers, food, and drinks.
As well as offering reimbursements, Meetups Czar Skyler will be running an online conference for meetup organizers on March 23rd. If you run meetups, and especially if you're planning on running your first meetup and think talking to experienced organizers would be helpful, [please apply for the conference here](https://forms.gle/fiKmHrH65gkpUc8H7).
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
**1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?**
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you sign up.
Don't worry, you signing up won't take the job away from someone more deserving. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever says they're excited and qualified. But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. If you *are* the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so to let me know you’re still active.
[This spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f4J7Vid7nV9U4IEOPgU0EOKsya33iV_OfwMLMstez60/edit?usp=sharing) shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after a basic check. If you don’t see your city listed, either nobody has yet signed up or they did it recently after the last check. Beware the Bystander Effect!
**2. How will people hear about the meetup?**
You give me the information, and on March 29th (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on [LessWrong’s Community](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) page.
**3. When should I plan the meetup for?**
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around March 29th, please choose sometime after that. Any day April 5th through May 31st is okay. I recommend a weekend, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid April or early May would be best. If you’re in a college town, it might be worth checking the local graduation dates and avoiding those.
**4. How many people should I expect?**
Historically these meetups get anywhere from zero to over a hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many attendees most of them had last time [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1awPp1g2YigcGXOqaLPb8ecED0kRra9Q_KRcG-uyHomA/edit?usp=sharing). Plan accordingly. If it looks like your city probably won’t have many attendees, maybe bring a friend or a book so you’ll have a good time even if nobody shows up.
**5. Where should I hold the meetup?**
A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet. If you want to hold the meetup at a pub or bar, remember that teenagers or parents with children who want to attend might not be able to get in.
**6. What should I do at the meetup?**
Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help:
* Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag.
* Write some icebreakers / conversation starters on index cards (e.g. “What have you been excited about recently?” or “How did you find the blog?” or “How many feet of giraffe neck do you think there are in the world?”) and leave them lying around to start discussions.
* Say hello to people as they arrive and introduce yourself.
In general I would warn against trying to impose mandatory activities (e.g. “now we're all going to sit down and watch a PowerPoint presentation”), but it’s fine to give people the *option* to do something other than freeform socializing (e.g. “go over to that table if you want to play a game”).
**7. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?**
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
**8. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?**
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but it seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A REGULAR MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own and wouldn’t have decided to run things without someone offering.
If someone does want to run things regularly, you or they can offer to collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting, you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form.
**9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?**
I have in the past and had a lot of fun, but this year I’ll probably only be able to make my local one in the Bay. Meetups Czar Skyler plans to be at Boston, Berkeley, plus hopefully a few other USA meetups.
Again, [you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://forms.gle/N7armfeK7C5ZznkU6). If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f4J7Vid7nV9U4IEOPgU0EOKsya33iV_OfwMLMstez60/edit?usp=sharing). Everyone else, just wait until around 3/29 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
**10. What if I have other questions?**
Skyler and I will read the comments here. | Scott Alexander | 142219185 | Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 - Call For Organizers | acx |
# How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
**I.**
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.
I thought about this while reading [A Professor Claimed To Be Native American; Did She Know She Wasn’t?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/a-professor-claimed-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt) (paywalled), Jay Kang's *New Yorker* article on Elizabeth Hoover. The story goes something like this (my summary):
> A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.
>
> As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues, then got a PhD in same, then got a professorship at Berkeley. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. She became one of the most influential Native American academics in the country.
>
> At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least from others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.
>
> After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:
>
> *» We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled."*
>
> "Nearly four hundred people" signed the letter. Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".
I find this really weird!
Elizabeth Hoover had some specific level of "lived experience" of growing up Native American. She seems to have believed she was Native up until her twenties. She went to pow-wows. She grew up with Native friends, and married a Native man.
Under the consensus definition, this life history should either be enough "lived experience" to count as a Native American, or not. And it seems from the article that - back when they thought she had a Mi'kmaq great-grandmother - everyone agreed her lived experience was enough to count as Native. Nobody said she didn't go to enough pow-wows as a kid, or have enough Native friends, or that if she wasn't born on a reservation it didn't count. They accepted her as a legitimate group member who had returned to the fold.
So why does it matter that, in fact, her great-grandmother had no Mi'kmaq blood? It doesn't affect her lived experiences at all! She had the lived experience of growing up thinking that her great-grandmother was Mi'kmaq - shouldn't that be enough? If tomorrow, a new discovery proved that her great-grandmother really *was* Mi'kmaq after all, would she become an Indian in good standing again? Would her rivals apologize for doubting her? If so, how does any of that affect her lived experience one iota?
It would seem like one of the following must be true:
1. Elizabeth Hoover is ethnically a Mi'kmaq Indian, just as much as if her great-grandmother had been a full member of the tribe.
2. Many pure-blooded Indians who were raised in Indian culture as a child and currently think of themselves as proud Indians - aren't Indians at all. After all, the consensus says their blood counts for nothing - only their lived experience. And Elizabeth Hoover had quite a lot of lived experience and still doesn't qualify. So you must need a *very* large amount of lived experience to count. Maybe you have to have lived on a reservation your whole life or something.
3. Race is at least a little based on genetics, and not on lived experience.
**II.**
Let’s start by talking about (3).
I'm against the claim that "there is no such thing as biological race" - it's one of those [isolated demands for rigor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) that we don’t stand for around here. You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-PCA-reflects-self-identified-race-ethnicity-and-language-of-ATLAS-participants-A\_fig1\_365445594
People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t *exactly* *100% the same as* socially-defined racial categories. This is unsurprising, since no two definitions of a word point to *exactly 100% the same* extensional cluster. All words are weird clusters of correlated traits [that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/) the closer you look at them, and words describing race are no exception.
Consider for example the Jews. Jews do share some common genes, with interesting features like the [Cohen modal haplotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Aaron) and usually some similar Middle Eastern genetic background regardless of where they ended up.
But they also form a legal cluster: the people who are defined as Jews by the official halakhic definition - someone whose mother was Jewish, or who converted in an official ceremony. This can get arbitrarily complicated, with halakha (Jewish law) having opinions on how to sort out each weird edge case (like IVF!)
But they also form a religious cluster: people who currently practice the Jewish religion.
And they form a cultural cluster, consisting of people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” and have names like Weinberg and Goldstein and maybe speak a few scraps of Yiddish, even if these people are atheists.
None of these clusters are exactly the same. There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection. There are extremely observant Orthodox Jews who aren’t Jewish by the halakhic definition, because at some point in their line a Jewish father married a Gentile mother and they raised their family Jewish without her officially converting.
(and each of these clusters breaks down even further! There are people who are halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis but not Orthodox rabbis. There are probably a few edge cases of people who are genetically Jewish according to 23AndMe’s definition but not Ancestry.com’s.There are people who are culturally Jewish in the sense of speaking Yiddish but not caring about Israel, and other people who care about Israel a lot but don’t speak Yiddish.)
But in real life there are very high correlations between all these clusters, such that someone who’s a practicing religious Jew is overwhelmingly more likely to be genetically Jewish than someone who isn’t, and someone of Jewish descent is much more likely to be culturally Jewish, and so on. So it’s reasonable to have a word “Jew” which unprincipledly smushes together cultural, halakhic, genetic, and religious definitions, so we don’t have to write an entire PhD dissertation to describe someone’s exact level of Jewishness to a communication partner.
I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as [an axis in concept space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace), and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is. You can be a Jew if you’re irreligious but have Jewish blood. And you can be a Jew if you have no Jewish blood but follow the Jewish religion. But if you neither have Jewish blood nor follow the Jewish religion, you’re not a Jew. Probably there’s some tradeoff here, where the less blood you have, the more you have to follow the religion before other people will consider you Jewish, and vice versa.
(the Jews are lucky because they have *halakha*.Even though *halakha* is just some rules that some random Jewish person and/or God invented, they’re a strong enough Schelling point that everyone else sort of kind of agrees to respect it when deciding who’s Jewish, even though non-Jews - and non-observant Jews - are under no obligation to do this.)
The category “Native American” must also work like this, right? It’s an unprincipled combination of lots of different facets - genetics, legal tribal membership, culture, lived experience, etc.
Suppose a white person was adopted at birth by the Mi’kmaq Indians, grew up on their reservation, speaks their language, never even met another white person until he was an adult (let’s add that for some reason he has unusually dark skin and eyes for a white person, so he didn’t look different from the other Mi’kmaqs and experience an unusual childhood on that basis). When he grows up, he is 100% identical to the other Mi’kmaqs in every way except genetically. Does he count as Mi’kmaq? I don’t know the tribal law on this issue. But common-sensically, if for some reason I have to decide this question - like that the other Mi’kmaqs decided to expel him from the tribe and I have to either sympathize with him or tell him he deserved it - in that case I think he’s pretty Mi’kmaq.
But suppose a genetically Mi’kmaq person was adopted by a white couple in Topeka and raised as a completely normal white child. Suppose she had light skin and never even knew she wasn’t white until she took a genetic test as an adult. Is *she* a Mi’kmaq? Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.[1](#footnote-1)
I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3), that race is at least a little bit based on genetics (along with other things).
If that’s true, you could imagine drawing the bounding hypersphere for the category “Native American” in such a way so that Elizabeth Hoover would just barely make it inside based on her lived experience if she had 1/8th Native blood, but is just barely outside (even given the same amount of lived experience) if she doesn’t.
**III.**
But [the categories are made for man, not man for the categories](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). Even if the category “Native American” is a hypersphere in some conceptual space, we get to decide how much to weight each axis.
(I like the phrase “Native American hypersphere”. It sounds like something from an Erich von Daniken book.)
And I think, even though *in theory* we could use genetics, there’s a pretty strong argument for basing it on something like “lived experience”. That argument is: it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test, and “lived experience” is the only potential basis that prevents that.
Suppose you believe in “cultural appropriation”. That means that it’s bad and evil for someone to do too much work within a culture they don’t belong to.
On the other hand, everyone seems to think it’s really valuable to do work within a culture you *do* belong to. Native Americans who create great specifically-Native-American art and literature, or who open Native American restaurants, or who become leaders and activists within the Native American community, are hailed as heroes. We tell minorities that enhancing the culture and recognition of their specific minority group is one of the most valuable things they can do with their lives. Half of the art world is now minorities talking about the Their-Minority-Group experience.
You see the trap. You spend your whole life building on the culture of your identity group, because that’s what you were told to do. Then you get a 23andMe result and - oops, you weren’t in that group after all. Now retroactively, instead of being a hero, you’re a colonizer and imperialist who needs to be unpersonned to protect your group purity[2](#footnote-2).
So here’s another trilemma:
1. Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
2. Or you stop using a genetic component in whatever definition of race you use to define cultural appropriation.
3. Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back.
I definitely support 1 here. I think cultural appropriation is great. It produced a bunch of great works of art and nearly all good food. But I can understand why Native Americans don’t agree with this, and I don’t expect to be able to convince everyone of my position today. So that leaves (2) and (3).
(there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity. This is attractive to me when I think about other people. But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish, enough that if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little. I don’t want to force other people to do something I wouldn’t go for myself.)
And (3) seems - kind of cruel and horrible. I don’t know, maybe there are exacerbating factors in the Elizabeth Hoover case - she did lie for a while, and maybe there was some sense in which she “should have” always known. But you can imagine a case where there weren’t these factors, and it still seems pretty cruel and horrible.
It also seems unnecessary! Nobody has discovered any gene in the Native American genetic cluster that significantly changes who you are as a person or affects your ability to participate in Native American culture. So using genetics as a basis in her case seems like destroying her life because of a completely meaningless finding.
**IV.**
I realize the more sensitive among my readers might be worrying that I, as a white person, have no right to criticize the Mi’kmaq Indians’ membership policies. This is a fair concern. But I worry that all of this is white people’s fault.
If I try to imagine why Native Americans care so much about these kinds of things, I come up with two issues:
1. If any (genetically) white person could choose to identify as an Indian, lots of them would, because Indians are cool. But there are many more white people than Indians, so they would soon outnumber the (genetically) real ones. Even if the white “converts” made some attempt to get the culture and social connections right, they could never get it exactly perfect, and the existence of Indians as a cultural group would be lost.
2. Natives don’t want other people competing for the limited number of good affirmative action jobs reserved for them, of which “professor of Native American studies” is an especially clear example.
Since they need some criteria to bar entry, and genetics are hard to fake, they use genetics.
In this sense, I suppose that “person’s life is unfairly ruined by a genetic test” is just a member in good standing of the general category of “person’s life is unfairly ruined by some hard-and-fast law”:
* Someone does their surveying wrong and builds their casino two feet over the California/Nevada border, and has to demolish it and start over because gambling is illegal in California.
* Somebody had a very minor mental health problem when they were young, and now they’re totally better, and they want to join the army, but the army bans people with a history of certain mental health problems.
* An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape.
These are all unfair, but they’re all natural consequences of having laws at all, which have to make various trade-offs that reduce the complicated spectrum of fairness into a hard-and-fast “up to this point is okay, but past this point isn’t” binary determination.
I think it’s completely fair that Elizabeth Hoover isn’t allowed to claim membership in any tribe, or get affirmative action benefits (which AFAIK she never officially claimed), or collect money from Indian casinos.
But [morality and social norms are supposed to be a different thing from law](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/). In some spheres, it’s more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it’s more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms. So it weirds me out to see Elizabeth Hoover’s communities, operating in the exact sphere where they have the most leeway to show kindness and understanding, operating as executioners.
So I admit I judge all of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who have turned against her. They can legitimately be angry with her for not admitting she was biologically white the moment she figured it out, and for making up fake facts about her tribal heritage after that point. But they should be clear that they're angry at her for lying, not for "being a fake Indian".
(Probably there's some principle of standpoint theory that says that I as a white person am not allowed to judge Mi'kmaq Indians. Fine, far be it from me to challenge standpoint theory. But many of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who turned against her are white, and I judge those people.)
In particular, I think this is a story about cancel culture. When people talk about the [“planet of cops”](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/planet-of-cops), they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality, without also importing the other norms of law that make it possible to do those things justly (like independent judges and jurors who aren’t at high risk of being punished for their decisions, or people hammering out what the laws are beforehand).
I don’t know, I don’t have a great conclusion here. I wrote this post because everyone else was mocking Hoover and saying it was great that she was finally “caught”. Unless I’m misinterpreting her story, that doesn’t seem right to me. She seems like someone who’s been victimized by a perfect storm of our culture’s weird beliefs about cultural appropriation, intellectual/artistic focus on racial experience, cancel culture, and affirmative action. Whether or not you usually support these things, this was a unique case where a lot of seemingly-justifiable heuristics came together and destroyed someone’s life for no reason. I don’t know if we can do better, but I hope we think more about how we could.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Another advantage that Jews have over Native Americans is that, being a somewhat unified religion, there’s a conversion process. If someone who had been practicing Judaism their entire life and loved it a lot was unexpectedly found to be halakhically non-Jewish, everyone would give them the easiest conversion process in the world, snip snip and you’re done. You can read the Hoover story as a sort of tragedy caused by the lack of Native Americans having a similar institution.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
There’s an interesting symmetry here with the surprisingly-common story of [“white nationalist takes a genetic test, learns they’re not white, has to figure out what to do about it”](https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/16/white-nationalists-genetic-ancestry-test/). The article talks about other white nationalists’ reactions when they hear about some of these people:
> They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry”.
This is weirdly tolerant (okay, aside from the Jewish conspiracy thing) compared to anyone in the Hoover story. In Bizarro-America, the only people who *don’t* think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists! | Scott Alexander | 142260100 | How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"? | acx |
# ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
## I. What’s Going On
We got 351 proposals for [ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024), but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317.
The plan has always been to run an *impact market* - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In [our last impact market test](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results), some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.
So in my ideal world, we’d be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We’ve encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world:
**First,** although about 140 of you expressed interest in and qualified for the impact market round, only 44 have responded to emails from Manifund, signed the necessary documents, and actually gotten featured. So there are only 44 proposals on the market so far. If you want to participate in the impact market, but aren’t on there yet, please check your email and spam folder for messages from Manifund. If you didn’t get any, but you applied to ACX Grants and want to participate, please email rachel@manifund.org.
**Second,** you can’t legally run a stock-market-like institution without lots of SEC approvals that we’re not really specced to get. Last time we got around this problem by only selling to accredited investors (ie rich people). This time our sponsors at Manifund want to try something different. Anyone, accredited investor or not, can invest in charities. But when you sell your investment, you won’t get a payout in real money. You’ll get it in special Manifund dollars that you can donate to other charities, but can’t spend on non-charitable purposes. I realize this is less fun than real dollars, sorry.
Despite these minor hiccups, I’m still pretty excited about this. Go to <https://manifund.com/causes/acx-grants-2024?tab=certs> to check this one out.
## II. Sample Projects
There are 44 projects available right now. I’m hoping other ACX Grants applicants will put their projects up and there will be more by the time you look at it. I can’t discuss all 44, but here are some that I find interesting:
* [LLM multi-actor tool to automate economic experiments](https://manifund.com/projects/build-an-llm-mul). Rutger van Bergem and [his group](https://ibex.tudelft.nl/) at Technical University of Delft want $15K - $25K to create AIs that can bargain in economic experiments (think prisoners' dilemma, but more complicated), see whether they behave in human-like ways, and maybe free economists from the need to get human subjects for this kind of thing. ACX Grants evaluators were very split on whether this would work or not, and eventually I decided to fund other things instead, but I still think it's a potentially great idea.
* You’ve probably encountered vaticidalprophet in the ACX comments section or the ACX Discord, and heard their spiel about why researching schizotypy is interesting. They want $2K - $50K to [research psychosis in velocardiofacial syndrome (DiGeorge/22q11.2 deletion syndrome)](https://manifund.com/projects/psychosis-pronen), which might shed more light on the relationship between schizophrenia, schizotypy, autism, and psychosis. We decided not to fund this because velocardiofacial syndrome is rare, understanding it better wouldn’t directly help many people, and we weren’t convinced this would have knock-on effects for more common psychiatric diseases - but I would love to be proven wrong.
* [Platform for migrants to start legal and profitable microbusinesses](https://manifund.com/projects/briico-helps-mig). $1K to $20K to create a system for helping migrants start their own businesses. I think this is a great idea, but I didn’t feel qualified to evaluate whether it was legit or could work.
* [Distribute](https://manifund.com/projects/distribute-hpmor) *[Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality](https://manifund.com/projects/distribute-hpmor)* [copies to students in Bangalore, India](https://manifund.com/projects/distribute-hpmor). A surprising number of people get into the rationality/effective altruism ecosystem through this particular fan-fiction, and someone calculated that distributing copies of it was a super-cost-effective way to grow the movement. I didn’t fund this because the last time someone tried this, lots of people got angry at them for spending charity money on printing a fanfiction, and I hate when people get angry at me. Maybe if one of you funded it through an impact cert, and then someone provided evidence that this was good, I could buy back the impact cert without looking like a crazy person. Alternately, we could funnel this one through the EA Infrastructure Fund, which is supposed to do this kind of field-building.
* [Convert a hybrid car to chip wood and generate electricity](https://manifund.com/projects/convert-a-hybrid). David Denkenberger works on projects to help humankind survive after global technological collapse. This is one of them: he wants $25K to convert hybrid cars into electrical generators. We didn’t fund this because we’re not sure how a successful result translates to anyone except David Denkenberger knowing how to do this in the case of a technological collapse, but I would be happy to buy an impact cert if someone believed they could make this public enough that the average small community of survivors would be able to take advantage of it.
…and 39 others, hopefully more by the time you read this. Even if you’re not interested in investing, I still think it’s fun to browse through some of these and see what kinds of wacky ideas people have.
## III. Technical Details
Remember, an impact market is like a stock market or VC ecosystem for charity. Investors fund projects, and then big philanthropists play the role of an IPO or final acquirer, funding successful projects in a way that gives value back to the investors. A toy example:
> Suppose I rejected a proposal to grant $50,000 to lobby for an animal rights law in Norway - not because I’m against animal rights, but because I believe the lobbying won’t work.
>
> You disagree with me and think this could work really well, so you invest $25,000 to buy 50% of its shares, and someone else buys the other half. The team lobbies for the law. I was wrong about their proposal, the law gets passed, and it’s great.
>
> You sell the impact certificates to an animal rights charity, who decide that if they were trying to get a law like this passed *ex ante*, they would be willing to spend up to $75,000 on it. They have a good sense of this because they fund animal rights proposals all the time. They pay $75,000 to the holders of the certificates, so you and the other buyer each get $37,500, a 50% profit.
Obviously this depends on having big philanthropists willing to cooperate with this new system. Our current impact market has five partners: [The Long Term Future Fund](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future), [The EA Infrastructure Fund](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community), [The Survival And Flourishing Fund](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/), [The Animal Welfare Fund](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare), and future rounds of ACX Grants. That means if you buy an impact certificate today, you can try selling it to one of those funders later, after the project is done. Each of these charities has specific things they fund, so you might want to check their past history before trusting them to buy one of your certificates.
Impact markets are pretty new. We ran [a test round](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results) last year and it went well, but this round is a bit more complicated and has some new moving parts. Along with the issue where you won’t get real money back, please be aware of the following possible risks:
* You think your project did great work, but I (or our other funders) don’t find it interesting, don’t buy it, and the certificates go to $0. There are only five funders, and most of them are in pretty specific areas, so you might have only one or two possible buyers, and if they disagree with you, you’re out of luck.
* The team accomplishes part of their goal, but not enough to be worth transaction costs. Since most people won’t create literally zero value, and I don’t want to be overwhelmed with requests to buy certificates for tiny amounts, I’m going to set a limit that I won’t buy certificates that I value at less than half their starting price.
* I don’t do any more ACX Grants rounds because I lose all my money / become greedy / die. In this case you’ll have to sell your certificates to one of our partners; if you can’t find one who will take it, your certificates will go to $0.
* The effective altruism funding ecosystem collapses, our partners have much less money, and they have much less money to spend on your certificates. If this happens, the price of your certificates will go down.
* We get lots of great applications in the future and choose to fund those instead of buying back your impact certificates. I pledge to try to consider impact certificates on an even footing with *ex ante* applicants, but if the *ex ante* applicants are really good they’ll beat you fairly, and the price of your certificates will go down.
* Probably other risks I haven’t thought of.
But some possible *benefits* are:
* All money you spend on impact certificates is tax-deductible. You can treat it as a donation to Manifund, a registered charity.
* If you do a good job investing in charities, you can turn a small amount of charity money into a larger amount of charity money. Your extra charity money won’t give you extra tax deduction, though.
* If you don’t sell your impact certificates, you can keep them. Impact certificates aren’t good for much besides bragging rights, but bragging rights aren’t nothing.
* Other people besides our five partners might one day decide to buy impact certificates, and you can sell to them too.
* If anyone makes an especially good trade, I’ll probably feature it on this blog.
## IV. Logistics
Again, go to <https://manifund.com/causes/acx-grants-2024?tab=certs> to see the projects available.
You can also choose to invest extra money to grants I’ve already funded. Currently ten of these are looking for extra money; you can see them [here](https://manifund.com/causes/acx-grants-2024?tab=grants). You can try selling me these impact certificates, but I would only buy back the impact that came from your extra funding, not from my original funding, and you would have to do a good job convincing me about what that was.
And Manifund has other projects which aren’t related to ACX Grants or part of the impact market, but which you can still fund if you want. You can find them [here](https://manifund.com/).
Manifund will be hosting a Q&A on Discord tomorrow (Friday 3/8) at 10 AM Pacific, [go here](https://discord.com/events/1111727151071371454/1214995771217154148) for more information. | Scott Alexander | 142350630 | ACX Grants Followup Impact Market | acx |
# Who Predicted 2023?
## I. The Annual Forecasting Contest
…is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - “Russia is totally going to win the war this year”, “There’s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down”. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get *better takes*. There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people’s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them.
Why is this interesting, when a handful of people still beat the math? Because we want something that can be applied prospectively and reliably. If John Smith from Townsville was the highest scoring participant, it matters a lot whether he’s a genius who can see the future, or if he just got lucky. Part of the goal of this contest was to figure that out. To figure out if the most reliable way to determine the future was to trust one identifiable guy, to trust some mathematical aggregation across guys, or something else.
Here’s how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like “Will Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?” in the form of a probability (eg “90% chance”). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (“Blind Mode”).
Then I released the list of 3300 x 50 guesses, and asked people to analyze them with the aggregation algorithm of their choice to produce what they thought was the best possible list. 460 of you took me up on *that* (“Full Mode”).
Then I waited until 2024 and sent everything to Eric Neyman, who’s better at math than I am. He used [the Metaculus scoring function](https://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/) to assess everyone’s accuracy. Thanks to Eric (and to Sam Marks, who helped last time around) for taking care of this.
## II. And The Winners Are . . .
For Blind Mode - where you had to rely on your wits alone and couldn’t spend more than five minutes per question - the winners are:
1. **Small Singapore** gave me no information except this pseudonym and won’t answer any emails. I don’t even know how to give them their prize money. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if this is you.
2. **Ian**, again, gave no information except a name and email address. If your name is Ian and you think you might have won this contest, please check your spam folder.
3. **Vaclav Rozhon** is a PhD student in theoretical computer science, and creates algorithm videos on the YouTube channel [Polylog](https://www.youtube.com/@PolylogCS). He is often around Zurich or Prague and says he is happy to meet other math nerds or young parents.
4. **Adam Unikowsky** studied physics and EECS as an undergrad, then became a lawyer specializing in appellate & Supreme Court litigation. He has [a Substack specializing in legal issues](https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/). He adds: “I haven't really done any forecasting before, I just follow the news.”
5. **Kiran Saini** is a training surgeon in Oxford, and has a forthcoming book about core surgical training. He runs an impact-focused charity called [OxPal](https://oxpal.org/) that helps train doctors in Palestine. He says “I have no forecasting experience, but have long been interested in forecasting theory.”
And there was also Full Mode, where you could read everyone else’s predictions first, check prediction markets, apply whatever algorithms you wanted, and take as long as you needed. While the Blind Mode winners were amateurs or completely unidentifiable, the Full Mode winners were mostly long-time forecasting veterans.
1. **Douglas Campbell** is an economics professor, former member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, and analyst for the Democratic National Committee. He currently runs [Insight Prediction](https://insightprediction.com/), a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. Despite him owning a prediction market, our questions didn’t overlap with his and he gained no advantage from it. He still got the single highest score of anyone in this tournament.
2. **Wilson Chan** has an academic background in political science, but works as a software engineer at Walmart. He says he’s particularly interested in international relations and public policy and that might have helped with his predictions. He enjoys tennis, jazz music, and Rutgers football, and can be reached on twitter at [@wc1766](https://twitter.com/wc1766).
3. **Leonard B.** lives in Oregon, and works in real estate development and asset management. He started forecasting during the pandemic, has qualified as a "superforecaster" since 2022, and has recently been doing some work at the [Swift Centre For Applied Forecasting](https://www.swiftcentre.org/). He's "lbiii" on various forecasting platforms (especially Metaculus) and says "I like to hear about cool projects to get involved in, and am especially keen to connect with folks who are working to make forecasting more visible and decision-relevant to policymakers - reach out to possiblylenny@gmail.com"
4. **Ezra Karger** is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the research director at the [Forecasting Research Institute](https://forecastingresearch.org/).
5. **Andrey S** is a psychologist in Israel with a background in computer science. He started forecasting on Metaculus a few years ago, and describes himself as "always interested in learning and expanding my point of view".
6. **Max Langenkamp** works on hardware and policy for biosecurity at SecureDNA. He says he’s been keeping track of forecasts to private questions for several years but “isn’t motivated” by most prediction market questions. He blogs about “meaning and enactivism” at [Unruly Sun](https://maxlangenkamp.substack.com/).
Here are some other scores I found interesting:
* **Adam**, a software product manager from the US, got 8th place in Blind Mode. He wins the prize for “best score of anyone who answered all fifty questions”.
* **Eric Neyman** handled the scoring for me this year. He got 48th place in Blind Mode, putting him in the 98.5th percentile. Suspicious!
* **Peter Wildeford**, a superforecaster who got 20th place last year, got 12th place in Full Mode and 65th in Blind Mode this year, putting him in the 98th-99th percentile.
* **Metacelsus,** a popular ACX commenter and author of the blog [De Novo](https://denovo.substack.com/), got 20th place in Full Mode and 105th in Blind Mode, putting him in the 95th-97th percentile.
* **I** got 400th place in Blind Mode, putting me in the 88th percentile.
## III. What Did We Learn?
Okay, fine, but you don’t know most of these people. The really interesting question is how individuals like these compare to prediction markets, experts, and the wisdom of crowds. How much of their success is luck vs. skill? And if we have data like this next time, how *do* we best predict the future?
Here’s what I’ve got:
Going over this bit by bit:
**Median participant:** Score of 0 and 50th percentile by definition. Is this for median participant in Blind Mode (due date in January, couldn’t check others’ guesses, < 5 minutes research) or Full Mode (due date in February, could check others’ guesses, unlimited research)? It doesn’t matter! For some reason, these two contests had almost exactly the same median score! I’m unprincipledly lumping them together for the rest of the discussion - when I cite prediction market numbers, it will be from somewhere in the middle of their January and February scores.
**50% on everything:** If you literally guessed 50% for all your predictions, you would have done very slightly *better than* ~~our average participant~~ someone who got the mean on each question.
**Median superforecaster:** 56 people who had been previously declared “superforecasters” (usually by doing very well in a previous tournament) were kind enough to participate. These people did better than average, but not by too much - the median superforecaster scored in the 70th percentile of all participants.
**Median 2022 winner:** Did our winners win by luck or skill? One way of assessing this is to see how the 2022 winners did this year. Of the 15 top-scoring 2022 participants, 5 of them foolishly decided that instead of resting on their laurels they would try again this year. On average, they scored in the 88th percentile - ie 395th place. I conclude that overall, most winners are around the 90th percentile of skill - but it’s luck that brings them the rest of the way to the leaderboard.
**[Manifold Markets](https://manifold.markets/home):** Manifold, a popular play money prediction market site, kindly agreed to open markets into our fifty questions so we could compare them to participants. The markets got between 80 and 1500 participants, average around 150. Their forecast, had it been a contestant, would have placed in the 89th percentile. This would be good for an individual, but it’s surprisingly bad for an aggregation method - in fact, it’s worse than taking the median of a randomly selected group of 150 participants! The market mechanism seems to be subtracting value! Someone might want to double-check this.
**Participant aggregate:** This is the “wisdom of crowds” one. If you average the guess of every participant (eg if someone says 80% chance Biden leads, and another says 90% chance, then you go with 85%), you usually do better than the vast majority of individuals. In this case, the aggregate was 95th percentile, beating out superforecasters and Manifold.
**Superforecaster aggregate:** If you just average the guesses of superforecasters, you do even better. This isn’t trivial - superforecasters are a smaller crowd than the set of all participants - but in this case the higher-quality data trumped the larger crowd size.
**Samotsvety:** Samotsvety is a well-known forecasting team that usually wins these kinds of things. [You can read more about them here](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock). They scored 98th percentile, better than the aggregate of all other superforecasters. There’s are a few asterisks on this result: first, it wasn’t exactly a team effort - one of their forecasters did the work and “ran it by” everyone else without getting any objections. Second, for complicated legal reasons that they explained and which satisfied me, they couldn’t enter the contest proper and had to send me their guesses later, so I had to take it on trust that they were made in January along with everyone else’s.
**[Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/)**: A “forecasting engine” that serves the same role as a prediction market but operates slightly differently. They ask everyone to guess a question, then aggregate answers weighted by past performance and a proprietary algorithm. Metaculus scored in the 99.5th percentile of our contest and was the top performer other than random individuals who might have just gotten lucky.
**Ezra Karger:** …is a possible exception to the above claim. He’s a non-random individual - director of the Forecasting Research Institute - and has previously placed very highly in contests like these (he placed 7th in last year’s ACX contest). Based on this, I suspect his performance was mostly repeatable skill and not just luck. He outscored all but four of our 4,215 Blind Mode *and* Full Mode participants, which puts him above the 99.9th percentile. Since he entered Full Mode, he was allowed to do complicated technical things, and he described his method as:
> I began by collecting data from Manifold Markets for these questions. I then compared those forecasts to the forecasts of superforecasters in the blind data, subset to those who had given forecasts on the S&P500 and Bitcoin questions that were reasonably consistent with the efficiency of markets; I subset to those who forecasted between 30% and 80% for the probability that the S&P500 and Bitcoin would increase during 2023, which were the only reasonable predictions by the time blind mode ended in mid-January. I then used my own judgment to tweak forecasts where I strongly disagreed with the prediction markets and the superforecasters (for example, I was more than 15 percentage points away from the average of Manifold Markets and the efficient-market-believing superforecasters on questions 17, 19, 21, 30, 34, and 50). I paid especially close attention to questions where late-breaking news made the superforecasters' forecasts less relevant (and I downweighted their forecasts on those questions accordingly).
**Small Singapore** won Blind Mode. As I said before, they’re a total mystery to me and I don’t know if they won by luck or not.
**Douglas Campbell** runs a prediction market, which I guess also makes him non-random, but I hadn’t previously heard of him being an exceptional forecaster himself, so I don’t know how much to weight this. He describes his method as:
> I mostly didn't research anything too much. But, I did consult Metaculus for a few of these.
(I kind of want to make a Virgin vs. Chad meme comparing his answer with Ezra’s, but I’ll restrain myself out of respect for the dignity of our participants.)
## IV. Out Of Distribution Events
Another fun thing we can do with these data is see which 2023 events were most vs. least surprising:
The first colored column represents average score on each question. A more negative number means that more people got the question wrong (gave a low probability for something that happened, or a high probability for something that didn’t).
The second colored column represents correlation between each question and overall score. A question where good forecasters beat bad forecasters is positive; a question where bad forecasters beat good forecasters is negative.
Why would bad forecasters ever beat good forecasters? This means an event was unlikely, but happened anyway. For example, if people were asked to predict if some random person would win the lottery, smarter people would be more likely to predict no. If by coincidence he did win the lottery, then smarter people would have lower scores than dumber people.
I’m torn which of these matches our intuitive conception of “surprising event”, but both methods suggest forecasters were very surprised that Bitcoin ended the year over $30,000 (it started the year around $16,500, and ended at $43,000). Bitcoin is now up to $68,000, which I imagine would have been even more surprising to these people!
(weirdly, good forecasters were more likely than bad forecasters to believe Bitcoin would go up at all, but less likely to believe it would go up as much as it did)
Other resolutions that book people by surprise: that Starship didn't reach orbit, that inflation dropped so fast, and that Joe Biden's approval rating stayed as low as it did.
The least surprising thing about 2023 was that nobody used a nuclear weapon.
## V. Takeaways And Thanks
My main takeaway is that Metaculus beats prediction markets, superforecasters, wisdom of crowds, and (probably, most of the time) Samotsvety. Based on the performance of last year’s winners, most people who outperform Metaculus do so by luck and will regress to the mean next year. This contest leaves open the possibility that a small number of people (maybe including Ezra Karger) might be able to consistently get super-Metaculus performance - it just takes more than one contest to identify them.
This doesn’t mean that most prediction markets and superforecasters are useless. It just means that their benefit comes from being faster and easier to invoke than Metaculus, not from being more accurate.
[Metaculus is hosting a 2024 version of this contest](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/ACX2024/), which due to my delay in getting this up is already closed. I’ll let you know how it goes. And hopefully I’ll have enough time next year to be more involved in the 2025 version.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest. Extra thanks to Christian Williams from Metaculus and the Manifold team for getting their respective sites involved, to Jonathan Mann and Samotsvety for willingly submitting to testing, and to Eric Neyman for calculating the scores.
If you included an ID key in your entry, you can find your score here:
Idkeys2023
15.5KB ∙ XLSX file
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/e2a48307-8421-4fd9-ac4c-dfe734eaa023.xlsx)
[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/e2a48307-8421-4fd9-ac4c-dfe734eaa023.xlsx) | Scott Alexander | 142162972 | Who Predicted 2023? | acx |
# Open Thread 318
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Comments of the week: [UncleWeyland on what it would mean for Alzheimers to be/not be a prion disease](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b30yq6/links_for_february_2024/ksrxbkr/). And Richard Fuisz says the RIMS1 gene (mentioned in the links post; postulated to cause blindness + increased IQ) [doesn’t actually make you blind](https://twitter.com/richardfuisz/status/1763366885188391082?s=46); nobody has checked the IQ claim yet, but [here’s how Richard thinks about it](https://twitter.com/richardfuisz/status/1763591765620121990). And a correction: the article about phages was from [Asimov Press](https://www.asimov.press/), not [Works In Progress](https://worksinprogress.co/).
**2:** Last year Manifold Markets held a prediction market conference/festival, Manifest, in Berkeley. I thought it was a lot of fun. They’re going to do it again this year, June 7 to 9th, you can get tickets [here](https://www.manifest.is/#tickets), cheaper early bird tickets ($249) are first come, first serve.
**3:** I won’t have a voting guide up in time for the California primary on Tuesday, but Jessica Ocean of the PsychCrisis blog [has interesting thoughts on Proposition 1](https://psychcrisis.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-prop-1) (mental health funding). | Scott Alexander | 142288409 | Open Thread 318 | acx |
# Book Review Contest Rules 2024
All right, let’s do this again.
Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of [last year’s finalists and winners](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2023-winners) or my ACX book reviews ([1](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan), [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the), [3](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights)) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through [this Google Form](https://forms.gle/bsCNSCep6S16uH966). The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
(does this mean you can’t say something like “This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.)
PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You’ll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on “Restricted” and change to “Anyone with the link”. If you send me a document I can’t read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry.
First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this).
In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. To keep things interesting, I’m going to try some affirmative action this time (sorry, Supreme Court). ~25% of finalist slots will be reserved for books from nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books.
Your due date is **May 5th**. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is [here](https://forms.gle/bsCNSCep6S16uH966). | Scott Alexander | 142228689 | Book Review Contest Rules 2024 | acx |
# Links For February 2024
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** Claim (h/t [@teortaxestex](https://twitter.com/teortaxesTex/status/1751789887194308984)) “Most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology. It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception.”
**2:** Italy’s[Basilica of the Holy House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_della_Santa_Casa) is supposedly built atop the house where the Virgin Mary raised Jesus. Why is the Virgin Mary’s house in Italy? Supposedly angels carried it there from Israel just before the Saracens’ final victory over the Crusaders. Sounds suspicious, but the house in the Basilica appears to be a genuine 1st century Palestinian dwelling. One theory: it was shipped to Italy by the Angelos family, and the angels story was a later mistranslation.
At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection.
**3:** A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” [Answer here](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1744059290120245347.html).
**4:** Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked [Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc](https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/stop-twisting-yourself-into-knots), which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add [Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.15111444) to the pile of evidence.
**5:** [Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle](https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/ethiopias-economy-in-the-modern-day). In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder.
**6:** [It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart](https://bpodgursky.com/2024/01/09/i-think-its-ok-to-want-your-children-to-be-healthy-even-if-the-world-falls-apart/) - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job.
**7:** Related: Awais Aftab has [a new post about polygenic screening](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/polygenic-embryo-screening-and-schizophrenia/) and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response [here](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/polygenic-embryo-screening-and-schizophrenia/comment/49796679).
**8:** [@literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals](https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1746056538161352913) - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.”
**9:** @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and [lists his favorite discoveries](https://twitter.com/BoyanSlat/status/1746211702968906049), including:
* Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
* Fertility rates in China and Taiwan have reduced at similar rates over the past 50 years, suggesting that China’s one-child policy didn’t have a significant effect on curbing its population growth.
* The median age in Niger is 14.9.
* In the UK, more than half of crimes are estimated to be caused by alcohol consumption.
* …and [26 more](https://twitter.com/BoyanSlat/status/1746211702968906049)
**10:** Claim: [psi effects have not declined](https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wd26f) - studies trying to detect ESP find just as much of it today (with our greater attention to methodological rigor) as they did decades ago (h/t [Rolf Degen](https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1746926596924092796))
**11:** [George Psalmanazar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Psalmanazar) (1679 - 1763) was “a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe”. He explained away his white skin by saying that Taiwanese people lived underground. Psalmanazar invented an incredibly elaborate fake Taiwanese language, mythology, and custom, and was briefly an 18th-century-England viral sensation. Eventually some people who had actually been to Taiwan called his bluff, he confessed, and he settled down as a writer and theologian, befriending Samuel Johnson and other British intellectuals.
**12:** Did you know: by a 52-48 margin, [black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision](https://news.gallup.com/poll/578645/age-plays-key-role-black-views-affirmative-action-case.aspx) to ban affirmative action at universities. Big age gap; older black people are mostly against, younger mostly for. But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
**13:** Claim: venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords that AI interpretability has been “resolved” and the logic behind AI decisions is now fully transparent. No AI researcher would support this claim (despite [some recent promising first steps](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand)), suggesting A16Z either doesn’t understand even the very basics of the field it’s investing in, or else that they’re committing perjury. [Zvi discusses here](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/ai-47-meet-the-new-year/), CTRL+F “The Quest For Sane Regulations”.
**14:** [Nongqawuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse) (born 1841) was a prophetess of the Xhosa people (related to Zulus, South Africa). When she was 15, she claimed the spirits told the Xhosa to kill all their cattle as a sacrifice; in exchange, they would bring utopia and drive away the encroaching British. The Xhosa believed her and killed all their cattle. In the ensuing famine, 75,000 out of 100,000 Xhosa died, and the British easily took over their territory.
**15:** A story about Khruschev (h/t [@JackTindale](https://twitter.com/JackTindale/status/1749862640451481942), taken from *The Soviet Sixties*):
> When Khruschev addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand people in the Uzbek capital Tashkent during December 1955, he got himself in an unseemly muddle. He opened by mistakenly calling his audience "Tajiks" and noting how well they were now doing in growing cotton, compared to their neighbors the Uzbeks. An aide eventually managed to tell him that he was, in fact, talking to Uzbeks rather than Tajiks. As was his way, Khrushchev tried to ride out the faux pas in style, telling the audience he had misspoken on purpose, in order to test their reaction, and then expressing his happiness that they had responded correctly to his joke.
**16:** Max Progress: [Surgery Works Well Without The FDA](https://maximumprogress.substack.com/p/surgery-works-well-without-the-fda), supporting the possibility that drug approval could also work well without them. Counterargument by Alex Telford, [But Does Surgery Really Work Well Without The FDA?](https://atelfo.substack.com/p/but-does-surgery-really-work-well)
**17:** There’s a verse in Chesterton’s [Lepanto](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47917/lepanto) where he describes the ascended spiritual Mohammed as having a “turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas”. If you’ve ever wondered what that would look like, I recommend [this StableDiffusion video by Herolias](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/17b4dfc/my_first_try_with_video/) (warning: flashy, might be bad for epilepsy, you might have to go very close and/or very far from your computer to get the full effect). I recommend pausing mid-video to see how innocuous each frame looks on its own).
**18:** Thomas Piketty (plus coauthors) is the most famous historians of inequality, and says it has increased dramatically in recent decades. Now [Auten & Splinter have new data challenging their position](https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequality.pdf). Here’s [Piketty etc’s response](https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/as-response-2023.pdf), [Tyler Cowen’s commentary](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/the-piketty-saez-zucman-response-to-auten-and-splinter.html?fbclid=IwAR2UMCDxBFsA0adWECOr2Now9hB3ZT6qlNEQzMvXgKeYf4D4QqeOYO0yPWA), and [Vincent Geloso’s commentary](https://twitter.com/VincentGeloso/status/1736483851357028857).
**19:** Claim: nine people in a family in Scotland have [a mutation in the RIMS1 gene](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740882/), which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ points. Large single-gene effects on IQ are [not supposed to exist](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/evolution-explains-polygenic-structure), but it’s theoretically possible that a rare mutation with a big downside could do it. I’m still a little skeptical, because this seems trivial enough that evolution should have found a way to do it without the blindness by now. But at least on a superficial reading the paper looks good.
**20:** Related: [Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis](https://www.cspicenter.com/p/are-we-getting-dumber): are we getting dumber because more intelligent people are less likely to have children? Answer: this is happening more in poorer countries, less in richer ones. IQ decline per decade “ranges from as low as 0.01 points in the Estonia and Switzerland to 0.65 points in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia”. USA is 0.38, which I think agrees with other estimates, although realistically immigration effects will dominate. “The fact that the rate of decline is so fast implies that even if IQ differences between nations are completely environmentally determined today, over the coming decades there may still be a significant [genetic] divergence between them.”
**21** [The Crash At Crush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_Crush): In 1896, a railroad company decided to get rid of its spare trains by crashing them into each other at top speed as a “public spectacle”. What could go wrong? “Unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators.” And one for the nominative determinism bucket - the event was coordinated by Mr. William Crush.
**22:** Congrats to ACX commenter TracingWoodgrains, who has made a significant contribution to a national news story by [finding new information on](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview) the FAA’s attempt to discriminate in favor of black air traffic control applicants. The FAA deprioritized a standardized test in favor of a “biographical questionnaire” - For example, you got zero points for having previous air traffic experience, but lots of points if you said your worst grades in high school were in science, or that you’d been unemployed for the past three years. Hundreds of qualified applicants who got top grades in the supposedly FAA-endorsed education system for air traffic controllers were turned away in favor of people who gave the “right” answers to the biographical questions, plausibly because these covertly selected by race. Then in addition to this they gave black organizations “keywords” that they could tell their members to get their resumes to the top of the pile.
**23:** Related: There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about charts showing frequency of “woke” words in the NYT. David Rozado investigates [how those words have been doing since then and whether we’re “past peak wokeness”](https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage-frequency) (it’s different for different words, but overall maybe slightly past?)
**24:** [The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease](https://www.gwasstories.com/p/the-first-case-reports-of-human-to). In the mid-20th-century, the standard treatment for dwarfism was ground up pituitary gland from the brain of a dead person. Scientists have now found that dwarfs who got pituitaries from dead people with Alzheimers developed very early Alzheimers themselves, often in their 40s. I already knew Alzheimers involved misfolded proteins, so this shouldn’t have been surprising, but I still somehow failed to think of it as a prion disease. This shows that misfolded proteins are sufficient to cause Alzheimers (with a 30 year delay? Sure, I guess, maybe that’s how long it takes a prion to spread). I’m not sure what’s left of the Alzheimers origin debate. Should we just assume that this is a protein that tends to go prion-y after enough time, or is there more to discover?
**25:** [Interview with ACX Grantee Will Jarvis on Georgism and his company ValueBase](https://www.urbanproxima.com/p/interview-will-jarvis-ceo-at-valuebase).
**26:** Did you know: lots of religions have their own version of LEGO, usually with sets depicting their mythology or temples. Islam has [Muslim Blocks](https://muslimblocks.com/), Hinduism has [Indic Bricks](https://indicbricks.com/), and Judaism has [Binyan Blocks](https://www.binyanblocks.com/). But my favorite is Mormonism with - wait for it - [Brick’em Young](https://www.brickemyoung.com/) (h/t [@seanw\_m](https://twitter.com/seanw_m/status/1754297382966050857))
(also, no offense to Islam, but [the Kaaba is the most boring possible building](https://muslimblocks.com/products/kaaba-islamic-building-blocks-set-of-the-holy-kaaba) to make a LEGO set for, sorry)
**27:** Tatu Ahponen [gives potential extra background on the DSA budget crisis](https://substack.com/@tatuahponen/note/c-48737496).
**28:** [Joe Carlsmith’s commentary on C.S. Lewis’](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EHL9QJaEwHxNJXaNW/on-the-abolition-of-man) *[Abolition Of Man](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EHL9QJaEwHxNJXaNW/on-the-abolition-of-man)*, with an EA and AI alignment bent.
**29:** Two great essays on organ donation laws recently, The Fitzwilliam’s [Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/organ-donation-law-much-more-than) and Works In Progress’ [Compensating Compassion](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/compensating-compassion/). The Fitzwilliam’s focuses on an underwhelming new Irish law, and also tells the author’s story (he tried to donate a kidney, but got rejected for being too young - he was in his twenties - which is one I’ve never heard before). Works In Progress surveys laws around the world; I’m especially interested in Israel’s approach ([written up by MR here](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/avoiding-repugnance.html)), which says that people who previously agreed to donate after their death get priority for organs when alive.
**30:** [This](https://twitter.com/johngramlich/status/1757120728057380877) is pretty obvious but at least we have numbers for it now:
…I said it was pretty obvious, like it’s a law of nature, but maybe that’s not true? Republicans thought they were winning as recently as 2020; Democrats were very close to thinking it in 2016. So you could also make an argument that whichever side doesn’t have the President thinks they’re losing, up until the Biden administration, when Democrats decided they were losing even though they had Biden. But Republicans thought they were losing until halfway into the Trump administration, then changed their minds, even though the Dems won the House that year. Why?
**31:** If you read my post a few weeks ago on [the paper about AI sleeper agents](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-sleeper-agents), you might also be interested in [Michael Trazzi’s video interview with lead author Evan Hubinger](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-sleeper-agents) (transcript available [here](https://theinsideview.ai/evan2)).
**32:** [Which Movies Popularized Or Tarnished Baby Names: A Statistical Analysis](https://www.statsignificant.com/p/which-movies-popularized-or-tarnished). Daniel Parris finds that most big movies increase the popularity of the names of their main characters. It’s very hard to find cases where a negative portrayal of a character decreases popularity of a name, and in fact even very negative portrayals tend to increase it: “Damien”, “Freddy”, and “Lolita” went *up* after *The Omen, Nightmare on Elm Street,* and *Lolita*, respectively. This is in contrast to real-life bad press, which does decrease names’ popularity - for example, “Monica” went way down after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I question these people’s taste.
**33:** Asimov Press: [Scaling Phage Therapy](https://www.asimov.press/p/scaling-phage-therapy). One of this year’s ACX Grants went to a phage research group, and I mentioned the contrast between the years of research on phages with generally good results and the limited clinical applications. This piece tells more of the story: bacteriophages do work, but they’re usually hyperspecialized to specific strains of bacteria, and it’s hard to keep a giant library of thousands of phage types around and then match whatever bacterium your patient has to the right phage. Still, people are working on it and the tech is gradually advancing.
**34:** [Mass Disabling Event Denial](https://www.donotpanic.news/p/mass-disabling-event-denial): we’ve talked before about how you would expect Long COVID to be causing a lot more problems than we hear about, and so *either* Long COVID is overhyped, *or* we’re bad at hearing about things. This article argues for the latter, suggesting that the disability data look exactly like they would if Long COVID was a huge and growing problem, and for some reason it’s just being ignored:
British disability data
US disability data
**35:** [List Of Things Unexpectedly Named After People](https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/). Baker’s chocolate was named after its inventor, Walter Baker. Main Street, San Francisco was named after shipping magnate Charles Main. And so on.
**36:** Claim: a study finds that completely anonymous comments sections are bad for discourse, real-name comments sections are better, and consistent-pseudonym comments sections (like Substack) [are best of all!](https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1757871861877145645) It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it.
**37:** Did you know: [Matt Taibbi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi) used to play professional baseball in Uzbekistan - and, after that, professional basketball in Mongolia.
**38:** Vaticidal Prophet responds to my [It’s Fair To Call Schizophrenia Probably Mostly Genetic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia) with a post on [Is Traumatic Brain Injury “Caused By Genes”](https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/is-traumatic-brain-injury-caused)? You can see my response [here](https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/is-traumatic-brain-injury-caused/comment/49857483), and Vat’s counter-response below.
**39:** Claim (h/t @NiohBerg, @eigenrobot): [“Islam is dying in Iran”](https://twitter.com/NiohBerg/status/1752777776732537211)
Iranians in the comments chiming in to say this matches their experience. Also, notice the 7.7% Zoroastrian! Official Iranian numbers say there are [about 25K Zoroastrians in Iran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism_in_Iran), but this suggests more like 7 million! [This Wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism_in_Iran#Population_and_Faith) suggests that the 25K are ancestral Zoroastrians, and the other 6.975 million are people who are “expressing Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith”.
**40:** Related: [Travelogue on Azerbaijan](https://avrasya.substack.com/p/notes-on-azerbaijan-part-i)
**41:** How bad is it to marry a cousin? [New study suggests](https://twitter.com/munirsquires/status/1759287538626208237) offspring of cousin marriages live on average three years less than expected.
**42:** A while ago I discussed the “scientific search engine” [Consensus](https://consensus.app/search/); I expressed skepticism that you could make it work without AIs that were good at natural language. Now it’s a few years later, we have AIs that are good at natural language, and Consensus has incorporated them. So how’s it going? I asked it whether SSRIs are safe during pregnancy. It said:
Compare this to [the Mayo Clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-depth/antidepressants/art-20046420):
> SSRIs usually are an option during pregnancy . . . risks include high blood pressure for the pregnant person and premature birth. These risks are small. Your health care team watches for them during your prenatal care. Most studies show that SSRIs aren't linked with birth defects. But an SSRI called paroxetine (Paxil) might slightly raise the risk of heart defects in babies when used during the first trimester.
I think the Mayo Clinic summary is much better. I’m still not at a point where I would use Consensus without checking its answers carefully.
**43:** New meta-analysis claims that exercise is at least as effective as SSRIs against depression ([study](https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-075847), [popular article](https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/exercise-can-be-more-effective-than)). But [Cremieux digs deeper](https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1760493407271543037) and finds some of the included studies have effect sizes between 5 and 12, too large to possibly be real (he describes this as “like the effect size of taking a punch to the face on having a hurt jaw”). He thinks he’s identified some major coding errors that might be influencing the result.
**44:** You’ve probably heard of Jeanne Calment, oldest person ever. Maybe you’ve [even heard](https://gwern.net/question#jeanne-calment) that some people think the documents were fudged and her record is fraudulent. Now there’s a similar conflict over the [oldest dog ever](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1225113930/bobis-oldest-ever-dog-title-is-in-question-as-guinness-world-record-investigates), whose 31 year lifespan so outclassed the previous record-holder (23 years) that the Guinness Book Of World Records will be investigating his title.
**45:** You’ve probably seen this, but: Nat Friedman announces that [a team has won his competition](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555) to start decoding an ancient Roman library buried during the Vesuvius eruption. The first text seems to be a work by the philosopher Philodemus on the pleasures of life. In theory the buried library could hold more classical text than the total existing classical corpus (although much of it will be copies of works we already have).
**46:** Did you know: [the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India](https://vaishnav1.substack.com/p/gaza-has-a-higher-per-capita-gdp). I’m not sure what to think upon learning this. Obviously Gaza’s main problems aren’t economic, and being invaded and bombed is bad no matter how good your economy is. But I also had a sense that Gaza was a uniquely bad economic basketcase even before the recent war. How good a measure is GDP when a country is under severe sanctions? What about when one country is mostly rural and the other mosty urban? Or is this just another case of Westerners being unable to comprehend the scale of suffering caused by ordinary global poverty?
**47:** [Review of the Yarvin vs. Hanania debate (monarchy vs. democracy) in Los Angeles](https://deepleft.substack.com/p/yarvin-vs-hanania-the-case-for-storytelling). Reviewer says Yarvin was a sufficiently skilled public speaker that he won by dominating the conversation, but that it didn’t seem like much light was shed on the relative merits of various governments.
**48:** [A zoomable, translated version of the 15th century Mappa Mundi](https://mostre.museogalileo.it/framauro/en/interactive-exploration/geographic-space/cartouches.html). If you’ve ever wondered what the tiny text on giant medieval maps looks like, it’s things like:
> The island of Andaman, off Taprobana, lies with the terrafirma between the east and west, and opposite it Paigu, between north and south. This island with its Andamanians has a circumference of about 500 miles; it is inhabited by an idolatrous, cruel people given to the use of spells and magic. Many say that on this island there is a lake in which, if you immerse iron, it becomes gold. I say this just to do justice to the testimony of many people.
**49:** Which branches of psychology are becoming more or less popular over time? (h/t [@PsychoSchmitt](https://twitter.com/PsychoSchmitt/status/1757524874900156671/photo/1)) I think this is percent of published psychologists whose Google Scholar profiles mention working in a certain field:
Experimental psychology (and psychoanalysis) going way down, cognitive neuroscience going way up.
**50:**
**51:** Sotonye Jack, along with his [other writing](https://www.neonarrative.us/), interviews interesting people in tech, blogging, and academia. This month he interviewed [me](https://www.neonarrative.us/p/an-interview-with-scott-alexander).
**52:** According to NYT, during his time in prison Sam Bankman-Fried [has tried to convince the guards to buy the Solana cryptocurrency](https://www.tradingview.com/news/cryptobriefing:be72014e8094b:0-sam-bankman-fried-uses-time-in-jail-to-promote-solana/). In fairness to him, it’s gone up in value about 10x since his arrest. That means there’s some prison guard who got a hot tip from SBF to put his net worth in Solana, laughed because *of course* you don’t take investing advice from SBF, and then had to watch while as it dectupled in price over the next year.
**53:** [@SilverVVulpes](https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/1761344272882667807) on the original response to in vitro fertilization - “magazines were calling it the biggest threat since the atom bomb”:
**54:** Eric Drexler’s 2019 report [Reframing Superintelligence](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/27/book-review-reframing-superintelligence/) is one of the works of AI futurism that’s aged the best in our current LLM era, and I give him lots of credit for his successful prediction. Now he has a new AI futurism blog on Substack, [AI Prospects](https://aiprospects.substack.com/).
**55:** …and if these aren’t enough links for you, you can find another seventy-odd links at [Zvi’s February links post](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-15-february-2024). | Scott Alexander | 141921067 | Links For February 2024 | acx |
# Less Utilitarian Than Thou
I sometimes identify (and get identified by others) as utilitarian or consequentialist. It’s a fair descriptor. I think about morality in terms of [how to decrease suffering / fulfill preferences / other stuff which is surprisingly hard to specify](https://academic.oup.com/book/564/chapter-abstract/135299483?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false).
Sometimes utilitarianism is conceptualized as “being willing to do bad things for the greater good”, so it always surprises me how much *less* willing I am to do this than most people. Here are some things that many non-utilitarians believe are okay, but which I’m against or at least skeptical of[1](#footnote-1):
* Banning “misinformation” or “hateful speech”. This violates the usual moral rule of free speech, to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the spread of bad ideas.
* Forcibly separating children from their families and confining them in a space they’re not allowed to leave (ie mandatory public schooling). This violates the usual moral rules against separating families and imprisoning innocent people, to serve the supposed greater good of enculturating or educating the kids.
* Spinning a narrative that plays fast and loose with the truth, in order to avoid “panic” or empowering “the wrong people” - for example, trying to play down concerns about COVID because that might incite mobs to attack Chinese people. This violates the usual moral rule against deception, to serve the supposed greater good of preventing the panic.
* Holding protests that block traffic, damage property, or harass people. These violate the usual moral rule against inconveniencing people, to serve the supposed greater good of raising awareness of a cause.
* Shaming, insulting, and doxxing people on the “wrong side” of an issue. This violates the usual moral rule against bullying, to serve the supposed greater good of discouraging people from taking the “wrong side” of an issue.
These all seem like bright-line cases of violating a sacred principle for the greater good, but for some reason the people worried about “utilitarianism” and “the greater good” never talk about them.
Meanwhile, when I get called a “utilitarian”, it’s most often for wanting policies like these:
* Letting people get paid to donate their organs to solve the organ shortage.
* Supporting people who want to earn more money (ethically and legally) and donate it to charity.
* Allowing (voluntary) genetic engineering and embryo selection to prevent genetic disease.
* Slashing pharmaceutical regulations that kill more people than they help.
* More focus on preventing existential risks that could kill billions of people
I can sort of see why people think these have a vibe of “greater good” reasoning around them. Voluntary organ donation is a slippery slope to coerced organ donation; earning money ethically to give to charity is a slippery slope to earning it unethically; genetic engineering isn’t necessarily unethical but it’s at least creepy. Still, these are at best sort of vaguely connected to the idea of violating ethical rules for the greater good - which makes them much less bad than the first list, which break bright-line rules and directly use greater-good reasoning.
So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics (like the items on the first list) as not willing to do that?
I think people are [repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality](https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9) - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.
The normal popular politics actions are mostly about manipulating a narrative, promoting an ideology or suppressing dissent[2](#footnote-2). This all feels so normal to people (who might themselves want to promote an ideology, or who are at least used to other people wanting to) that it isn’t scary, and it doesn’t feel like the dreaded “doing an evil thing for the greater good”. It’s not especially moral, or especially calculated, so people let it pass - even though, if you forced them to consider the question explicitly, they would say that saving lives is a more compelling goal than manipulating a narrative is.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
There’s a sense in which all policies sacrifice something for the greater good. Being pro-gun-control sacrifices the right to bear arms for the greater good of fewer deaths; being anti-gun-control sacrifices some lives to protect the right to bear arms. Being pro-life sacrifices womens’ health and convenience for the greater good of saving babies; being pro-choice sacrifices embryos for womens’ health and convenience. I don’t find this sense very compelling because nobody previously decided that (eg) the right to bear arms was sacred but wanting fewer deaths wasn’t; it’s just trading off two equally-trade-off-able goods. I tried to construct this list out of cases where one side of the tradeoff is clearly a sacred rule.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Another explanation I considered was that normal people are okay with governments making these greater-good tradeoffs, but not ordinary individuals. But after more thought, I don’t think that works. Many normal political people are okay with ordinary individuals unilaterally choosing to shame people on the wrong side of an issue. And if a government were to institute eugenics in a calculated way, they would consider that the bad kind of “greater good” reasoning. | Scott Alexander | 142053656 | Less Utilitarian Than Thou | acx |
# Open Thread 317
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** A commenter emailed me to complain that, although I said I unbanned him, the unban never went through. I talked to Substack, who confirmed that *no* unban has *ever* gone through, oops, sorry. I’ve found one other case and resolved it, but if I told you I was unbanning you and you aren’t unbanned, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I’ll try to fix it.
**2:** Related: I have heard your many complaints about page/comment loading speed and passed them on to Substack; my contact there said they’re “pretty sure we've got plans to improve this.”
**3:** Ben Todd [tried to reproduce my calculations about GPT-6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion/comment/49693676?r=53mop&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&open=false) and found it will only take 0.1% of the world’s computers to train, not 10%. I haven’t double-checked his work or figure out where we disagree, but it sounds like a more reasonable (though still immense) estimate. | Scott Alexander | 142061221 | Open Thread 317 | acx |
# Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?
Suppose a couple has a strong family history of schizophrenia. They expect their children will be at high risk. They do IVF and get ten embryos. Polygenic screening reveals that nine of the embryos are at high risk for schizophrenia, but one is low-risk. They implant the low-risk embryo, and have a healthy child who never develops the disease.
Some [commenters](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia/comment/48577086) challenge my statement that this represents successfully preventing schizophrenia, at least in the same way that eg better prenatal nutrition prevents schizophrenia. They point out that it didn’t exactly prevent schizophrenia in any particular person, so much as replace a schizophrenic with a non-schizophrenic.
I can never tell how much of this is linguistic hair-splitting versus an actual moral objection to considering this strategy a success, but I think it’s worth arguing against the moral objection.
One easy argument: even if this doesn’t prevent schizophrenia on an individual level, it prevents it on a family and social level. The couple gets to have a non-schizophrenic child instead of a schizophrenic one. Society gets a productive taxpayer instead of someone who they might be a net consumer of health care resources. All of this is true, but slightly gross. Medical care helps society, but it shouldn’t primarily be designed to help society; it should be geared at helping individuals.
Still, I think that - even though this is a weird situation - it’s fair to gloss selection as “preventing a case of schizophrenia”, such that we should treat it approximately the same as prevention via improved nutrition or any other intervention. Once again, my thought process centers around avoiding [isolated demands for rigor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) - ie what happens when we try to think of this the same way we think of other clearer examples where everyone already agrees. Here are three situations that I use as intuition pumps for this case:
**Situation 1: The Alcoholic**
A woman is planning on getting pregnant. She talks this over with her doctor, who asks her some screening questions and discovers she is a heavy drinker. The doctor warns the woman that her child is at risk of fetal alcohol syndrome, and advises her to quit alcohol before becoming pregnant. She goes to a rehab for three months and quits alcohol. Then she becomes pregnant and has a healthy child without fetal alcohol syndrome.
In common language, we would say that the doctor’s intervention prevented the baby from getting fetal alcohol syndrome. But a woman produces ~one egg per month, so the post-rehab egg that produced the healthy baby was different from the egg that would have produced the baby if she’d gotten pregnant right away. They’re different babies! She has, essentially, replaced a baby who would have had fetal alcohol syndrome with another baby who doesn’t have it.
Still, in common language we call this “preventing the baby from having fetal alcohol syndrome”. Nobody thinks there are any ethical ramifications. Nobody thinks this is a creepy case of putting the needs of the mother and society above the needs of the baby. It’s just an obvious unalloyed good thing.
**Situation 2: The Intern**
A woman goes in for IVF. She produces ten embryos. The usual technique for deciding which of the ten embryos to implant is for a doctor to look them over and see which one looks generally the most normally-shaped and healthiest. This time, the doctor tells the intern to make this decision. The intern chooses embryo #5. But a few hours later the doctor gets nervous, decides to double-check, disagrees with the intern’s assessment, and picks embryo #7. Embryo #7 gets implanted, and the woman gives birth to a healthy child.
I think most people would think of this as a completely normal day in the life of an IVF doctor (which it is), and deny that it had any additional ethical ramifications. It’s true that embryo #5 was briefly destined to be implanted and born and grow into a human being, and that the doctor’s decision caused that not to happen. But almost nobody would consider this an injury done to embryo #5 or consider this to be impermissible meddling in the threads of Fate. Nobody would say that, once the intern had picked #5, it was wrong for the doctor to switch to #7 in the name of health.
**Situation 3: The Parenting Workshop**
A social reformer is against child abuse. She sponsors workshops with high-risk teenage boys, where she teaches them some parenting skills that will be useful to them after they get married and become fathers. Studies show that these workshops are very effective, and that when these boys grow up, their children get abused much less often then those of equally high-risk boys who didn’t attend the class.
A skeptic pipes up: these boys had to walk to the reformer’s workshop. This very slightly jostled their testicles, which changed the distribution of sperm, which means there’s no way that the exact same spermatozoon fertilized their wives’ eggs as would have fertilized them if they’d never been to the workshop. Therefore, the workshop didn’t prevent abuse in any particular child who would have otherwise been abused. It just caused a different crop of children to be born and not abused.
I think this skeptic is exactly right that sperm production is so stochastic that there’s no way their children had exactly the same genes after the workshop as in the counterfactual world where they didn’t attend. Still, this is an insane way to think about things, right? You just say that the workshop prevented child abuse.
---
I think the strongest objection to selection would come from someone who is anti-abortion. If they think life begins at conception, then actual harm is done to a frozen embryo if it is not selected (and so probably eliminated).
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term. As in Situation 2, usually the doctor chooses the most robust looking one that they have a good feeling about, and throws away the others. [An Alabama court made this argument on anti-abortion grounds recently](https://apnews.com/article/alabama-frozen-embryos-ruling-ivf-pause-3ea72dd4494cad3f65c57e751e4c5c3b). But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse.
And if the anti-abortionist doesn’t have much of a case here, pro-choice people have even less of a case. This is a non-injury to something they don’t even acknowledge as having rights anyway. It maps to cases where everyone agrees a good thing has been done, like asking pregnant women not to drink, or teaching high-risk men parenting skills. We call these “preventing fetal alcohol syndrome” and “preventing child abuse”, and it’s equally fair to call polygenic selection “preventing schizophrenia”. | Scott Alexander | 141267301 | Who Does Polygenic Selection Help? | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
*[Original posts: [Contra The Atlantic On Polyamory (subscriber only)](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-atlantic-on-polyamory), [You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate)]*
**1:** Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics
**2:** Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry
**3:** Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes
**4:** Comments On Children
**5:** Other Comments
## 1: Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics
**Micah Zolu [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49013226):**
> I feel like a simpler rebuttal to such an article would be statistics comparing relationship happiness/satisfaction in polyamorous people and monogamous people. Does no such comparison exist which is why one must resort to reviewing n-of-1 studies or raising concerns about people deriving generalizations from a handful of n-of-1 studies?
I don’t know of any good published journal articles on this topic. I know of two informal surveys: Aella’s and mine.
Aella’s survey [includes data from](https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships) 430,000 people! The average social class is somewhere between lower-middle and middle, so this isn’t just capturing elites, and should be able to address concerns that polyamory only works as a “luxury belief”.
You can read a list of all her findings [here](https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships). In all questions, monogamous people answer about their partner, and polyamorous people answer about their primary or longest-term partner. The ones that I found most interesting were these:
In general, polyamorous people were as happy with and committed to their relationship as monogamous people, and people “in the middle” were less happy than either. Aella thinks (and I agree) that this means that people who are genuinely committed to one relationship style or the other will do better than people who are “trying to open up the relationship” as a last-ditch move, or conflicted, or implementing a messy compromise between partners with different values.
Here are some other graphs that focus on relationship length:
The relationship length graph here at the bottom seems to slightly contradict the one above showing similar length; I think this is partly because there aren’t enough 45-55 year olds in the sample to make a difference in the aggregated data, and partly because I think the bottom graph combines “slightly poly” and “very poly” into a single “poly” category, and we already saw that slightly poly people do badly.
To a first approximation, poly people are equally happy with and committed to their partner as monogamous people, regardless of relationship length (though remember that this selects for relationships that are still going on), and they get married at *about* the same frequency.
However, they only have about half as many children.
This broadly matches the results of the 2017 SSC survey (I’m using 2017 because it had the most questions on sex and relationships). Mono and poly people had equal self-rated life satisfaction, but poly people had higher romantic satisfaction (6 vs. 6.6). Poly people were slightly less likely to currently be in a primary relationship that had lasted more than five years (34% vs. 39%), but this might be because they were slightly younger (31 vs. 33). Respondents were mostly young and childless, but poly people were only half as likely to have children as mono people (15% vs. 27%).
I think a fair summary of these results is “poly and mono relationships are about equally good, except that poly people have slightly higher romantic satisfaction and mono people are much more likely to have children; being wishy-washy in the middle is worse than either”.
**Hamish Todd ([blog](https://hamishtodd1.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49043042):**
> I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses.
>
> I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was \*awful\* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions.
>
> To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner).
>
> I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery.
>
> With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there.
>
> I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good.
Sounds like a testable claim!
I decided to operationalize this as "on the SSC survey, polyamorous men would have a higher correlation between self-rated social status and self-rated romantic satisfaction than monogamous men".
Among monogamous men (n=5268), the correlation was 0.323
Among polyamorous men (n=555), the correlation was 0.311
I'm eyeballing this as not a significant difference, and in either case it's in favor of poly.
**drosophilist [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49030210):**
> On average, straight men and straight women differ in their sexual/romantic preferences. For obvious evolutionary reasons, men's sexuality is optimized for variety/novelty/as many partners as possible, while women's sexuality is optimized for emotional attachment/find the best man you can and get him to stick around and help care for your babies. (Obvious disclaimer: I'm talking about trends and averages, not every man/not every woman, blah blah blah.)
>
> For this reason, I'm worried that a widespread embrace of polyamory/open relationships would be a disaster for women. Sure, you'll say that polyamory is all consensual and based on negotiated agreements, so what's the problem? But it's not so simple, and people who are emotionally entangled find it hard to make logical choices, and people are good at lying to themselves. "I can totally accept polyamory as the price of holding onto the man I love! [six months later] I'm so jealous and miserable and I keep hiding in the bathroom so he won't see me crying, but all open-minded people do polyamory nowadays, I can't let this get to me, I'm with the man I love, this is totally the right choice... excuse me while I get another box of tissues..."
>
> If polyamory catches on in society at large, we'll see, at minimum a lot of tearful letters to advice columns from women saying things like, "Dear Abby, my husband wants to open our marriage, I really hate the idea of him being with another woman but I don't want to be an old-fashioned prude, plus I'm afraid he'll leave me unless I agree, but the thought makes me so unhappy, what should I do?"
In [the canonical poly survey](https://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2016/1/08/polyamory-numbers), women were over-represented in polyamory; about 35% of poly people were men and 49% women (the remainder either didn’t answer or were nonbinary or something).
[Commenters agreed with this](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49054754), and said their experience was that polyamory was mostly female-driven. This is my story too; I became poly because the woman I wanted to date at the time was.
Why should this be, since men traditionally prefer sexual variety more than women do? I think one thing a lot of commenters are missing is that - despite people’s salacious dreams of what it must be like - polyamory usually focuses on the emotional aspect of relationships rather than the sexual. If someone wants to sleep with a bunch of people, they can just be a normal casual-sex-haver or swinger or something. Poly emphasizes the part where you have multiple *relationships*. This is more of a female fantasy than a male one, hence the female predominance.
There were a lot of you who were pretty sure that polyamory had to be bad in some way under some conditions. I challenge you to operationalize this in a way that we can test on future (or existing) surveys, eg “Poly people in the bottom quintile of status will report lower relationship satisfaction” or “Poly marriages among people without a college degree are more likely to end in divorce than monogamous ones.”
## 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry
**Some Guy ([blog](https://extelligence.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49021878):**
> I had one of those childhoods that was so terrible that people find it fascinating but this seems just awful for kids. Again, I’m probably bias because my parents have racked up close to ten marriages between them and I grew up knowing that their first and most heartfelt loyalty was never to me. There would be my brothers and sisters, whichever of my parents we were with, and just some random person they’d decided they loved more than us. And that person definitely made their resentment of us known and usually made whichever of my parents was there perform some sort of loyalty test. Most other people I know in this situation have some kind of similar experience even if the examples are less dramatic and more open to being interpreted as over-sensitivity. Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit. That might not matter as much when there are resources to go around for everyone, but when you’re poor it matters a lot because there isn’t that much to go around and one year your step-mom might want to ritually humiliate you and your siblings by giving you socks at Christmas while her children open elaborate gifts.
>
> Again, personal experience, blah blah blah. But you have to acknowledge that the pathways for this kind of thing open up just because you’ve expanded the numbers of players in the game and unaligned their motivations.
I take the opposite lesson that Some Guy does from this.
Quick digression: in medical studies, lots of people don’t take the experimental drug the way they’re supposed to. Maybe they get side effects and stop, or they screw up the dosing. There are two statistical ways of dealing with this, called “per-protocol” and “intention-to-treat”. In per-protocol analysis, only the people who took the drug correctly get counted. In intention-to-treat analysis, everyone who was assigned to the experimental group gets counted, even if they didn’t take the drug.
So, suppose that you have some drug which always cures a disease when you take it correctly, but it’s incredibly complicated to get right, and has lots of side effects and almost nobody ever makes it to the end of a course. In per-protocol, the drug looks great; in intention-to-treat, it looks useless.
Which is the better analysis strategy? It depends on what you’re using the number for. If you’re a patient, and you’re confident that you are smart and determined and can use it correctly, and you want to know your chances, use per-protocol. If you’re a social engineer, and you want to know how many cases of the disease you’ll cure by promoting the drug in the general population, use intention-to-treat.
I find this a useful lens to apply to social problems. For example, G.K. Chesterton famously said that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” Supposing he’s right, maybe Christianity, when followed per-protocol, has a strong success rate in curing sin. But it looks much worse under intention-to-treat. If you assign people to the “Christianity” group - maybe by raising them in a Christian society where you tell everyone to be Christian, and where everyone goes to church on Sundays - then most people don’t follow the protocol, and they don’t become any less sinful.
Some Guy is talking about people assigned to the monogamy group. They were raised in a society that told them to be monogamous. They agreed to be monogamous. They probably had lovely weddings where they swore to be monogamous until death do them part. But it doesn’t sound like they were able to follow the protocol. Monogamy followed per protocol may have many good effects. But by intention-to-treat, monogamy looks pretty mediocre.
(nobody in this story was assigned to the polyamory group, and nothing in it speaks at all to the success or failure thereof)
Another way to think of this is as different failure modes:
The question isn’t whether the success mode of mono is worse than the failure mode of mono. It’s whether moving the marginal couple from mono to poly or vice versa makes success more vs. less likely.
I’m not sure what the answer is there. If you’re very optimistic, you could imagine that the people in the story above, instead of divorcing to be with another partner, could have stayed married, stayed with their children, and had another partner on the side. I’m not that optimistic. The people described don’t seem like they would be very good at any form of relationship. If you tell them to be monogamous, they will cheat. If you tell them they can have as many relationships as they want as long as they do so ethically and honestly, then they’ll do it unethically and dishonestly.
But occasionally, I do meet some people who I feel would be better served by polyamory. Here’s a conversation I sometimes imagine having with certain friends and/or patients (this is partly stitched together from a few real conversations with different people, and partly imaginary):
> ME: So, you’re having a messy divorce.
>
> THEM: Yeah.
>
> ME: Because you cheated on your fourth husband.
>
> THEM: Yeah.
>
> ME: And now you’re dating a new guy. Are you worried that this might also end with you cheating on him?
>
> THEM: No.
>
> ME: Remember how we talked about the secret ancient rationalist technique of thinking about an answer for five seconds before you give it? I want you to try that now. Are you worried that this new relationship will end with you cheating on your partner?
>
> THEM: . . . . . yes.
>
> ME: Okay. Why do you think that is?
>
> THEM: I guess I’m just a bad person!
>
> ME: Can you be more specific?
>
> THEM: I guess I’m just really impulsive, and sometimes I see someone and can’t hold myself back! I’m too flighty and horny to ever be happy staying with the same guy for too long.
>
> ME: Okay. Can you think of ways that you could potentially address that in your next relationship?
>
> THEM: No, I’ve already tried therapy, and I’m too extraverted to be happy never going to any places where I could meet new men. I don’t know what else to try! I guess I’ll just never be able to be in a relationship without destroying it.
>
> ME: How would you feel about talking to this new guy you’re dating and telling him all this? Maybe he would be willing to agree to some kind of open relationship, so that if you felt something like this again, you could have a safe outlet that wouldn’t destroy the relationship.
>
> THEM: No that would be unethical.
I’ve also met some people in the same situation as the “them” above who did switch to open relationships and it did seem to let them have a stable life / marriage / family in a way that they weren’t able to do before.
I don’t think this is right for everyone, but the people who need it, need it.
And here’s the kind of thing I see in relationship advice forums:
> I used to hate when my wife went out to parties or conferences because I always worried she was meeting other men. I told her she couldn’t leave the house unless she texted me exactly where she was going and explained why it was necessary, and it made her mad, but she eventually agreed.
>
> But she still talks on the phone to this one guy she’s been friends with since grade school. They’ve never had sex or anything, and he’s married to someone else, but they chat on the phone a couple of times a week and I always hear her laughing. I think it counts as an emotional affair and I told her that if she didn’t cut off all contact right away, I was going to end the marriage. Now she’s all mad at me. What should I do?
This just seems like a fundamentally unhealthy outlook on relationships and life. People with better emotional skills can figure out some middle ground where they still agree not to have “emotional affairs” or whatever but don’t freak out every time their partner has contact with another human, but seeing the version where this goes bad has kind of radicalized me. I think there’s something really attractive about being poly even if you never get around to having any other relationships, just so you don’t have to constantly be getting angry at your partner for having normal human desires.
**TGGP [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49022568):**
> The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection.
I’m nervous about cultural selection arguments because they seem to justify anything, and to rapidly switch what they justify. Three thousand years ago, a cultural selectionist could have said that most societies in the world were polygynous, so we should avoid monogamy. A hundred years ago, they could have said that most societies in the world were monarchies, so we should avoid democracy.
The problem is that nobody ever deploys cultural selection arguments against a failed trend that everyone hates. Nobody ever says “throughout history, most societies haven’t made people marry rocks, so we shouldn’t force people to marry rocks now”. Nobody wants to marry rocks now, so nobody needs to argue against it! Cultural selection arguments only get deployed against things that were once unpopular, but are in the process of becoming more popular - ie alleles that are currently being selected for!
This isn’t *necessarily* hypocritical. You could say that certain institutions are spreading for good reasons, and others are spreading for bad ones (and TGGP links my [Competing Selectors](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/07/addendum-to-enormous-nutshell-competing-selectors/) post which makes exactly this point). But now you’re not really making a cultural selection argument, you’re making an “I did some armchair reasoning and decided this was bad” argument.
I think TGGP would answer that it doesn’t require any selective pressure to explain why people would want to have more romantic partners, since this is inherently fun for everyone. But first of all, no it isn’t - you can read the responses to this thread to see how viscerally unhappy some people are about this. And second of all, however fun it is now, it was probably equally fun a hundred years ago, so we still need an explanation for why it’s happening now and not earlier.
Another possible argument is that polyamory isn’t spreading by monogamous cultures dying out and being replaced by polyamorous ones. It’s spreading by word of mouth. But this is also how almost every cultural trend spreads. Monogamy didn’t spread to Scandinavia because the Vikings died out and the Romans colonized their land, it spread because missionaries converted them to Christianity. If some memoir converts somebody to polyamory, that seems like the closest modern-day equivalent.
I don’t really know how to rescue cultural selection arguments from these kinds of considerations.
**Ascend [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49021135):**
> Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger.
>
> 1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't *almost* follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a monogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence.
Splitting this up into two paragraphs so I can answer one at a time.
The traditional response is to ask: Do you think it’s bad for someone to have a second child? Surely if they really love their first child, one should be enough for them! More than one friend? In fact, why do they need to have a friend at all? Shouldn’t their partner be enough?
I think you can think of this in one of two ways. One is to imagine the original objection in the mouth of a Dickens villain: “We can’t invite other people to our Christmas party! They would consume our limited supply of Christmas cheer, and then there wouldn’t be enough left for us!” Obviously at the end of the Dickens book, the character discovers that cheer isn’t a limited resource, and multiplies rather than divides when shared with others. [Some people genuinely think this way](https://www.polyphilia.blog/home/compersion).
This isn’t really how things work for me. I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly.
> 2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates \*competition\* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist!
Re: 2 - As I mentioned above, polyamory seems more about the romance angle than the sex angle.
One interesting demonstration of this is how many asexual people are poly. In the 2017 SSC survey (the same one cited above), about 5% of polyamorous people described themselves as asexual (having no sex drive) compared to about 3% of monogamous people. These people are probably in relationships for the emotional benefits.
I also checked sex drive among people who were in monogamous relationships, stable polycules, and open relationships (this is the 2019 SSC survey, which went into more depth on sex and romance). There were no significant differences in sex drive among these three categories.
**Piotr Pachota ([blog](https://transhumanista.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49014935):**
> Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed.
>
> As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship.
>
> Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window.
>
> Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then.
Yeah, one pattern I see pretty often goes something like:
* Weird people, who maybe weren’t able to cope with normal institutions, find some weird new thing that works for them, okay, cool, whatever.
* Journalists pick up on it, and write articles on how it’s new and quirky and unique, and how the people who do it are realer and more self-actualized and more human than the boring people who don’t.
* A bunch of people who don’t enjoy the thing and aren’t good at it do it because it’s trendy, and they are terrified of becoming obsolete as human beings unless they follow all the latest trends.
* A bunch of people who reflexively hate journalists pooh-poohing them for not being deviant enough loudly announce that they hate the new thing (which unfortunately plays into the journos’ hands - [it’s bad on purpose to make you click](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-bad-on-purpose-to-make-you-click))
* Constant battles between the trendy people and the performative haters.
My position is that I feel sympathy for everyone involved except the journalists.
**Chris Nathan ([blog](https://chrisnathan.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49043082):**
> [Polyamory is] particularly harsh because the culture pathologizes ordinary human responses (anxiety, jealousy, loneliness) as if they're deviant. This seems to drive underground the kind of useful conflict - in which issues get addressed and incremental improvements made - that are standard operating procedure for high functioning monogamous relationships. I'm sure some people can do polyamory well, but it's not for many, and certainly not for most.
Nobody can indulge the entire human experience, unless they’re very lucky and have no contradictory desires. If you’re monogamous, you have to fight the natural human urge to desire people other than your partner (some people won’t have this urge, but many do). If you’re polyamorous, you have to fight the natural human urge to feel jealous (some people won’t have this urge, but many do). I think a good monogamous community won’t pathologize desire, but will politely and firmly remind you not to surrender to it, and a good polyamorous community will do the same with jealousy. Some people will do better with one set of restraints, and other people with the other.
(It’s actually worse than that, because even monogamous people can’t be so jealous that they get paranoid and restrict their partner’s normal activities, and even poly people can’t have relationships that are incompatible with other relationships they want to keep. Everyone has to restrain their desires at least a little all the time, and wisdom consists of knowing which ones to follow, which ones to restrain, and not freaking out about it).
## 3: Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes
**Yunshook [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49019041):**
> I'm about to jump on a 12 hour shift running conduit, so I apologize if this is a little disorganized. Id intended to write this for next Monday, but it's topical.
>
> I've been thinking about the structures I've observed in polyamorous groups and the challenges that they face. Very little is codified as generally acceptable in the space, though certain pods may have structural rules that work for them. As a whole though, it's a kind of laissez faire dedicated to maximizing sexual access rather than building cohesive groups of reliable people with healthy relational habits. I suspect this focus on sexual access alone is an accident of how political sexual liberation has affected polyamorous culture rather than an inherent evil that is baked into the practice.
>
> In many, (though not all) polyamorous groups I've seen, kids are often an afterthought who are brought up by single mom's who often find themselves as satellites to several disparate polyamorous groups. The nature of easily picking up a new flame and dropping old ones makes it easy to pick up attractive but difficult people, and get rid of them (and their kids) when they become too inconvenient or unreasonable. Given the inherent complexity of maintaining multiple relationships, I see it a lot. 2 people have 1 relationship to manage, 3 have 3, 4 have 6, 5 have 10... And so on. So many simplify to a wheel and spoke type of relationship structure to simplify. There may be a primary power couple who are tied together financially and they sleep with other people who are easily discarded and have no financial obligations to them. Children produced in this manner are similarly easy to discard, and grow up in difficult circumstances. Some pods have around 4 or 5 people who are part of the primary group and financial obligations are slightly more rigid, though I have often seen an ease of discarding in this structure as well. In these groups I've seen that the kids sometimes stay with the main pod while the satellite parent is ejected. This is marginally better, but still not ideal.
>
> Raising healthy children who have stable family backgrounds could be a primary focus within polyamorous culture in the US if expectations were a little more codified and there were fewer individuals flying the polyamorous flag for hedonic sexual pursuits alone. Kids need a fair amount of support, stability, and need to have connections to people of all ages to grow up as responsible, strong minded people. The small village mentality that could exist in polyamorous groups could reduce the burdens most parents experience in child rearing, because there can be a number of kids growing up together with a number of parents to provide support. But again the lack of codified expectations in that space means that relational churn is prevalent.
>
> I'd be interested to see what effective polyamorous marriage would look like as a legal institution, as it could provide satellites who have kids more recourse. However, it still wouldn't solve the cultural issue of commitment to relationships, which is increasingly rare in monogamous couples as well. How to address that and make people just behave as good people in relationships can't really be written into law. I suspect there may be something about the templates of life we learn from the dominant stories we consume, but that's a whole other tangent.
>
> I think the major point here is that it isn't polyamory so much as the dominant strain of polyamory that is so distasteful. Since it looks like it's around to stay, I'd like to see it hashed out to be healthier and geared towards making good people.
**Also Yunshook:**
> I've seen a lot of adoption of polyamory among disabled and those on food stamps where I live. It looks to be a strategy to find resources as a group, as well as to maximize sexual access for those who are not traditionally desirable. As an outsider, I have observed a lot of toxic behaviors in these groups, but it seems to be far more common than one would expect. I'd love to see the numbers, but my intuition says that this amount of buy in doesn't go away quickly. It's possible that there aren't many people who are actually interested in healthy polyamory outside of a few well off, responsible individuals such as Scott. Possibly most people just want casual sex on the side of their committed relationships. If that is the case, I'd prefer a culture of swingers in already committed relationships to a culture of satellite relations who have no recourse. At least swinger couples and quads each have two parents who are financially responsible for any kids that come around because of one of their dalliances.
**Matt Arnold [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49024369):**
> Reducing one's romantic relationships to political statements is a real thing. I spent time for a few years in a polyamory group which turned into a Relationship Anarchy group. They redefined "Polyamory" to mean every bad thing that anyone labeling themselves polyamorous had ever done to them. Some of them eventually did that to the term "Relationship Anarchist" too, and switched to "Political Relater". I wrote more about this here:
>
> <https://nemorathwald.dreamwidth.org/400711.html>
>
> In retrospect, I might say to my past self "you don't dislike Political Relaters, you dislike those who attend meetups about things."
As you can probably predict, that link is a doozy.
I think the general form of “you don’t have polyamory, you hate people who write books” is “you hate the kind of people the link describes”. I promise that there are other polyamorous people who are normalish people with normalish politics who have normalish relationships that just happen to be with more than one person at a time.
**Concerned Citizen ([blog](https://asecondconcernedcitizen.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49038541):**
> All of the happy polycules I have encountered have a lot of trans or autistic people. Just going by personal observation I don't think it works so well with neurotypicals, if you can call solomonesque narcissism neurotypical.
The happiest polycules I know are asexual people. The second happiest are people who have sex so frequently and compulsively that it’s impossible for them to be angry with their partner for sleeping around because not-sleeping-around seems as impossible to them as falling upward. Autistic is third (and sometimes overlaps with the previous two categories). Trans people in polycules tend to go either very well or *very very* badly, no in-between.
**Radar [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49044923):**
> The books I've seen on polyamory are self-help books not memoirs and in that they seem to be sincere attempts at helping people think through what kinds of resources and capacities a person might need to have on board to pull it off successfully. Those books make it seem like a second full-time job to pull it off responsibly, and not a lot of people have that kind of time or capacity. For the people that do, or who pull it off well regardless, there's nothing to hate it seems to me.
>
> I do wonder if there are two kinds of people doing polyamory (just to oversimplify for a minute) -- those who are doing it to try and solve problems in their monogamous relationships and those who are proactively setting out to create polyamory from the start because that's what they want.
>
> As a therapist (and from talking to colleagues) many of our client bases tend to select I think for the first kind, and that does give us a biased view because in that context, polyamory looks like people putting a lot of energy into new and exciting romantic and sexual liaisons while they're having trouble communicating and being emotionally present for their primary relationship. And for a while that may bring a kind of breath of fresh air back into the primary relationship, but it also brings a ton more emotional and psychological complexity which the primary relationship is not equipped to manage. I've seen multiple situations, with and without kids, where polyamory was a transitional step to divorce (and of course that's not an indictment of polyamory itself).
>
> Therapists also see situations where even if the parents manage polyamory well between them, it's very time and energy intensive at a time developmentally when their small kids need a lot of care. Young kids can have a hard time getting enough care anyway with two working parents in late-stage American capitalism with all its demands outside of the family. So seeing the parents' spare going to nurturing second and third romantic interests when the emotional needs of the kids (or the grownups for each other or themselves individually) are not adequately met seems like not a helpful thing.
>
> Now of course polyamory in that frame can join all the other things that people choose or have to put energy into -- substance use, very involved hobbies, workaholism, economic precarity, media consumption, emotional avoidance, etc.
>
> On the other side, the nuclear family in our current culture is pretty widely insufficient for parents and children. As well that narcissistic self-gratification is not an adequate motivation to sustain a marriage. So to the extent that polyamory might offer more social connectivity for people and to the extent people in it create a larger sense of purpose for it than just self-gratification, then maybe it's a good alternative social structure, including maybe for raising kids.
>
> My bias is that many of my data points make it look like people engaging in emotional avoidance by finding another arena in which they can pursue self-gratification. I'd be interested to hear from people happily in polyamorous situations and who have more data points any reflections about whether they see these two kinds of people doing polyamory and any guesses about what the ratios are (and really anything else they might want to say).
**CJW [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49047955):**
> There seem to be a couple distinct strands of polyamory I've noticed, one has a massive PR problem and the other doesn't want PR at all.
>
> On one hand you have these arrangements that sound like some nightmarish bubbling ooze emerging through several sedimentary layers of Tumblr and Asperger's. "Queer catgirl polycule" kind of stuff that you'll see late-transitioning transwomen post about when they've basically abandoned any idea that they can find a home in normieville. Living arrangements that get broadcast as shock journalism in the Daily Mail, seemingly tailor made for normies to look down on the whole thing. A continuation of the Jerry Springer spectacle, often completely fabricated by the participants, but a spectacle that nevertheless convinced me at a very young age that involving any 3rd person in a relationship would probably just get a chair thrown at your head.
>
> On the other hand, there are various flavors of "swingers", with a surprising amount coming from the ex-military and current law enforcement community, who have semi-stable ongoing activities with another couple. They don't want normies knowing about any of it, and treat it like a secret club. So the publicly successful and well-adjusted members of the community who have secret sexual/romantic lives aren't talking about them, and as a result that leaves only the eccentric outsiders as the "face" of the lifestyle, such as it is.
>
> I have never had an inclination towards any of this, the amount of potential drama just seems miserably high, and I've been conditioned to see it as either low-status or psychologically damaging to a person's self-conception of their social identity ("if you go too far, you'll never get back to where the rest of them are".) I think that a society which encourages people to view polyamory negatively is probably doing most people a favor, as most people will find these arrangements dangerous and unrewarding and are better off being steered towards traditional monogamy. If you decide you really want to do it later in life, you'll find the pineapple people or an adjacent alt-lifestyle group eventually, and you know where California is if you want to go further than that. I don't hate polyamorous people, but I do find them weird, and it's probably for the best if most people feel the same.
**Justin [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49068981):**
> As someone who has never read a book on polyamory but knows several people who have been or are in those relationships, they are near universally unhappy or one partner is dissatisfied with the relationship. In all these cases, the major friction in these relationships is coming from the structure of the relationship.
>
> I know it is not for me, but I see a lot of my friends who are trying to "have it all" so to speak and very reluctant to confront the problems coming from their arrangements.
**Jaybird [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49094684):**
> In my (limited) experience, there are two kinds of polyamorous people:
>
> 1) Polyamorous 20-somethings. These guys are insufferable. They jump back and forth between "You shouldn't be so judgmental" and "Polyamory is the only ethical way to hold relationships". "You shouldn't snark at people who are different than you" and "The human heart is large enough to hold more than one person!" "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE JOYS OF NRE!!!" Toxic people yell "I'm polyamorous!" and, suddenly, the topic shifts away from the toxicity to defenses of Polyamory Theory. Ryan cheats on Chris and the community joins together to tell Chris to be more open-minded and less selfish.
>
> 2) Polyamorous 40-somethings. These guys are pretty okay. There's a lot less jumping back and forth. It's not really a "polycule" as much as a "stable triad/quadrad". NRE? Ha! I'd have to leave the hosue. Oh, man. I haven't thought about Ryan for years. I heard they moved to Wisconsin. I think Jamie is still Facebook acquaintances... I'll ask next time we get coffee. You know what? I won't. I don't care. I'm glad they're no longer here.
>
> The problem is that the only way to get a 40-something polyamorist is to take a 20-something polyamorist and wait a couple of decades.
I’m fascinated by how many people think there are two types of poly people, but disagree on what those types are.
**Moon Moth [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49151633):**
> The distribution of personality types in "poly" has changed over the years. Like with tech, in the beginning there were a bunch of early adopters, figuring out how to implement feminist theory in a way that let them have lots of sex, and they tended to be fairly good about self-awareness and boundaries and the like. I expect that Scott's circle is a younger generation of people like this. But there were also people who discovered the poly community and thought "if I say the right words, I get to have fun, and if I say these other words, I can hurt people and get them to think it's their own fault". And eventually there were people who thought "if I say the words other people say, and do the things other people do, I can fit in with the cool kids". (Similar to what happened with wokism.)
…or maybe they’re the same two types, just described in different ways? I don’t know.
**N W [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49509465):**
> I'm a tall, good looking guy. I was cool and in popular groups. I'm the chad. The cool and good looking guys slept around. The less good looking guys tried but did poorly. The top dogs were shamed by many of the top girls for being 'players', but they would still get involved with us.
>
> Poly came around and you could tell people about it and most would think it was cool, but few would challenge the idea because... well we were cool and they weren't. You can convince uncool people of many things by being cool and good looking.
>
> Cool people never said they were poly back in the day. But we definitely acted poly. Then some more nerdy guys started to say they were poly. This let more moderately attractive people have greater sex choices, something only good looking guys previously had.
>
> I've had multiple girls. Many times. It's not hard to do but it's a headache. I got older and decided on one girl. If you want kids, one long-term partner focused on your children is better (time is resource constrained).
>
> For all the poly people out there, Chads are so much better socially. We get more practice --- the amount of gentle touch to maneuver numerous relationships is large. We're better than you at it. Are we better because of skill or because people are nicer to us? It's probably a bit of both. Most poly people seem pretty bad juggling things and ruin their lives. You get more slack when you're high status or hot. If you aren't high status or hot you'll struggle.
>
> Even with all those skills and numerous opportunities most of the Chad guys I know (85-90%) pick one girl eventually, because it's tedious! You will become more bored of sex (not entirely but a lot) and you'll want other things than sex optionality as you age.
>
> Hot guys have sex optionality in monogamous relationships. We can cheat faster than you stumble getting her number. But we overwhelming don't. It's a tremendous waste of time. This 'support relationship' or whatever nonsexual relationship you might also think about having is a waste of time.
>
> I don't know how else to write this. I feel like my writing skills are sorely lacking compared to the more bookish people on this website. As a man who's lived the poly life poly people romance. It's not worth it. It's rationalized horniness.
>
> IF you plan to never have children, poly is fantastic. The Chads I know that didn't pick one girl are either dead or taking drugs and will likely remain bachelors
I think this backs up my claim that poly is mostly not people trying to have lots of sex, it’s people trying to have lots of relationships.
## 4: Comments On Children
**Some Guy [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49102597):**
> I would just refer back to the statistics on the likelihood of abuse when an adult other than a parent is in the home. Why would those be different in a polyamorous situation? That’s my general system level proof of which one of these is likely better for children at the social level of analysis. Also the statistics about the general well-being of children with two parents in the home. That is very clearly more stable, you probably know those statistics better than I do, and while of course not perfect it does seem very hard to argue that if that wasn’t the case for more people (which we know is possible because it was the case for virtually everyone not that long ago) general welfare would be much better.
Slight nitpick that in most poly families all partners would consider themselves parents. But stepparents also consider themselves parents, and the statistics Some Guy cites show bad outcomes for stepparents, so I don’t think this is a good counterargument. I tried to respond [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49686316), but overall I agree that this is an important point.
**Anomie [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49085791):**
> Human children are probably the most demanding children to care for on Earth. Traditionally, mothers had a lot of help from their extended family and friends in raising their children, but that's not really possible under the current status quo of monogamous nuclear families. If we could just normalize setups that made this kind of collaborative childcare practical, maybe that could encourage people to have more children. ...Of course, there's still the issue of affordability, and we still have a problem of people failing to form relationships in the first place. \*sigh\* I really doubt things are ever going to improve at this point.
**Brendan [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49220158):**
> You could imagine further scenarios where the two original parents stay together in a loving relationship prioritizing the children, the only difference being that the parents don't restrict eachother from having additional romantic/sexual involvement with other people. This could have positive or negative effects on the children, but those effects would be a result of the way the parents behave and prioritize, regardless of whether they place default restrictions on eachothers romantic/sexual interests.
>
> A parent prioritizing a (additional) romantic relationship over their children is no more harmful than a parent prioritizing their friends over their children. The issue is the way they're prioritizing. When I defend polyamory I'm not defending loosening your familial bonds.
## 5: Other Comments
**Person Humansly [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49192666):**
> I think the reason most people are uncomfortable with polyamory is that it subverts the dearly-held mythology of all-conquering “true love” between soulmates that pervaded western culture for a few centuries until the last decade or-so. Years ago, Jason Pargin (of [Cracked.com](http://cracked.com), back when it was still relevant) said that outsiders looking back at our culture would see romantic love as our religion, and I think he was right.
I think most poly people would disagree with this perspective. I think they would say you can love truly, it’s just possible to do with many people at once. Or even if you only have one true love, you can at least have a couple of other enjoyable and beneficial relationships on the side.
This is also what made me angry about [the recent Sam Kriss piece](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/manifesto-of-the-armed-front-of-love), where he just assumed as a matter of course that you could use “polyamorous” synonymously with “people who don’t *really* love each other”.
I used to be confused by the idea of “stereotypes are bad”. Like, we’re supposed to be angry when someone says “women are bad at math”. But if this means “on average, women are worse at math than men”, it’s true, and if it means “no woman has ever been good at math”, this is an insane statement that I’m not sure anyone has ever believed. So what’s the stereotype which is both bad and a real thing people say?
The answer is: it’s when people are too casual with their beliefs to even think in these terms. I think Sam Kriss, if we asked him whether poly people are less likely to be in love than mono people, wouldn’t be entirely sure. If we asked him whether they’re incapable of love, he would agree that’s insane. He just wrote an article that kind of vaguely assumed this was true as background information.
> For the first decades of my life, we were so immersed in it that it didn’t occur to us that it was strange compared to other times and cultures to believe in and focus on finding your “true love,” mutually “falling in love” with a soulmate for an eternally-passionate, all-satisfying, exclusive marriage that transcends and conquers all problems. Most of our popular stories reinforced these myths, from Disney’s “Happily Ever After” twists on ancient fairy tales that originally had dark endings, to hero’s journey stories that required the crucial step of “getting the girl,” to more-disturbing stories like Punch Drunk Love. It was so pervasive that it was shoehorned into the ending of Fight Club, where we barely even noticed that it didn't make much sense.
>
> As these myths have been breaking down in recent years, movies and TV shows have started moving away from them, but to the many people who still hold these romantic myths as dearly as a religion, hearing about people who don't share them can be as frustrating as hearing about the "new atheists" was to fundamentalist Christians in the early aughts.
I realize that maybe this commenter was trying to say that deflating love was a good thing, because our culture over-rates it. I’m not sure. I used to have a position something like “love is less important than having the basic stability/responsibility to raise children together”. Now that I have children, I’m starting to think that it’s pretty rare to have so much stability and responsibility that you can stay with someone through all of the stress and craziness of child-rearing using virtue and willpower alone. You also have to love them enough that it’s fun or at least tolerable to be constantly stressed out *as long as it’s together with them*.
This is part of why I dislike the word “coparent” which is catching on now for the same reasons as “partner”. Yeah, as relationships get more complex it’s sometimes useful to have terms which don’t necessarily imply other terms. But I think it undersells the difficulty of trying to coparent together without something that at least sort of resembles love.
(obviously having kids with someone you love who *isn’t* responsible and stable won’t work either. It’s maybe unfair that you need both love and responsibility, and maybe I’m doing something wrong since billions of people have had kids since the beginning of time and surely they didn’t all have both these things. But I’m not sure that *I* could do it without both.)
**Eremolalos [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49072997):**
> Inviting anyone who would find it entertaining to join me in coming up with the most irritatingly narcissistic book titles they can think of. Such as:
>
> *The Adorable Complexity of Being Me*
>
> *Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive*
**Anonymous Dude [adds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49076663):**
> *Becoming Fully Myself*
>
> *Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem*
>
> *Me/Myself/I: A Journey of Three and One*
>
> *Every Man and Woman is a Star*
>
> *Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey
>
> Neutralizing Poison: The Fourth Level of Self-Healing (the first three being, of course, Curing Light Wounds, Slowing the Venom, and Banishing Blindness, and the sequel being Returning from the Underworld)
>
> The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love*
Hey now, “Every Man And Women Is A Star” is from [The Book of the Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Law), which whatever else you want to say about it definitely isn’t boring hippie therapeutic self-help. But otherwise these are great/awful.
Matthew Carlin [recommends](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49208284) us this [Terrible Self-Help Title Generator](https://bugsby.net/drive/heal.cgi). And Moon Moth points out that there is a book called [A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir](https://www.amazon.com/Woman-First-Deeply-Personal-President/dp/1419733532), but I’m not sure I can give it full credit: it seems to be a fictional memoir by a popular TV character and might be deliberately bad.
**TGGP [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49172948):**
> Polygamous marriage is still not legal in the . . . cultures which appear capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility . . . like the Amish & ultra-orthodox Jews.
Funny story! Polygamy was legal in Judaism during Biblical times (eg King Solomon and his seven hundred wives). The Talmud is vague about the practice, but mostly seems to treat it as undesirable but not forbidden. It only became fully illegal in Judaism around 1000 AD, when Rabbi Gershom ben Judah banned it for all Jews under his authority (approximately all European Jews, but non-European Jews gradually adopted his position too). Rabbi Gershom said his ban would expire at the end of “the thousand”, which has been interpreted variously as the end of the Jewish millennium (1240 AD) or the end of a thousand years (2000 AD).
In either case, the ban is now expired, and the prohibition on polygamy rests on questionable legal footing. Most mainstream rabbis continue to ban it based on “custom”, which can have legal force under Jewish law in certain situations. There’s probably some extremely convoluted set of positions you could take on the law where polygamy would be legal - especially if a Jew isn’t of European descent, or lives outside of Europe.
You can read more about this at [What’s The Truth About The Expiration Date Of Rabbeinu Gershom’s Ban On Polygamy?](https://jewishaction.com/religion/jewish-law/whats-the-truth-about-the-expiration-date-of-rabbeinu-gershoms-ban-on-polygamy/)
## 6: Updates
I didn’t know before looking into the statistics for this post that poly people were that much less likely to have children. I find that disappointing. Probably some of this is self-selection by people who wouldn’t have had children anyway, but it’s still unfortunate.
I was surprised how certain people were that poly relationships were disasters that couldn’t work, compared to how little of a sign there was of that in the data. I like Aella’s explanation that most mono people’s experience of poly people is mono people “experimenting” with “opening up their relationship”, which is a natural danger zone. An alternative is that Aella got a bad sample (but her sample ought to be much more representative than mine), or that poly people lie / misremember / have a hard time answering surveys.
I found Some Guy’s concern about the abuse risk of having an extra person in the house to be thought-provoking and something I hadn’t considered before. I think it won’t apply very often (because poly people have fewer children, and even when they do there’s rarely a third partner in the house). In the cases where it does apply, I’m conflicted. I think of the cases I know, and I’m as close to 100% certain as anyone can be that the third partner isn’t an abuser. But obviously people date abusers all the time thinking that they’re not abusers, and “check if someone is an abuser before inviting them in the house” isn’t a primitive action that people can always get right. I think more about this [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/49102597). | Scott Alexander | 141726468 | Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory | acx |
# Mantic Monday 2/19/24
Manifold has lots of bots. There’s a Silicon League entirely for bots. Lots of bots make lots of money:
Most of these bots are boring. They’re bots programmed to automatically buy some market once the price gets low enough, or to arbitrage basically-identical markets, or do some other technical finance maneuver.
But you could imagine more interesting bots. Ones that forecasts the same way humans forecast. You could imagine a bot based on ChatGPT that asks “What is the probability of a cease-fire in Ukraine this year?” and bets on ChatGPT’s answer.
And by “you could imagine” I mean “there’s now a [Humans Vs. Bots tournament](https://news.manifold.markets/p/human-v-bots-forecasting-tournament) on Manifold with an ℳ250,000 prize”
Let’s see how they’re doing:
All of these bots seem to be making small profits, with GPT in the lead. But what’s this?
The Nermit bot is based on [FutureSearch.ai](https://landing.futuresearch.ai/), a new company trying to build an AI-based forecaster. Based on their own internal calculations, they claim success:
But see foonote 1
How is this[1](#footnote-1) possible?
Some studies of superforecasters converge on the same technique: figure out a base rate for some event, then alter it based on the current situation. For example, if you wanted to know the chance of a cease-fire in Ukraine over the next year, you might start by plotting the distribution of war lengths over the past century, then check how many wars that had lasted at least two years had a cease-fire in the third. Then you might adjust a little bit down for factors like “there haven’t been any promising peace talks yet” and “the two sides seem equally balanced”.
FutureSearch’s AI tries to do something similar. It prompts itself with questions like
1. “What would be a good reference class for this question?”
2. “Okay, now estimate the base rate in that reference class”
3. “What are the most important recent news articles about this topic?”
4. “How do those suggest the probability might be higher or lower than the base rate?”
5. “Putting it all together, what do you think the probability is?”
This doesn’t sound to me like it would work. But FutureSearch says it does. They let me test their AI model. I tried four questions:
> * **Will Nikki Haley win the 2028 presidential election?** Answer: 10%
> * **Will Israel launch airstrikes on Pakistan in the next year?** Answer: 1%
> * **Will an AI be top 3 in Math Olympiad in the next three years?** Answer: 25%
> * **Will Prospera have 10,000 residents on 1/1/2026?** Answer: 35%
All of these seem like plausible answers except the one on Prospera, which I would have placed more like 5%. Here’s what the AI has to say for itself:
And here’s an example of what’s doing inside one of these subpoints (in this case, subpoint one about special economic zones with significant foreign investment):
55% of SEZs with significant investment reached population 10,000 after seven years, so that’s its base rate for this method.
On the one hand, this is very impressive. It knows what Prospera is. It correctly identified the main factor threatening its growth (the ongoing legal case with Honduras). It came up with some really interesting base rates, calculated them, and weighted them for relevance. All of this is great.
But I don’t see it doing what would be the obvious first step for me, which is finding the current population of Prospera and how fast it’s growing. Plausibly this is because there are no news stories about this, and you sort of have to estimate it by following how many apartments are being built there and how much is happening (my guess is current population 400, growing to 1,200 by 2026).
I talked to a FutureSearch representative, who agreed that it dropped the ball on this question, but pointed out that if prompted slightly differently, it gives a better answer:
> * **How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026?** Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000)
This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down).
So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader.
Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen.
And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information.
[FutureSearch](http://futuresearch.ai/) is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email [hello@futuresearch.ai](mailto:hello@futuresearch.ai).
## Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on [The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/30/cryptoai.html). One of them is a prediction market. He writes:
> Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") [back in 2014](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy), and [played around with them extensively](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/02/18/election.html) in the last election as well as [more recently](https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xec367991). But so far prediction markets have not taken off *too much* in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless *a lot* of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc.
>
> One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/) or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet [tens of billions on sports](https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/10/19/2763467/0/en/Sports-Betting-Market-is-set-to-reach-USD-231-2-billion-by-2032-with-a-notable-11-1-growth-rate-CAGR.html), so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or [LK99](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99) that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations *have* failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need *something new* to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: **the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs**.
>
> AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions *in general* may be in the millions. Note that potentially, **you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions**: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to [Augur](https://augur.gitbook.io/help-center/disputing-explained) or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides.
>
> This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions:
>
> * **Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?**
> * **What will happen to the price of stock X (eg. see [Numerai](https://numer.ai/))**
> * **Is this account that is currently messaging me actually Elon Musk?**
> * **Is this work submission on an online task marketplace acceptable?**
> * **Is the dapp at https://examplefinance.network a scam?**
> * **Is** `0x1b54....98c3` actually the address of the "Casinu Inu" ERC20 token?
I imagine a very successful version of this as a search engine for the future. Like, FutureSearch (above) is pretty cool, but why should you trust them? How do you know they’re better than their AI competitors? Better than humans? Instead, imagine a search engine where you can pay 0.01 ETH to ask a question like “Will Prospera have a population of at least 10,000 people by 1/1/2026?” Your money goes to subsidize a prediction market, and within a few seconds (!) several competing forecasting bots will make their prediction. Then the search engine will return a result for you, and in 2026 some moderator AI will check the news and auto-resolve the question.
(this would work even better if you could add some humans in the loop who made money by betting against the forecasting bots on the questions where common sense tells you they’re farthest off - but then you’d have to wait human timescales instead of seconds, and pay human wages instead of peanuts)
And as Vitalik mentions, it doesn’t have to be about the future. It can be about any question you’re not sure about, as long as there’s eventually some way to resolve it.
Does this beat a centralized AI predictor? That depends whether you trust the centralized AI predictor or not! Remember, the biggest advantage of prediction markets isn’t necessarily accuracy, it’s [trust and canonicity](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq).
## Bet On Love
This was a Manifold promotional event for Valentine’s Day, taking the form of a “prediction market dating show” where six contestants competed to win a date with local celebrity Aella. It was *not* what I was expecting.
I’m going to include a video embed in a moment, but fair warning: if you already hate any of rationalists, San Francisco, tech, prediction markets, polyamory, betting, love, reality shows, or Aella, this will definitely make you hate them more.
I’m including it in this post because . . . well, you know how sometimes Christian apologists say that the Gospel writers *must have* been telling the truth, because [they included parts of the story that were embarrassing to them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment) and to their fledgling movement? I’m including this video so future historians will know I must be telling the truth about everything:
Still, the production is incredible and everyone involved is really talented. I was especially impressed by the fake CEO Duncan Horst (whose name is a pseudo-Spoonerism for “drunken host”).
I have to admit, as some kind of journalist-adjacent person who writes a monthly column on prediction markets, plus an early funder, I feel like I should be one of the best-qualified people in the world to understand what Manifold is. I’m not sure I do. They’re a prediction market company . . . that also runs a dating site . . . and has a philanthropy arm that moves millions of dollars to charitable causes . . . and puts on some kind of extremely well-done genre-bending reality show slash off-Broadway musical?
My current understanding of what happened: there’s a group called the “postrationalists” who were vaguely inspired by rationalist writings but also think the emphasis on facts is boring and autistic and we need to focus more on creativity/friendship/woo/intuition/vibes. They have a gathering called [VibeCamp](https://vibe.camp/) where they do artsy stuff. Someone from Manifold went to a theater production by a postrat group called [“The Classics Department”](https://www.classics-department.com/), liked them, and hired them to make a promotional event for Manifold. They are sort of rationalists and prediction market junkies, but also sort of making fun of rationalists and prediction market junkies. Hence this show.
## This Month In The Markets
The big AI excitement this month was around OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video engine. Here’s what forecasters thought would be true of it by end 2025:
You can see many more (including “It was jailbroken and used to make porn: 54%”) [at the link](https://manifold.markets/Bayesian/what-will-be-true-of-openais-sora-m).
And one year ago, I asked Manifold whether we would have a text-to-video AI capable of creating a pretty good full-length motion picture by 2028. Here’s how the release of Sora affected the market:
…it jumped from about 30% to about 40%.
(I don’t know why it went down so much from late 2023 to early 2024.)
Metaculus asks the same question and forecasts that AI will be able to make feature films by 2030:
The dumbest possible way to do this is to ask GPT-4 to write a summary (“write the summary of a plot for a detective mystery story”), then ask it to convert the summary into a 100-point outline, then convert that into 100 minutes of a 100-minute movie, then ask Sora to generate each one-minute block. This wouldn’t work as written now (I don’t think Sora can do sound, it wouldn’t keep actors and style consistent unless you forced it), but it seems like something that requires incremental improvement rather than a grand breakthrough.
Some politics topics [courtesy of Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/markets?_c=politics). Look at those amounts of money!
See [here](https://eurasianet.org/armenian-pm-says-azerbaijan-gearing-up-for-full-scale-war) for more information.
This one will only be interesting for other people interested in California’s water situation. Snowpack is a major determinant of how much water eventually makes it into reservoirs for the year and whether we get nagged about drought or not. [Here’s median and past years for context](https://nwcc-apps.sc.egov.usda.gov/awdb/basin-plots/Proj/WTEQ/assocHUCca3/state_of_california.html), looks like this year is a bit low.
## Short Links
**1:** Vox: [How A Ragtag Group Of Friends Became The Best At Forecasting World Events](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock). Profile of Samotsvety, the world’s leading forecasting team.
**2:** TIME: [Looking For Love? Let The Market Decide](https://time.com/6694798/manifold-love-dating-markets/). Profile of Manifold.love
**3:** Speaking of which, [Manifold.love announces their new structure](https://news.manifold.markets/p/above-the-fold-do-you-want-a-guaranteed); normal use is free, but for $100 they’ll get you a “guaranteed three dates” by subsidizing a prediction market on who you should go on dates with (if you don’t go on dates with anyone, they’ll refund you the $100).
**4:** A DAO (a type of crypto organization) [claims to be implementing futarchy](https://docs.themetadao.org/resources/frequently-asked-questions). It’s less clear what they’re implementing futarchy to do, but I think it’s some kind of trading in Solana (a cryptocurrency).
**5:** Swift Centre [has a forecasting piece on the US elections](https://www.swiftcentre.org/biden-trump-rematch-chances/); spiciest claim is that “replacing Biden won’t help the Democrats”. I notice that this isn’t *exactly* what the question says - it says the Democrats’ chances are better if Biden is the candidate on Election Day than if he isn’t. But this could be because the Democrats are more likely to replace Biden in a world where things aren’t going their way. I don’t know if this is because they simplified the question in their article, or if this is actually a (slight) mistake.
**6:** Base Rate Times [has a list](https://twitter.com/base_rate_times/status/1748550930671489101) of the Twitter accounts of ~40 superforecasters and other great predictors.
**7:** The [INFER](https://www.infer-pub.com/) forecasting platform [is now being led by RAND](https://www.infer-pub.com/the-pub/rand-program-update), suggesting that important people affiliated with the government are starting to take more interest.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
From FutureSearch:
> On our accuracy chart, we should emphasize that these are very preliminary results, and the methodology has two important caveats:
>
> It compares to current crowd forecasts, so we can score now without waiting for resolutions. It uses historical Metaculus predictions to infer how well humans would do, by computing the average Brier score Metaculus users got for predictions made when the Community Prediction was around a given value. More technically, we draw resolutions from the crowd forecast distribution, and compare the expected value of our Brier score to that of Metaculus users.
>
> Across Metaculus, Manifold, Good Judgment, Infer, Kalshi, and Polymarket, we only found 55 questions with large crowds on good geopolitics questions about 2024. Also, this eval only scores binary questions for the same reason - we didn’t find enough continuous questions to get statistical power. (Part of the motivation for the Humans vs. Bots tournament was to double our sample size on binary questions, but we haven’t run new evals on them yet.) | Scott Alexander | 141813824 | Mantic Monday 2/19/24 | acx |
# Open Thread 316
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** I’d like to send some kind of certificate or small gift to people who helped with ACX Grants (donors, evaluators, administrative, legal advice, etc). If you’re in this category, would like something like this, and feel comfortable giving me your address, [sign up here](https://forms.gle/YpY97XRCCHpnzMoy5). This might take a while, sorry.
**2:** The grant that got the most attention (positive and negative) was the one to the Far Out Initiative to explore a mutation that seems to turn off suffering. I intend to talk to Marcin and his team soon and maybe write a post about it. In the meantime, [you can read their FAQ](https://faroutinitiative.com/FAQ).
**3:** And a message from ACX grantee Apart Research:
> Apart is seeking highly curious, ambitious, and results-driven researchers to join us in piloting new and exciting research within AI safety in research hackathons and in our lab. If you are keen to collaborate with a forward-looking AI safety research organization, we are always looking for new partners for hackathons, funding, research, or anything in between. Find us at [apartresearch.com](http://apartresearch.com) or write directly at hello@apartresearch.com
**4:** Some people have asked if I’m doing a book review contest this year. Let’s say yes, [same rules as last year](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2023), but the due date is pushed back to May 5th. I’ll post more about this later and might make minor rule changes. | Scott Alexander | 141788912 | Open Thread 316 | acx |
# X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?
John Burn-Murdoch (that’s his surname, not a suggestion) argues that a political gap is forming between men and women:
Click to go to original tweet.
Although there has long been a weak tendency for men to be more conservative and women more liberal, it seems this has grown rapidly in recent years.
Paul Graham proposed an explanation:
Click to go to original tweet.
…and commenter Nevin Climenhaga proposed a potential test:
Yes! Let’s do it!
Using the 2022 survey data, I compared:
1. Men with at least one brother, but no sister
2. Men with at least one sister, but no brother
3. Women with at least one brother, but no sister
4. Women with at least one sister, but no brother
…on their political attitudes, measured on a scale of 1 - 10, where 1 was far-left and 10 was far-right.
Here’s what I found:
No sign of any effect. This doesn’t necessarily disprove Paul’s original claim. It just suggests it doesn’t extend to siblings. Which would, admittedly, be weird.
Is it bad to test this in the ACX survey data? Might ACX already be selecting a certain small window from the political spectrum? Although it’s always better to use a more representative sample, despite its political selection the ACX sample was able to demonstrate that women were generally further left than men. So I think if this was significantly weaker in some sibling-based subgroup, it should have been able to demonstrate that too.
Marginal Revolution discusses other potential explanations for an increasing ideological gender gap [here](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/religion-and-the-ideological-gender-gap.html), but also [the finding doesn’t replicate and might not be real at all](https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1751615375408521623).
*[As always, you can download the ACX survey data [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022) and try to replicate my results. Some subjects are excluded from the publicly downloadable dataset for privacy reasons, so you might not get exactly the same numbers I did.]* | Scott Alexander | 141266255 | X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics? | acx |
# Love And Liberty
Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK’s birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing.
I propose Valentine’s Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything.
Love operates on the non-aggression principle. To a first approximation, the only rule is that you may not seize it by force. Otherwise, anything goes.
(except prostitution - the significance of which could be an entire post of its own)
Love is unfair. Some people go on dozens of dates with supermodels, then have happy marriages with their perfect partner. Other people die alone, through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills, or with less money, or disconnected from the social networks that would allow them to meet good partners. Usually when something is this unfair, we demand it be made fairer, maybe through redistribution. In love, nobody demands this - except incels, who are universally loathed for it.
Love is unsafe. A mistake in love will ruin your life. Usually when something is this dangerous, we regulate it. Here are some common-sense regulations on love that could be part of your chosen party’s platform at the next election:
* Nobody is allowed to date without a license. These work like drivers’ licenses; you have to take a short class, and pass a short test demonstrating that you understand consent and basic relationship skills.
* Dating licenses can be revoked for sufficiently serious crimes - eg cheating, domestic abuse, or persistent alcoholism/drug use.
* Three month waiting period for marriage.
* Centralized government database of who is in a relationship with whom at any given time. You can check the database to make sure your partner isn’t leading a double life.
* After three messy breakups, you have to take a remedial relationship skills class before you can date again.
* You can’t use race as a criterion for choosing partners. If someone thinks you rejected them because of their race, they can sue for unlawful discrimination.
Am I joking? The last one yes, but I don’t know about the others. Probably some of these policies would make the world a better place overall, at least as a first-order effect. So why am I against them? Why is *everyone* against them? I can make up good reasons, but they’re not my real objection. It’s more of a gut feeling of “if we did this, we would be pathetic and less than fully human”. This is how people used to think about everything else[1](#footnote-1). For some reason nobody except libertarians has this gut feeling about anything else anymore, so we go and do the things that superficially look like they’ll make things fairer and better and safer. But for some reason, everyone still has the gut feeling about love[2](#footnote-2).
The most fragile thing in the world is a social consensus in favor of freedom. Thirty years ago, it sounded horrifying and dystopian to think that the government could monitor everyone’s phone calls and read their emails. Now the government does this all the time, and if you don’t like it you’re soft on terror, or far-right extremism, or whatever it’s bad to be soft on this year. The basic libertarian experience is to go to sleep confident that some freedom is rock-hard and universally-agreed upon, only to wake up the next morning and find that every newspaper in the country has simultaneously declared it Problematic. All your friends agree it’s Problematic. If you ask them “But just yesterday, didn’t you say that if that freedom was ever taken away, life wouldn’t be worth living?”, they just sort of go glassy-eyed and say that you’re being soft on the thing it’s bad to be soft on. This process came for everything your grandparents held dear, it’s coming for everything you hold dear, and it will come for everything your children hold dear. Except, maybe, love.
In every fantasy book, there’s the Magical Hidden Valley with the Mystical Ring Of Protection that means the forces of the Dark Lord can never reach them. Even as corruption creeps over everything else, the Magical Hidden Valley stays pure and beautiful. The Chosen Hero has to convince the inhabitants of the Magical Hidden Valley to abandon their safety and join the fight to save the rest of the world. That’s love. It has some sort of Mystical Ring Of Protection against statism. That’s all I can say.
This is the point where I should say that “and therefore, it works better than other things, which means libertarianism is generally correct” I don’t know. Love is kind of a disaster. People get their hearts broken all the time, or marry obviously incompatible people, or just never find love at all. Most female murder victims are killed by their romantic partners, and even for the male victims it’s pretty high up there. I failed in love for twenty years, until I finally caught the last train out of Singlesville before the station closed for the Night Of Dating Apps Ruining Everything. I cannot claim at all, in any way, that love works “well”. If it didn’t have the Mystical Ring Of Protection, people would have paved over it and replaced it with some much more presentable institution years ago.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic. 95% of people [describe themselves as](https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_020722/) at least “satisfied” with their romantic relationship, and 60% as “extremely satisfied”. Is there any other institution that can say the same? One of the oldest libertarian arguments is that what *looks good* can be totally different from *what actually works* - a regulatory agency that allows 100 boring-but-great drugs that each save thousands of lives (but also thalidomide) gets worse PR than one that only allows 50 boring-but-great drugs (but bans thalidomide), even though the first has saved far more lives and served its constituents better. Maybe for all our fretting about love and all of its high-profile blow-ups, behind the scenes it’s mostly just sickeningly happy couples living great lives together. I’ve written many long screeds against our society’s norms around love, but my wife is objectively the best person in the world, and I can’t be fully dissatisfied with any system that allowed me to find her.
Still, the only part I’m really confident in is the “not being pathetic and less than fully human” thing. I notice that some big fraction - maybe the majority - of songs, books, movies, and other culture - is about love. Love is still an adventure. For something to be an adventure, it has to be dangerous. Brimming with the chance to fail in a terrible and final way, or to succeed beyond your wildest imagination and be happy forever. One of the most interesting books last year that wasn’t about love was *Going Infinite,* about FTX. This is not a coincidence. Love is like a crypto scam, tantalizing you with the promise of infinite riches before dashing you against the rocks. In the unregulated spaces, a few of the colors of primal human experience still leak in, as unfair as God, and we throw ourselves on the wheel and see where we land. Or at least we read books about the kind of people who do that.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Is this true? I tried to think of other fields of human activity that have this property. The first that came to mind were art and child-rearing. But art is distorted by government subsidies, and lots of dictatorial countries regulate what kinds of art are permissible in a way even they don’t try to regulate love. And some states and countries ban home-schooling, which effectively mandates very strong state intervention into child-rearing. Maybe in some sense these interventions are no greater in magnitude than some love-related ones (eg against prostitution). But it still seems like love is near-unique in the degree to which everyone is united against regulation.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Maybe this is an overly simple story. There were more regulations on love until very recently - bans on interracial marriage, bans on gay marriage, etc. Maybe it’s not just that love resists regulation, but that it’s becoming progressively less regulated at the same time the economy etc becomes progressively more regulated. | Scott Alexander | 141627183 | Love And Liberty | acx |
# Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion
*[All numbers here are very rough and presented in a sloppy way. For the more rigorous versions of this, read [Tom Davidson](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/davidson-on-takeoff-speeds), [Yafah Edelman](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nXcHe7t4rqHMjhzau/report-on-frontier-model-training), and [EpochAI](https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-the-dollar-training-cost-of-machine-learning-systems))*
**I.**
Sam Altman [wants $7 trillion](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/09/openai-ceo-sam-altman-reportedly-seeking-trillions-of-dollars-for-ai-chip-project.html).
In one sense, this isn’t news. Everyone wants $7 trillion. I want $7 trillion. I’m not going to get it, and Sam Altman probably won’t either.
Still, the media treats this as worthy of comment, and I agree. It’s a useful reminder of what it will take for AI to scale in the coming years.
The basic logic: GPT-1 cost approximately nothing to train. [GPT-2](https://blog.dataiku.com/pre-trained-models-ais-object-oriented-programming) cost $40,000. [GPT-3](https://www.pcguide.com/apps/gpt-3-cost/) cost $4 million. [GPT-4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Training) cost $100 million. Details about GPT-5 are still secret, but [one extremely unreliable estimate](https://mpost.io/gpt-5-training-will-cost-2-5-billion-and-start-next-year/) says $2.5 billion, and this seems the right order of magnitude given the $8 billion that Microsoft gave OpenAI.
So each GPT costs between 25x and 100x the last one. Let’s say 30x on average. That means we can expect GPT-6 to cost $75 billion, and GPT-7 to cost $2 trillion.
(Unless they slap the name “GPT-6” on a model that isn’t a full generation ahead of GPT-5. Consider these numbers to represent models that are eg as far ahead of GPT-4 as GPT-4 was to GPT-3, regardless of how they brand them.)
Let’s try to break that cost down. In a very abstract sense, training an AI takes three things:
* Compute (ie computing power, hardware, chips)
* Electricity (to power the compute)
* Training data
*Compute*
Compute is measured in floating point operations (FLOPs). GPT-3 took [10^23](https://airtable.com/appDFXXgaG1xLtXGL/shrBucz1oynb4AUab/tblhmFk3gP7psWh3C?backgroundColor=cyanDusty&viewControls=on) FLOPs to train, and GPT-4 plausibly [10^25](https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/07/gpt4-details-leaked.html).
The capacity of all the computers in the world is about [10^21](https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/ai_timelines/hardware_and_ai_timelines/computing_capacity_of_all_gpus_and_tpus) FLOP/second, so they could train GPT-4 in 10^4 seconds (ie two hours). Since OpenAI has fewer than all the computers in the world, it took them six months. This suggests OpenAI was using about 1/2000th of all the computers in the world during that time.
If we keep our 30x scaling factor, GPT-5 will take 1/70th of all the computers in the world, GPT-6 will take 1/2, and GPT-7 will take 15x as many computers as exist. The computing capacity of the world grows quickly - [this source](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10688/how-much-of-ai-progress-is-from-scaling-compute-and-how-far-will-it-scale/) says it doubles every 1.5 years, which means it grows by an order of magnitude every five years, which means these numbers are probably overestimates. If we imagine five years between GPTs, then GPT-6 will actually only need 1/10th of the world’s computers, and GPT-7 will only need 1/3. Still, 1/3 of the world’s computers is a lot.
Probably you can’t get 1/3 of the world’s computers, especially when all the other AI companies want them too. You would need to vastly scale up chip manufacturing.
*Energy*
GPT-4 took about [50 gigawatt-hours](https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/generative-ai-does-not-run-on-thin-air) of energy to train. Using our scaling factor of 30x, we expect GPT-5 to need 1,500, GPT-6 to need 45,000, and GPT-7 to need 1.3 million.
Let’s say the training run lasts six months, ie 4,320 hours. That means GPT-6 will need 10 GW - about half the output of the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest power plant in the world. GPT-7 will need fifteen Three Gorges Dams. This isn’t just “the world will need to produce this much power total and you can buy it”. You need the power pretty close to your data center. Your best bet here is either to get an entire pipeline like Nord Stream hooked up to your data center, or else a fusion reactor.
([Sam Altman is working on fusion power](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/10/microsoft-agrees-to-buy-power-from-sam-altman-backed-helion-in-2028.html), but this seems to be a coincidence. At least, he’s been interested in fusion since at least 2016, which is way too early for him to have known about any of this.)
*Training Data*
This is the text or images or whatever that the AI reads to understand how its domain works. [GPT-3](https://lambdalabs.com/blog/demystifying-gpt-3) used 300 billion tokens. [GPT-4](https://www.springboard.com/blog/data-science/machine-learning-gpt-3-open-ai/) used 13 trillion tokens (another source says 6 trillion). This sort of looks like our scaling factor of 30x still kind of holds, but in theory training data is supposed to scale as the square root of compute - so you should expect a scaling factor of 5.5x. That means GPT-5 will need somewhere in the vicinity of 50 trillion tokens, GPT-6 somewhere in the three-digit trillions, and GPT-7 somewhere in the quadrillions.
There isn’t that much text in the whole world. You might be able to get a few trillion more by combining all published books, Facebook messages, tweets, text messages, and emails. You could get some more by adding in all images, videos, and movies, once the AIs learn to understand those. I still don’t think you’re getting to a hundred trillion, let alone a quadrillion.
You could try to make an AI that can learn things with less training data. This ought to be possible, because the human brain learns things without reading all the text in the world. But this is hard and nobody has a great idea how to do it yet.
More promising is synthetic data, where the AI generates data for itself. This sounds like a perpetual motion machine that won’t work, but there are tricks to get around this. For example, you can train a chess AI on synthetic data by making it play against itself a million times. You can train a math AI by having it randomly generate steps to a proof, eventually stumbling across a correct one by chance, automatically detecting the correct proof, and then training on that one. You can train a video game playing AI by having it make random motions, then see which one gets the highest score. In general you can use synthetic data when you don’t know how to create good data, but you do know how to recognize it once it exists (eg the chess AI won the game against itself, the math AI got a correct proof, the video game AI gets a good score). But nobody knows how to do this well for written text yet.
Maybe you can create a smart AI through some combination of text, chess, math, and video games - some humans pursue this curriculum, and it works fine for them, sort of.
This is kind of the odd one out - compute and electricity can be solved with lots of money, but this one might take more of a breakthrough.
*Algorithmic Progress*
This means “people make breakthroughs and become better at building AI”. It seems to be another one of those things that gives an order of magnitude of progress per five years or so, so I’m revising the estimates above down by a little.
*Putting It All Together*
GPT-5 might need about 1% the world’s computers, a small power plant’s worth of energy, and a lot of training data.
GPT-6 might need about 10% of the world’s computers, a large power plant’s worth of energy, and more training data than exists. Probably this looks like a town-sized data center attached to a lot of solar panels or a nuclear reactor.
GPT-7 might need all of the world’s computers, a gargantuan power plant beyond any that currently exist, and *way* more training data than exists. Probably this looks like a city-sized data center attached to a fusion plant.
Building GPT-8 is currently impossible. Even if you solve synthetic data and fusion power, and you take over the whole semiconductor industry, you wouldn’t come close. Your only hope is that GPT-7 is superintelligent and helps you with this, either by telling you how to build AIs for cheap, or by growing the global economy so much that it can fund currently-impossible things.
Everything about GPTs >5 is a naive projection of existing trends and probably false. Order of magnitude estimates only.
You might call this “speculative” and “insane”. But if Sam Altman didn’t believe something at least this speculative and insane, he wouldn’t be asking for $7 trillion.
**II.**
Let’s back up.
GPT-6 will probably cost $75 billion or more. OpenAI can’t afford this. Microsoft or Google could afford it, but it would take a significant fraction (maybe half?) of company resources.
If GPT-5 fails, or is only an incremental improvement, nobody will want to spend $75 billion making GPT-6, and all of this will be moot.
On the other hand, if GPT-5 is close to human-level, and revolutionizes entire industries, and seems poised to start an Industrial-Revolution-level change in human affairs, then $75 billion for the next one will seem like a bargain.
Also, if you’re starting an Industrial Revolution level change in human affairs, maybe things get cheaper. I don’t expect GPT-5 to be good enough that it can make a big contribution to planning for GPT-6. But you’ve got to think of this stepwise. Can it do enough stuff that large projects (like GPT-6, or its associated chip fabs, or its associated power plants) get 10% cheaper? Maybe.
The upshot of this is that we’re looking at an exponential process, like R for a pandemic. If the exponent is > 1, it gets very big very quickly. If the exponent is < 1, it fizzles out.
In this case, if each new generation of AI is exciting enough to inspire more investment, *and/or* smart enough to decrease the cost of the next generation, then these two factors combined allow the creation of another generation of AIs in a positive feedback loop (R > 1).
But if each new generation of AI isn’t exciting enough to inspire the massive investment required to create the next one, and isn’t smart enough to help bring down the price of the next generation on its own, then at some point nobody is willing to fund more advanced AIs, and the current AI boom fizzles out (R < 1). This doesn’t mean you never hear about AI - people will probably generate amazing AI art and videos and androids and girlfriends and murderbots. It just means that raw intelligence of the biggest models won’t increase as quickly.
Even when R < 1, we still get the bigger models eventually. Chip factories can gradually churn out more chips. Researchers can gradually churn out more algorithmic breakthroughs. If nothing else, you can spend ten years training GPT-7 very slowly. It just means we get human or above-human level AI in the mid-21st century, instead of the early part.
**III.**
When Sam Altman asks for $7 trillion, I interpret him as wanting to do this process in a centralized, quick, efficient way. One guy builds the chip factories and power plants and has them all nice and ready by the time he needs to train the next big model.
Probably he won’t get his $7 trillion. Then this same process will happen, but slower, more piecemeal, and more decentralized. They’ll come out with GPT-5. If it’s good, someone will want to build GPT-6. Normal capitalism will cause people to gradually increase chip capacity. People will make a lot of GPT-5.1s and GPT-5.2s until finally someone takes the plunge and builds the giant power plant somewhere. All of this will take decades, happen pretty naturally, and no one person or corporation will have a monopoly.
I would be happier with the second situation: [the safety perspective](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate) here is that we want as much time as we can get to prepare for disruptive AI.
Sam Altman previously endorsed this position! He said that OpenAI’s efforts were good for safety, because you want to avoid *compute overhang*. That is, you want AI progress to be as gradual as possible, not to progress in sudden jerks. And one way you can keep things gradual is to max out the level of AI you can build with your current chips, and then AI can grow (at worst) as fast as the chip supply, which naturally grows pretty slowly.
…*unless* you ask for $7 trillion dollars to increase the chip supply in a giant leap as quickly as possible! People who trusted OpenAI’s good nature based on the compute overhang argument [are feeling betrayed right now](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vBjSyNNnmNtJvmdAg/sam-altman-s-chip-ambitions-undercut-openai-s-safety).
My current impression of OpenAI’s [multiple contradictory perspectives here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/openais-planning-for-agi-and-beyond) is that they are genuinely interested in safety - but only insofar as that’s compatible with scaling up AI as fast as possible. This is far from the worst way that an AI company could be. But it’s not reassuring either. | Scott Alexander | 141569076 | Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion | acx |
# Open Thread 315
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who commented [on this year’s ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024). Reminder that you can go to [Manifund](https://manifund.com/causes/acx-grants-2024) to learn more about ACX Grants projects, comment on individual efforts, and donate to the ones that need more funding.
**2:** ~~Related: I have a few (hopefully very short) questions for an attorney who knows things about charity and tax deductions. I would be happy to pay your normal rate. If you’re willing to help, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.~~ Already got a volunteer, thank you everyone who emailed me! | Scott Alexander | 141597345 | Open Thread 315 | acx |
# ACX Grants Results 2024
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money[1](#footnote-1), and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities.
(In particular, I wasn’t able to fully evaluate several AI alignment grants and had to pass on them; if this is you, consider applying to OpenAI’s [Superalignment Fast Grants](https://openai.com/blog/superalignment-fast-grants) before February 18.)
If your name is below, you should have received an email with further information. If you didn’t, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com, and include the phrase “this is a genuine non-spam message” in the text. Unless my email specifically mentioned you as an exception, Manifund will be handling payments and you’ll hear from them soon.
This year’s winners are:
**John Lohier and Hugo Smith, $13,000** to work on lead-acid battery recycling in Nigeria. Lead poisoning harms child health, lowers IQ, and reduces global GDP by up to [trillions of dollars](https://www.cgdev.org/publication/call-action-end-childhood-lead-poisoning-worldwide-neglected-top-tier-development) each year. One major source of contamination is informal shoddy recycling of lead batteries in developing countries. John and Hugo are economics students at U Chicago; with help from contacts at their university and the broader EA ecosystem, they hope to go to Nigeria and research the economic levers (eg subsidies and buybacks) that would shift battery recycling into the formal sector.
**Elaine Perlman, $50,000**, to lobby for changes in the laws around kidney donation. I discussed this further in part VIII [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney): there’s a severe shortage of organs, and the easiest way to solve it is to let the government give people tax breaks for organ donation. Elaine works with the [Coalition To Modify NOTA](https://www.modifynota.org/ourteam), a group of doctors, donors, recipients, and others who are fighting to turn this into law via the [End Kidney Deaths Act](https://www.modifynota.org/ourteam).
**Marcin Kowrygo, $50,000**, for [the Far Out Initiative](https://faroutinitiative.com/). Recently [a woman in Scotland was found](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65694397) to be incapable of experiencing any physical or psychological suffering[2](#footnote-2). Scientists sequenced her genome and found a rare mutation affecting the FAAH-OUT pseudogene, which regulates levels of pain-related neurotransmitters. Marcin and his team are working on pharmacologic and genetic interventions that can imitate her condition. If they succeed, they hope to promote them as painkillers, splice them into farm animals to produce cruelty-free meat, or just give them to everyone all the time and end all suffering in the world forever. They are extremely serious about this.
**1DaySooner, $100,000**, to advocate for a specialized pandemic response team at the FDA. Although I complain about how long it took the FDA to approve the COVID vaccine, everything is relative, and they were able to approve it much faster than their usual process. This exhausted employees and created a backlog of other non-COVID tasks, and might not be possible even for another pandemic, let alone normal operations. 1DaySooner wants the government to fund an effort to make the FDA capable of Operation Warp Speed-style efforts in more situations, and maybe apply its lessons to everyday decisions. You can read more about their work [here](https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2023/we-need-fda-office-preparedness-response#reading) and [here](https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/30/fda-pandemic-response-h5n1-office-of-preparedness/), and donate [here](https://www.1daysooner.org/donate/).
**Alex Toussaint, $20,000,** to build anti-mosquito drones. Inspired by military drones and bats, Alex’s plan uses sonar to locate mosquitos, then zip over and grind them in its propellers. You can read more about the sonar [here](https://www.alextoussaint.com/2021-04-28_How-I-built-an-ultrasonic-3d-scanner.html). I originally thought this was cool but couldn’t possibly work at large enough scale to make a difference against mosquito-borne diseases. But Alex claims that in theory you could clear a city block in ten minutes using a $300 drone. Our evaluators didn’t know enough about drones to fully assess these calculations, but the fight against mosquito-borne disease needs fresh ideas, and this one is nothing if not ambitious. Deployment will be a whole separate problem, but I’m hoping that if the prototype works then we can get the relevant experts interested.
**Cillian Crosson, $32,000**, for Tarbell Voices. [The Tarbell Fellowship](https://www.tarbellfellowship.org/) helps early career journalists cover high-impact topics; this grant will be primarily focused on their AI program. If you are (or would like to be) an early career journalist working on AI, check them out!
**[Blueprint Biosecurity](https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/), $25,000**, to continue their research into germicidal far-UV-C - ie ultraviolet lightbulbs that kill airborne germs. If this worked, you could sit in a room with lots of people who had COVID and not get it yourself, because the lights would zap the virus before it could reach your nasal passages; in the best-case scenario, this is a fully general solution to all respiratory pandemics. Other teams have already established that the UV light kills germs, so the remaining challenge is to ensure it’s safe for humans. Jacob’s project addresses one of the remaining safety issues: UV creates ozone, which is good in the ozone layer but bad in breathable air. Blueprint plans to test various ozone scrubbers to see if they can remove the problem.
**Robert Yaman, $100,000**, for [Innovate Animal Ag](https://www.innovateanimalag.org/), which seeks “technological solutions to animal welfare challenges”. For example, farmers who raise egg-laying chickens don’t want males, so they currently kill 6 billion male chicks per year. “In ovo[3](#footnote-3) sexing technology” lets them read sex from eggs directly, so they can throw away the male eggs instead of killing chicks in a horrible grinding machine after they’re born. If this works, we’ll finally achieve mankind’s age-old dream of being able to count your chickens before they hatch! But also:
> In-ovo sexing is just the beginning - we have a list of 45 other potentially impactful technologies that we would like to support, including on-farm hatching, high-expansion nitrogen foam, aquatic animal stunning machines, and fertility-based pest controls. We aim to inspire a new techno-optimism for animal welfare to bring our husbandry practices in line with our values.
**Jordan Braunstein** and **Tetra Jones**, **$34,000** to work on assurance contracts. These are the general case of what Kickstarter does - coordinate people who all agree to do something if enough other people agree to make it worth their while. They want to branch out from Kickstarter’s funding-focused model into different forms of contract - for example, compacts for political action (eg Free State Project), dominant assurance contracts that incentivize people to overcome transaction costs, and “contigently anonymous” contracts where people can hide their identity until a certain threshold gets reached. Jordan and Tetra applied separately to start their own platforms, but have agreed to to work together on [spartacus.app](https://spartacus.app/); you can contact them [here](https://spartacus.app/#contact) if you want to help or participate in testing. I’m aware that another site, [EnsureDone](https://ensuredone.com/projects), is already trying something similar[4](#footnote-4). I’m funding Spartacus as a backup, but I like Ensure too and they should feel free to contact me if I can help in any way.
**Joel Tan, $100,000,** for the [Center For Exploratory Altruism Research](https://exploratory-altruism.org/). They’re involved in cause prioritization, research, and support for various global development charities. We were most excited about their work trying to stem the tide of hyper-processed foods in the developing world - for example, campaigns to reduce levels of sodium and trans fat.
**Mark Webb, $5,000,** to study land reform. You might know Mark better as ACX commenter sclmlw, and you might remember land reform from [my review of How Asia Works](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works) as a key part of the process by which countries move up the development ladder. There are a few organizations working on lobbying for land reform on a political level. Mark wants to try something different and just buy land directly. This would be very expensive to do at scale, but I talked to Mark and he has a pretty well-thought-out plan to start small, prove the concept, and gradually court bigger and bigger funders. I am honestly a little skeptical, but Mark has put a lot of thought into this project, and it’s not like anyone else’s land reform ideas are working very quickly, so I’ve agreed to grant a starting $5,000 to help him get started.
**Greg Sadler, $65,000,** for policy advocacy in Australia. Last ACX Grants, we funded Nathan Ashby to do this. Nathan and his team were able to get some significant victories, influencing government policy on pandemic preparedness, charitable tax deductions, and AI safety. This time around, he recommends his colleague Greg Sadler at [Good Ancestors](https://www.goodancestors.org.au/) to continue his work. You can read more about their agenda [here](https://www.goodancestors.org.au/policy).
**Kurtis Lockhart, $100,000**, to help build a campus for the African School of Economics in Fumba, Zanzibar. We talked recently about [the difficulty of using charity to accelerate market development](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-capitalism-beat-charity) in lower-income countries, so I was delighted to come across such a perfect opportunity. I’m especially excited about being able to do this in Fumba, the Charter Cities Institute’s [“flagship new cities project”](https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/inaugural-africas-new-cities-summit-inflection-point-the-charter-cities-movement-and-charter-cities-institute/) in Africa.
**[HealthLearn](https://healthlearn.org/), $25,000**, for an online training program for healthcare workers in developing countries. This is one of those blindly-follow-the-evidence grants: GiveWell says that training health care workers is one of the most effective interventions known, and HealthLearn hopes to be able to do it at scale. You can support HealthLearn by donating or volunteering your expertise in growing consumer-facing tech products; check out their [blog](https://healthlearn.org/blog/early-2024) to learn more.
**Anthony Maxin and Lynn McGrath, $60,000**, for [smartphone pupillometry](http://apertur.ai/). The pupil exam is an important tool for diagnosing neurological conditions like [stroke,](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37857150/) [traumatic brain injury](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37464770/), and dementia. In the traditional exam, a healthcare provider shines a light at your eye and watches to see if the pupil contracts appropriately. But this is a pretty fuzzy test and people sometimes get it wrong or miss slight abnormalities. There are high-tech pupil-contraction-measuring machines, but they’re finicky and expensive and lots of hospitals don’t have them. This team wants to measure the pupillary reaction to light on smartphones, no additional hardware required. If it works, it will help get a whole range of conditions diagnosed faster and more accurately.
**Mike Saint-Antoine, $1,000**, for biology tutorial videos. You might remember Mike from [his review of](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners) *[Viral](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners)*, which was a finalist in the ACX Book Review contest, or from [his excellent blog](https://www.mikesblog.net/) on (mostly) prediction markets. But in his day job, he’s a computational biologist, and his *other* other hobby is making videos teaching people to do computational biology with Python, R, Matlab, etc. I’m usually skeptical of video-related grant proposals. But our bio evaluators were very impressed with his work, and I’m happy to make this token grant to help him get some better technology and give him a signal-boost. Check out [his YouTube channel here](https://www.youtube.com/c/mikesaint-antoine).
**Chris Lakin and Evan Miyazono, $40,000**, to support participants at the [Conceptual Boundaries Workshop](https://formalizingboundaries.ai/) working on AI safety. The workshop is already funded, but they plan to use the money to fund further promising research by workshop participants. I mostly wanted to avoid AI alignment funding in this round, but our evaluators liked them, and if they can regrant ACX money to promising alignment projects, then I don’t have to figure out which ones those are myself.
**Esben Kran, $59,000,** for [Apart Research](https://apartresearch.com/), another group that incubates and facilitates AI alignment researchers. After this I’m sticking to my rule against AI alignment projects, honest.
**Spencer Orenstein, $1,500,** to write a primer on how to achieve political change. I asked for one of those [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests) (part 8), and I know some other people are also working on this. But Spencer seems like a great candidate - he’s a former staffer in the US House of Representatives with 13 years of policy experience and has won various policy-related awards - and I’m excited to see what he has to say.
**Samuel Celarek, $20,000**, to research IVF clinic success rates, with the ultimate goal of creating a company that ranks the best IVF clinics. Evaluator opinion was split on this one: is this really an effective charitable cause? I funded it anyway for three reasons. First, the team came very heavily recommended. Second, this grant has a chance of causing a few dozen to a few thousand extra well-loved developed-world children to exist; I’m not exactly a total-utilitarian pronatalist but I can abstractly bargain with them. Third, this grant could improve the IVF ecosystem, and getting lots of people to use IVF is a prerequisite to high-impact reproductive technologies like polygenic screening.
**[Alexander Putilin](https://psychotechnology.substack.com/) and** **Andrew X Stewart, $32,500,** to try to replicate a study showing that brain wave synchronization can significantly speed learning rates and improve focus. I asked someone to work on this in [this post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests), and Alexander and Andrew were the ones who stepped up. Their team also plans to investigate other uses of EEG, including speeding progress in vipassana meditation (like an insight equivalent to [Jhourney](https://www.jhourney.io/)).
**Celene Nightingale, $1,000**, to [advocate for](http://www.minorliberation.org/) the repeal of the Interstate Runaway Compact, a law used to arrest runaway minors and force them back to potentially abusive families. This might not be maximally effective altruism, but I got some friends to chip in enough money to fund this one as a birthday present for a mutual friend who feels strongly about this. Happy birthday, Charlie!
**Çağrı Mutaf, $15,000**, to [work on animal rights in Turkiye](https://ciftlikhayvanlarinikorumadernegi.org/). The 680 million farmed fish in Turkiye, like farmed fish everywhere, live in terrible conditions - for example, some farms kill the fish by leaving them to die slowly of asphyxiation over half an hour. Çağrı and his team have already secured better conditions for 40 million Turkish fish, and plan to continue their work by securing welfare guarantees from more aquaculture and seafood companies.
**Joseph Caissie, $100,000**, to advocate for Georgism. This is a followup to last year’s grant to Lars Doucet and Will Jarvis, who were able to build [a land value assessment startup](https://www.valuebase.co/) that [got funding from Sam Altman](https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/01/valuebase-backed-by-sam-altmans-hydrazine-raises-1-6-million-seed-round/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALEVTb86udumBqhi8pn111qEjn5gvhYhAaSwp_SZWjcZ6bXD3cpZZd8yH41wNjyPNIP2eIZbCPZ4Q34T4gHdlXezq4j2Wa9zYrA4BqlyiWjOdLDsuVzarSIpkp0iPWJ_JJq-Sw9I2D7nHQlatqXwpz5GjbUMsszQtOcyW5QFCKkV) and went on to influence local and state government policy. Lars and Will have asked me to help fund the next step in their plan: giving Joseph (currently the State Assessor of Alaska) enough money to quit his job and join the neo-Georgist project full-time.
**EN, $60,000,** to study phage therapy. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. For decades, people have wondered whether you could use them to kill infectious bacterial strains. There have been some small-scale successes, especially in Eastern Europe, but overall these remain neglected. Dr. N and his team work on phage therapy as a potential solution to growing antibiotic resistance. Their current projects include trials of phages to fight typhoid and diabetic wound infections.
**Tugrul Irmak, $80,000,** to continue his work creating artificial kidneys. You can read the story of what led Tugrul into this area [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney/comment/42610692). He and his colleagues at University Medical Centre Utrecht and Delft University of Technology are building a “hybrid route of artificial blood filtration membranes and kidney cells seeded on artificial membranes”. This money will help his team hire another post-doc.
**Joshua Morgan, $8,000,** for work adding tardigrade genes to human cells. Tardigrades (aka water-bears) are near-microscopic little animals known for being impervious to almost everything - they can survive temperatures near absolute zero, extremely high doses of radiation, the crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean, and even the void of outer space. Professor Morgan and his lab at UC Riverside want to add some of the relevant genes to human stem cells. They say that they hope to create hardier cell lines for research and therapeutic purposes (for example, to strengthen graft tissue after surgery) and our bio evaluators were very impressed by the possibilities here. But if all of this is secretly a plan to create invincible supermen, I’m happy to give them the grant for that too.
**S, $7,000,** to produce materials on forecasting for governments. S is a strategic advisor for a European government, and wants to write manuals and run workshops for EU policy-makers on how to integrate forecasting platforms like Metaculus and prediction markets into their decision-making.
**Andrew Luskin, $25,000,** to develop a system for low-cost single-cell imaging. Biologists sometimes want to watch cells while an animal is still alive, to see how they operate in their natural context. This is currently expensive and inconvenient (for both researchers and animals). Dr. Luskin [and his colleagues](https://www.rajasethupathylab.com/resource-fiberbundletechnology) want to use fiber optics to create a more affordable alternative. Our biology evaluators were excited by this one and thought it had many promising applications.
**Gene Smith**[5](#footnote-5)**, $20,000,** to create an open-source polygenic predictor for educational attainment and intelligence. You upload your 23andMe results, it tells your your (predicted) IQ. Technology hasn’t advanced to the point where this will be any good - even if everything goes perfectly, the number it gives you will have only the most tenuous connection to your actual IQ (and everyone on Gene’s team agrees with this claim). I’m funding it anyway. Partly this is because there are some things you can use even a very bad IQ predictor for, like studies that aggregate a lot of people’s genetic information. Partly it’s because people are already using closed-source IQ predictors for various things, and I think ([ceteris paribus](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/)) anything closed source should be open source on general principles. But partly it’s because after this technology gets good, there’s going to be a big debate over whether the public should be allowed to access it, and I intend to win that fight before it starts.
**Duncan Purvis, $30,000**, for work on improving flu vaccines. Previous vaccines have included four strains of flu, but one strain recently died out. The World Health Organization, which coordinates flu vaccines, is planning to downgrade to a three-strain vaccine. But Duncan thinks there’s room to improve resistance to future pandemics by reserving the extra slot in vaccines for potentially dangerous influenza A strains. He plans to attend conferences, publish papers, and otherwise build a coalition to make this happen.
**Chris Mimm, $20,000,** to develop a scenario analysis platform for developing-world agricultural programs. Chris envisions this as doing for agricultural aid what [Remix](http://www.remix.com) did for transportation, helping administrators plan interventions to aid areas in crisis and eventually make them self-sufficient.
**C, $10,000**, to further his political career. As usual, the first way I’ll help further his political career is not naming him here or giving any further details.
And this is just the first step! Our partners at Manifund are taking it from here. For now, you can go to their **[ACX Grants page](https://manifund.org/causes/acx-grants-2024)** to get more information on the funded grants, see which ones want more money, and donate if you’re interested. You can also discuss the specifics of proposals in the comments section there.
But in a few weeks, they’ll also be adding the grants we *didn’t* fund to an impact market. You can buy “impact shares”, which will go up or down in value depending on how the project does (for legal reasons, your profits will go to charity). We have five potential buyers lined up: three sub-granters in the EA Funds program (Long-Term Future Fund, Animal Welfare Fund, and Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund), the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and next year’s ACX Grants. I’ll tell you more about this when it happens.
I’ve also passed all the projects that gave me permission and seem relevant to various other funders like foundations, wealthy people, and venture capitalists. Some of them might get still get back to me later, so stay alert.
Thanks to everyone who supported ACX Grants, including:
* [Manifund](https://manifund.com), a charitable spinoff of Manifold Markets, which will handle getting everyone their money and run the upcoming impact market. Thanks especially to Austin Chen, Rachel Weinberg, and Saul Munn.
* Our overall evaluators: Misha Gurevich, Clara Collier.
* Our biology evaluators: Samira Nedungadi, Ruth Hook, Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, ACX commenter Metacelsus, and some people who prefer to stay anonymous.
* Our global health and development evaluator, Andrew Martin.
* Our animal welfare evaluator, Kieran Greig
* Our other evaluators. I sent small lists of 1-5 grants to a few dozen people who were very helpful but who I’m not going to list individually.
* Our funders: Brayden McLean, Anton Makiievskyi, James Grugett, Calvin French-Owen, Tom Tseng, Richard Barnes, ACX commenter “thecommexokid”, and some people who prefer to stay anonymous or haven’t responded to my email asking for permission to publicly credit them. If you want credit later, let me know and I’ll edit you in and/or thank you on an Open Thread. I feel bad including these names in the same font as everyone else, because some of them donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, and obviously having money is the most important part of a grants program. Once again, thank you so much.
* Various sources of encouragement, advice, and inspiration, including Oliver Habryka, Tyler Cowen, and Jaan Tallinn.
* If I forgot you, please let me know and I’ll edit you in.
I’ll post progress reports from these grantees (and some of last round’s) sometime later this year or early next.
The next ACX Grants round will be either January 2025 or January 2026 - depending on my schedule, the economy, and the level of interest.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
In some cases, people said they didn’t want money and just wanted the prestige and networking opportunities that come from being an ACX Grantee (warning: these may not really exist). In cases like these, I tried to only make the grant if I *would have* made it if they had asked for money; otherwise I should trivially approve all of these, and then I would be undercutting the value of the signal.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
There’s a long history of studying patients with various pain insensitivity syndromes. Many of them die after getting injuries that they don’t catch in time; for example, they might accidentally brush against a candle, light themselves on fire, and not notice until they look down and see the flames. Ms. Cameron is especially interesting because she’s in her seventies, very healthy, and by all accounts has lived a pretty normal life (she does report that she “often burns her arms on the oven”, but seems to catch it faster than people with other variants of her condition). I’ve seen some suggestion that she has something like [pain asymbolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia), where she still perceives pain but doesn’t find it unpleasant. Maybe she burns her arms because low levels of asymbolic pain aren’t attention-grabbing enough to immediately catch her attention if she’s distracted - but she manages to stay overall alive and healthy because higher levels of pain *can* grab her attention even without associated unpleasant qualia. This is the sort of thing Marcin’s team will be considering as they try to understand her condition better.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
One thing I learned while researching this grant was that the word “ovo” looks like a chicken.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
Here I’m leaning heavily into my experience funding Manifold last time around. The lesson I’m currently taking away from that is that having multiple platforms working on an important problem is less like splitting the party, and more like buying multiple lottery tickets for getting the exact right combination factors that lets something become successful. I hope I’m not [over-updating on one dramatic event](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events) here, but I’m still very new to grant-making and I don’t have that many data points to learn from!
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Not his real name. | Scott Alexander | 141192754 | ACX Grants Results 2024 | acx |
# Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure
We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had [It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia), the week before [Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic). Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to:
1. Studies have failed to find any schizophrenia genes of large effect. If schizophrenia is genetic, it must be caused of thousands of genes, hidden in the most obscure corners of the genome, each with effects too small to detect with current technology. This seems less like the sort of thing that happens naturally, and more like the sort of thing you would claim if you wanted to make your theory untestable.
2. Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes.
In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, [Michael Roe points out](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic/comment/47992032) that one of these mysteries solves the other:
> If there were single gene polymorphisms with large negative effect, they would get selected out of the population ... eventually. Which suggests that there can't be high-frequency mutations with large negative effect, unless there is some compensating advantage (like, e.g. giving you resistance to malaria).
>
> Which leaves us with multiple mutations, each of which individually has a small effect, adding up to a large total effect. And mutation-selection balance, where random mutations are introducing harmful mutations at about the same rate the natural selection is removing them.
If there were genes of large effect, evolution would have removed them. So all that can be left is genes of small effect.
And the only way genes of small effect can cause a common and severe condition is if there are so many of them that they add up to a large effect.
(Dr. Steven Hyman of NIMH [made the same point](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/a-note-from-hyman-on-the-genetic) recently on [Psychiatry at the Margins](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/a-note-from-hyman-on-the-genetic))
So many of the traits we’re most interested in - intelligence, strength, schizophrenia, etc - are *necessarily* massively polygenic, because one side of them is better for fitness than the other. If they were monogenic, evolution would have already selected for the good side, and there would be no remaining genetic variance.
The remaining question is: why are there still even these genes of very small effect? Here are three possible answers:
1. Evolution hasn’t had time to remove all of them yet. Because a gene that increases schizophrenia risk 0.001% barely changes fitness at all, it takes evolution forever to get rid of it. And by that time, maybe some new mildly-deleterious mutations have cropped up that need to be selected out.
2. Schizophrenia genes have a counterbalancing advantage in some legible, schizophrenia-related way. For example, they all make people more creative.
3. Each particular schizophrenia gene has a counterbalancing advantage in a different way. One gene might increase schizophrenia risk 0.001%, but also improve kidney function a little. Another might increase schizophrenia risk 0.02%, but also decrease risk of heart attacks. And so on.
Studies seem to mostly support (1), for example [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502987/) of ancient hominid genomes finds that schizophrenia genes are getting less common over time, suggesting that evolution is trying to get rid of them and it’s just taking a few tens of thousands of years.
It should be relatively easy to disprove (2) - just use genetic testing to find the people with the lowest schizophrenia genetic risk, and see if they all have some problem (eg low creativity). I don’t think genetic testing is good enough to do this yet, but based on the evolutionary argument above, I doubt this one.
I’ve never heard anyone discuss (3), but it sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? It sounds hard to test, but you might be able to look at all-cause mortality in the people with the lowest schizophrenia genetic risk and see if it’s unusually high. I would be shocked if this turned out to be true, but it’s theoretically possible.
Why does this matter? We’re getting to the point where we can select embryos for low schizophrenia risk (we’re not at the point where we can *engineer* low schizophrenia risk yet, but someday we might be). If schizophrenia genes are good in some way, we might want to hold back until we understand why[1](#footnote-1). If they’re just evolutionary mistakes, we could move forward with less concern.
So far the evolutionary mistake theory seems most plausible.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
The scare-mongering here has to be false - that is, it can’t be bad to choose an embryo at the 50th percentile of schizophrenia risk rather than the 99.9th, because half of people are at the 50th percentile of schizophrenia risk and nothing bad happens to them. Schizophrenia genes can be at *best* fitness-neutral; otherwise evolution would be selecting *for* them. The worst you could say is that this would be depriving some people of exceptional creativity (as in 2) or exceptional organ effectiveness (as in 3), instead pushing them towards the average of these traits. But there’s no reason to think this is true, and plenty of reasons to think it isn’t.
The clearest way to resolve these questions would be to genetically engineer someone to zero schizophrenia risk and see what happened (this is beyond current technology). I predict they would be not only less schizophrenic, but healthier in lots of other ways too, since it would eliminate random mutations and most random mutations that do anything at all are deleterious. | Scott Alexander | 141142911 | Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure | acx |
# You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books
**I.**
Yesterday [I criticized](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-atlantic-on-polyamory) *[The Atlantic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-atlantic-on-polyamory)*[’s recent invective against polyamory](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-atlantic-on-polyamory) (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article.
The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.” This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone’s very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unhappy. *Then* they conclude they hate polyamorous people.
But this is an unfair generalization. They should hate people who write books.
**II.**
Advice is disproportionately written by defective people. Healthy people perform naturally and effortlessly. You walk so gracefully that a million man-hours into bipedal robots fail to match your skill. But if some stroke patient or precocious one-year-old asked your secret, you would just say “I put one foot in front of the other.”
If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle to overcome their natural constitution, and so accumulate tips and tricks throughout their lives. Or ask a physical therapist who works with these people and studies them. Just don’t ask someone you see walking especially briskly down the street.
Relationships work the same way. Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions! They’ll tell you all sorts of fascinating things about boundaries and gaslighting and the four-hundred-and-ninety-four principles of nonviolent communication.
This isn’t just because good relationship partners are born and not made. I mean, I think that’s true to some degree. But also, people who start off as normal bad relationship partners improve piecemeal, through gradient descent on a thousand little interactions too small to notice or generalize over. It’s only after this process fails that people seek legible principles.
And I’m not mocking the legible-principle-seekers. These are people who have honestly tried their hardest at relationships and still feel like they need to do better, maybe because they have limited social skills and have to deliberately study what other people absorb naturally. Probably some of the legible principles people have come up with genuinely help these people. If you’re in this situation, reading the legible principles might help you too.
But if you’re not in this situation, taking their advice will probably go much the same as taking an ataxic’s advice on walking. You’ll overthink it and trip over your own feet. If you persist, you’ll settle into a stilted and unnatural walking style that was worse than what you did before.
I know many people in happy, successful, polyamorous relationships. None of them write advice books. If they did, they would say something vapid, like “Treat every day as a gift from God.”
The actual best-known polyamory advice book is *More Than Two,* by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert. A few years after it was written, Eve and three of Franklin’s other partners accused him of abuse, which he vehemently denied and turned back on her. Every so often I check to see how things are going, and one of them has come up with some new volley against the other.
In retrospect, I think it’s not surprising that the best-known relationship advice book was written by people in a terrible relationship. Terrible relationships have a way of making you overanalyze your relationship dynamics. They encourage you to come up with lots of strategies for dealing with conflict, given all the conflict you’re constantly getting into. They happen when you’re the sort of person who over-promises and under-delivers, which is also the kind of person who can write an exciting-sounding book shilling something.
[This week’s XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2890/) is surprisingly relevant.
My concern is that people read books like this, correctly intuit that there’s something wrong with the author, and then apply that to polyamorous people in general.
**III.**
This is a bit unfair; *The* *Atlantic* article was about a memoir, not a book of advice. Memoirs aren’t necessarily written by people in terrible relationships. Just narcissists.
Maybe not all of them. But *The Atlantic’s* complaint was that the book seemed kind of navel-gazey. It was the work of someone who had fallen too deep into the self-help ethos of examining every one of their experiences to see if it was maximally resonant with their True Self.
…and from this, the author concluded that this must be what *polyamorous* people are like.
No! Obviously it’s selecting on memoir-writing! There are probably some acceptable times to write a memoir, like when you’ve just conquered Gaul. But usually memoir-writing means you think your True Self is absolutely fascinating and your experiences are worth recording and analyzing at book length.
Freddie de Boer [recently wrote](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/about-marianne-eloises-response-to) a harsh review of a memoir, which included quotes like this:
> In the mornings, I sunbathed and walked to Whole Foods and FaceTimed my new boyfriend, feeling the gap between England and California close. In the afternoons, I went to the comedy festival, where I felt more me than I had in months, indulging the person I was and the things I liked. One night, I watched comedy band The Lonely Island, laughing in a crowd alone as they brought out Michael Bolton and T-Pain.
I find this paragraph interesting because - there’s nothing wrong with doing any of these things. There’s nothing wrong with walking to Whole Foods. There’s nothing wrong with FaceTiming your boyfriend.
There’s not even anything wrong with writing it in your memoir. Probably there are other parts of the memoir that are deeper and more central to the core of human experience. And in between doing the deep and important things, this person went to Whole Foods, and included that detail to specify that this one day was ordinary and happy. On a rational level, I can’t fault this person at all.
But I still notice a totally unfounded feeling of contempt (just to emphasize, I’m not endorsing this contempt, and for all I know the writer might be great). If you write this kind of thing in a memoir, and it claims (even as subtext) that you’re a deep and interesting person, then readers are going to make fun of you.
If you’re a particular type of bad person (which I am) then you will interpret a popular memoir as a claim to status. Such a claim needs to be backed up - either by conquering Gaul, or at least by being so good at writing that you can elevate the humdrum existence of Whole Foods shopping trips and FaceTime sessions into transcendent poetry. And if you’re a particular type of bad person (which I am), your bar will be so high that nobody meets it. Then you’ll be left feeling vaguely offended by this person and their dumb annoying Whole-Foods-shopping, FaceTime-session-having ways. And if you’re bad at attributing your emotions, you might think you hate FaceTime as a communication protocol.
This is also what I think *The Atlantic* is doing with polyamory.
**IV.**
Not all memoirs are written by narcissists. Some are written by activists. This is not an improvement.
Many people are activists for good reasons. And relationships can be inherently political; in a country where gay marriage was still an active political issue, marrying as a gay person would clearly be choosing a side. Still, there’s a range of how much people want to treat their romantic relationships as making political statements. And without condemning it on a philosophical level, *on a* *psychological* *level* the people at the far end of this range can be pretty weird.
Imagine, if you will, a monogamy influencer. Someone who writes a bunch of books about how great monogamous relationships are. Someone who holds up their relationship to the world as an example, who blogs about all the different times they could have cheated but didn’t, who explains how they felt about each of them. Someone who tours the country, telling young people that monogamy is right for them, and answering their questions on the right way to be monogamous. Someone with a monogamy-themed TV show. Would you want to marry this person?
(have I just accidentally re-invented televangelists? Fine, I’ve just re-invented televangelists; I recommend against marrying one.)
Imagine that the only time you ever heard of monogamy was through monogamy influencers - how would you know if your next-door neighbor was exclusive with his wife? You would end up thinking it was a weird idea practiced by weird people who couldn’t keep their mouth shut about it. It would sound kind of like a preachy cult.
You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention. By definition most of what you come across through semi-formal channels will be preachy, pushy, and associated with the kind of people who are obsessed with talking about themselves. If you learn about some lifestyles through informal channels (eg your family and friends), and others through semiformal channels (eg media and books), the latter will look obviously inferior.
I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe. | Scott Alexander | 141358165 | You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books | acx |
# Open Thread 314
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Correction to [Mantic Monday 1/29](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-12924): the article discusses how prediction markets did poor-to-mediocre last election. Maxim Lott [adds the useful context](https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/deep-dive-on-predicting-elections) that over a longer period of three election cycles they’ve generally done pretty well.
**2:** Commentary on [It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia): Dr. Awais Aftab, author of the article I was responding to, has his own response [here](https://substack.com/@awaisaftab/note/c-48598866). I agree with his first point that variance statistics don’t exactly and numerically map to the real world. In response to his second point, part of my argument is that there may never be a satisfying unitary story of schizophrenia (any more than there will be a satisfying unitary story of what causes kidney disease), so instead of treating genes as the IOU for the satisfying story downstream of the genes, we should just go with the genes. Further [commentary by Emil Kirkegaard](https://substack.com/@kirkegaard/note/c-48579446).
**3:** New subscriber-only post: [Links At Length: Democratic Socialists’ Budget Crisis](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-at-length-democratic-socialists)
**4:** I recently saw [someone recommend](https://neilscott.substack.com/p/halfway) only including the first paragraph of a post in emails, then including a “go to website” link afterwards. The advantage is that if I edit a post after writing it (which I almost always do) readers can read the edited version instead of the flawed original. How do readers feel about this? Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails? [**EDIT:** Okay, enough of you have said you need the full email that I’ve made up my mind and you can stop replying . . . although I guess those of you in that situation won’t see this edit. Darn!]
**5:** I would still like all Middle East discussion on the Middle East Containment Subthread at the bottom of the Open Thread.
**6:** ACX Grants results will probably be announced Friday, February 9. Sorry for the delay. | Scott Alexander | 141387193 | Open Thread 314 | acx |
# It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently [wrote a paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178123006418) trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between “the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong” and “the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn’t describe it as ‘mostly genetic’”.
Awais Aftab [makes a clearer version of the philosophical argument](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/contextualizing-the-heritability). He’s not especially interested in debating the studies. But he says that even if the studies are right and schizophrenia is 80% heritable, we shouldn’t call it a genetic disease. He says:
> Heritability is “biologically vacuous” ([Matthews & Turkheimer, 2022](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368122000632)), and I think we would be better off if more of us hesitated to assert that schizophrenia is a “genetic disorder” based predominantly on heritability estimates.
I think about questions like these through the lens of avoiding [isolated demands for rigor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/). There are always complicated ways that any statement is false. So the question is never whether a statement is perfectly true in every sense. It’s what happens when we treat it fairly, using the same normal criteria we use for everything else.
For example, we commonly use language like “smoking causes lung cancer”. So when I ask “do genes cause schizophrenia?”, I’m not asking whether this is so perfectly and platonically true that no philosopher could ever nitpick any of its implications. I mean - do genes cause schizophrenia in the normal sense of causation that smoking causes lung cancer?
Aftab makes several arguments against causal language in [his post](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/contextualizing-the-heritability), [some others](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/schizophrenia-and-genetics-end-of/comment/47821575) in this discussion in the comments, and there are a few more in [the original Torrey paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178123006418). Let’s go through them, apply the smoking standard, and see how they fare.
**Argument 1: Genes are a risk factor, not a cause.**
I challenge this distinction. We say that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, but also a cause of lung cancer.
Why might a risk factor / cause distinction be tempting? In infectious disease, we distinguish between the *cause* of flu (the influenza virus) and various *risk factors* for flu (eg age).
Even though this distinction seems intuitively obvious, I can’t find a good definition anywhere! Some sources say risk factors are merely correlational whereas causes are causal. But age is certainly more than correlational with flu (if we magically de-aged someone, they would get the flu less).
Other sources use a necessary-and-sufficient standard: flu virus is *necessary* to get the flu, and it’s *sufficient* even if you don’t have any other risk factors. In comparison, you can get the flu without necessarily being old, and age isn’t sufficient to give you the flu unless there’s a flu virus going around.
But this example is rigged. Flu-like symptoms are a common feature of many conditions (eg SSRI withdrawal), but we *define* flu as “flu-like symptoms that you get from the influenza virus”. So the seemingly-necessary virus → flu causation only works by definitional fiat. Nor is flu virus sufficient. Lots of people get flu virus but never develop symptoms, maybe because their immune system is good enough to fight it off. This, too, is definitional: we define someone as “having the flu” if they have the virus, even when they don’t have symptoms.
Here it helps to remember [Symptom, Condition, Cause](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/). The flu virus (cause) can cause respiratory inflammation (condition). We could imagine someone who had lots of respiratory issues just because they were very old and decrepit, in which case we might call age (cause) the cause of their respiratory inflammation (condition).
So the flu (cause) vs. age (risk factor) distinction only makes sense in the context of definitional fiat where we’re talking about respiratory-inflammation-caused-by-the-flu-virus as a natural category.
Lung cancer is a condition with many possible causes - smoking, radiation, genetics, bad luck. Of these, smoking is the most common. So we colloquially say “smoking causes lung cancer”.
Schizophrenia is also a condition with many possible causes, and I think it makes sense to colloquially say “genetics causes schizophrenia”.
**Argument 2: Statistics about variance explained by heritability in general don’t necessarily apply to individuals**
You also can’t point to any individual lung cancer patient and say “smoking caused this person’s lung cancer”. Even if they’re a smoker, they might have gotten the cancer through bad luck, such that they would have still gotten it even if they didn’t smoke.
Still, on a society-wide level we know that smoking causes most lung cancer, so it’s still okay to say “lung cancer is mostly caused by smoking”.
In the same way, we can never say for sure that genetics caused any specific case of schizophrenia[1](#footnote-1), but on a society-wide level we can still say “schizophrenia is mostly genetic”.
**Argument 3: The genes that cause schizophrenia aren’t specific to schizophrenia.**
Smoking isn’t specific to lung cancer. It can also cause throat cancer, stroke, heart attacks, COPD, etc. Still, since it’s the main cause of lung cancer, we still say “smoking is the main cause of lung cancer”.
In the same way, even though schizophrenia genes also cause other things, we can still say that schizophrenia is mostly genetic[2](#footnote-2).
**Argument 4: No particular gene contributes very much to schizophrenia**
No particular cigarette you smoke contributes very much to your risk of lung cancer, but smoking 10,000 cigarettes does. This is just the sorites paradox.
**Argument 5: Variance in heredity is only meaningful relative to particular societies.**
The famous example: if you plant a lot of seeds in poor soil, all the variance in how high they grow will be genetic. If you plant a lot of seeds in good soil, all the variance will still be genetic. But if you plant them scattered across soils of various qualities, much of the variance will be environmental.
But this is true of everything. In a society where everyone had magical cancer-preventing nanobots, smoking wouldn’t cause lung cancer. In a society where everyone inhaled radioactive dust all day, smoking would be an utterly insignificant cause of lung cancer compared to all the radioactive dust inhalation. In a society where no one smoked, 0% of lung cancer would be explained by smoking status.
And also, schizophrenia is a terrible condition to make this argument for. It is famously [nearly the same prevalence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_schizophrenia#By_country) in every society studied. And [studies from 1970s China](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25324626/) find the same heritability as Western studies.
Although one can imagine some super-exotic society where the impact of environmental factors on schizophrenia outweighs genetic factors, I’m not sure this is any more interesting than hypothetical cancer-preventing nanobots that could eliminate the effect of smoking. I think it’s reasonable to discuss the causes of diseases relative to real societies that exist on Earth.
**Argument 6A: Heritability doesn’t tell us about causal processes**
“Smoking causes lung cancer” doesn’t tell us about causal processes. You have to do difficult research work and expand it out into some specific chain, like “the tar in tobacco causes DNA to mutate in such-and-such a way”. Still, we were happy to say “smoking causes lung cancer” even before we knew the causal process.
Even “A gene causes cystic fibrosis” doesn’t immediately reveal causal processes after the gene. You have to do the work and find that the gene affects the consistency of lung mucus. You could call it a lung mucus disease if you wanted to. But you could also call it a genetic disease. Everyone calls it both of these things, and they’re not in conflict.
In the same way, “genes cause schizophrenia” doesn’t reveal causal processes after the genes. But if it’s true, we’ll one day learn something like “this particular gene makes your glutamate receptors 0.0001% less efficient, and you need efficient glutamate receptors for various brain processes, so if you combine that with 9,999 other genes, your brain processes stop working well.
**Argument 6B: Genes could just be a proxy for some more satisfying cause of schizophrenia**
The argument here is: imagine schizophrenia is caused by some extremely common virus, that everybody has all the time. In most people, the immune system controls the virus, and it has no effect. But in some people, with genes for bad immune systems, the virus gets out of control and causes schizophrenia. Here we would say the virus causes schizophrenia[3](#footnote-3). But it would show up in twin studies as 100% genetic, because all the differences in who gets schizophrenia and who doesn’t are caused by genes.
This is possible, but I think it’s false. We know many apparent risk factors for schizophrenia: [cannabis use](https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-marijuana-link), [birth canal asphyxia](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/signs-of-asphyxia-at-birth-and-risk-of-schizophrenia/A604D491A78269DE5837433B897518B4), [social defeat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_defeat), [toxoplasma infection](https://www.science.org/content/article/reality-check-can-cat-poop-cause-mental-illness), [poor prenatal nutrition](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632499/). If you try to combine these into one big picture, it doesn’t work.
The only thing that makes sense to me (and I’m definitely not an expert, and E. Fuller Torrey is, so take this with a grain of salt) is thinking of schizophrenia as cumulative damage to some abstract computational organ. Consider an analogy to kidney disease. The cause of kidney disease is “anything that hurts your kidney”. It can be caused by kidney infections, kidney cancer, trauma to the kidney, autoimmune diseases affecting the kidney, etc. Kidney disease is just a catch-all term for “anything causing your kidney to work less well than it should”. If you examined its heritability, it would probably be substantially genetic. Some of these genes would be for bad kidneys. Others would be weirder: probably a gene for risk-seeking impulsive behavior would show up, since that increases your chance of trauma to the kidney.
Schizophrenia is less comprehensible than kidney disease; all kidney disease causes meet in one clear nexus (the kidney, an easily visible physical organ), whereas it’s unclear what all schizophrenia causes have in common. I think when we know more, we’ll find that there’s some sense in which they all damage the same computational system in the brain. There won’t be a more satisfying cause like a virus. And when we figure out what’s going on with the genes, we’ll find that they’re genes involved in that same computational system, or for things that disturb it.
(see also [Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-34e) for more on how I think about these kinds of issues)
Again, I don’t think this is too different from smoking. *You can imagine* that smoking is just a proxy for a more satisfying cause of lung cancer. For example, smoking depresses immune function, letting a virus get in and cause the cancer. But in fact we’ve studied this pathway and our best guess is that this isn’t true. So we just say “smoking causes lung cancer”.
**Argument 7: Heritability numbers rely on assumptions that can be violated**
All numbers are like this.
You can never 100% prove a number with no assumptions. You can just check as hard as you can, try to falsify it, and find that it’s stood the test of time.
So for example, Dr. Aftab points out that twin studies could break down if a small difference in the intrauterine environment could have vast effects on future outcomes. But when people have tried to investigate this, [they mostly find that it doesn’t](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4858569/), aside from a couple of perinatal outcomes you’d expect. Or: twin studies could break down if identical twins have much more correlated environments than fraternal twins. But when people try to investigate this, [they mostly find that they don’t](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X13001397).
The results of twin studies have been mostly corroborated by adoption studies, a separate methodology. A third methodology, relatedness disequilibrium studies, [gets slightly different numbers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130754/), but not enough to change the predominantly genetic nature of schizophrenia (also, some people [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/heredity/comments/97hmji/relatedness_disequilibrium_regression_estimates/) object to them; I’m not smart enough to follow this conversation but would love if someone explained it to me).
There are also reasons to expect twin studies to *underestimate* heredity; for example, any measurement error shows up as environmental variation. If a construct is hard to measure (schizophrenia is so famously hard to define that we’re not even sure it exists) then twin studies will underestimate its heredity. And “heredity” probably underestimates the level of genetic effect, since some of the variants causing schizophrenia might be mutations during embryonic development.
So the question isn’t whether you can think of a possible bias that a study can have, but whether you honestly believe the bias is big enough that you should discount the study - and if so, what prior you retreat back to. My impression is that the biases in twin studies are relatively small, and that the prior from other studies is similar enough that you can’t justify retreating to a more environmentalist position in particular.
To keep to our theme, did you know that the phrase “correlation is not causation” was popularized by [pro-tobacco statisticians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher#University_of_Cambridge,_1943%E2%80%931956) to prove that the original smoking-causes-cancer studies might be biased?
**Argument 8: Heritability numbers produces counterintuitive results about risk at an individual level.**
We [discussed this in the context of twin pairs earlier](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic). Instead of rejecting heritability numbers, I think people should get better intuitions.
Also, this is equally true of everything else. Even though smoking causes 80% of lung cancer, if Alice gets lung cancer and Bob smokes exactly the same as Alice, Bob will have a much lower than 80% chance of getting lung cancer. The solution isn’t to stop describing smoking as causing lung cancer, it’s to get better intuitions.
**Argument 9: Epilepsy is also ~80% heritable, but we don’t call epilepsy genetic**
Fine. Epilepsy is also genetic.
---
Why am I insisting on this so hard?
I think if E. Fuller Torrey had discovered that something fun and interesting like toxoplasma or social defeat explained 80% of the variance in schizophrenia, everyone would say “Oh! That causes schizophrenia!” and forget all the nitpicking. This would happen even though toxoplasma can cause other things, even though it might not explain the exact causal pathway by which toxoplasma causes schizophrenia, etc. I think people really want things not to be genetic, so when they do turn out to be genetic, they apply higher standards for whether you can call that “the cause”. Then people underestimate how much genes matter.
This is well-intentioned: people want to fight back against a disease, so they want to exhaust all hope of finding environmental causes (which they think they can change) before giving up and attributing it to genetic causes (which they think they can’t). But as we often discuss here, this is backwards - [society is fixed and biology is mutable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/).
A story: once I was seeing a young man who became psychotic for a few days every time he used cannabis. Along with medical treatment, I gave him the obvious suggestion: stop using cannabis! This was both because even a few days of psychosis can be pretty bad, and because I was worried he was at high risk for schizophrenia and cannabis might eventually push him permanently over the edge. His parents attended the appointments and very strongly reinforced the “don’t use cannabis” message. Every few months, he would use cannabis, become briefly psychotic, and need me to help get him out of it. Every few months, I would use all the tools I had - contracts, motivational interviewing, tearful lectures from his parents, etc - to try to convince him not to use cannabis. Every few months, he would swear he definitely wouldn’t use it again. Every few months, he would come back, psychotic again, after using more cannabis. Until one time it pushed him over the edge and he became schizophrenic and as far as I know he still is.
The other environmental risk factors for schizophrenia are equally hard to change. Poverty? Okay, don’t be poor, thanks for the important life advice. Social defeat? “Doctor, are you saying I have to never let anyone defeat me?” “Yes, it’s my official medical recommendation that you become invincible.” The only thing in this category I’m really excited about is fish oil supplementation, and even that might or might not replicate.
Even this is overestimating the tractability, because half of the environmental variance in schizophrenia is [non-shared](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/16/non-shared-environment-doesnt-just-mean-schools-and-peers/), which usually means measurement error and embryological random noise we can’t control. The other half - about 10% of total variance - probably *is* interesting environmental stuff we can control, but at this point the crumbs are so small that they’re hard for studies to pick up and they’re all just guesses. If cannabis really is involved in schizophrenia, it’s probably 1-3% of the variance - but nobody is entirely sure it’s involved ([1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-015-0657-y), [2](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)16200-4/fulltext)), because picking up things that cause 1-3% of variance in a noisy world is really hard. It’s not just that social factors explain a small percent of the variance and are hard to change, it’s that we only have tentative guesses about what they are.
By comparison, you can very clearly halve your children’s risk of schizophrenia through [polygenic selection](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies), which costs only a few hundred dollars if you’re already doing IVF. You don’t need to worry about whether your teenager will ignore your recommendation not to use marijuana, you don’t have to fiddle around with shaving a few points off the variance, and you don’t have to worry that you’re chasing correlational phantoms. Just pay a few hundred bucks and you’re done. And polygenic screening gets better every year. In a decade or two you can probably eliminate the risk entirely.
Still, if you look at the [resources](https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/features/is-it-possible-to-prevent-schizophrenia) on how to avoid schizophrenia, the ones doctors are supposed to give people from high-risk families when they’re considering having kids, they never mention polygenic screening. It’s all just “don’t do drugs” and “avoid getting socially defeated”.
It’s even worse than that, because people keep trying to sabotage polygenic screening! The psychiatric genetics teams are [trying to prevent](https://www.science.org/content/article/genetics-group-slams-company-using-its-data-screen-embryos-genomes) screening companies from using their data! Sometimes it’s because [this completely voluntary process vaguely reminds of them of eugenics](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck). Other times it’s because they somehow try to pretend the amount of variance involved doesn’t matter or isn’t worth it, even though it’s a million times more than the drug abuse and social defeat issues people constantly obsess over. But other times it’s even weirder - a bioethicist [in this article](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/orchid-embryo-testing) and a geneticist [in this one](https://www.science.org/content/article/genetics-group-slams-company-using-its-data-screen-embryos-genomes) both say variants of “health care should be about treating schizophrenia, not preventing it”. This is both totally antithetical to the spirit of real clinical medicine as it’s practiced, and ethically odious to anyone who has witnessed the side effects of antipsychotics first-hand. I cannot wait until this kind of thinking ends up in the shameful dustbin of history, alongside all those 18th-century people who tried to ban vaccines because diseases were a divine punishment and humans shouldn’t interfere.
And one step to getting them in that dustbin is acknowledging that this mostly genetic disease is, in fact, mostly genetic.
**EDIT AFTER THINKING ABOUT THIS MORE:** One way to think about this is that if we knew for sure that all of the genes involved in schizophrenia were for an autoimmune condition, we might say “schizophrenia is an autoimmune disease”. If we knew for sure that all the genes involved in schizophrenia involved susceptibility to a certain virus, we might say “schizophrenia is a viral disease”. In both of these cases, it would still be genetic in some sense, but we would be more interested in the downstream mediator. But if all of the genes in schizophrenia exert their effect in different ways with different mediators, and there’s no story we can tell beyond the accumulated damage analogy above or the [dynamical systems approach](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-34e), maybe we might as well call it genetic, since the genome is the furthest-downstream place where it has a clear and comprehensible unified cause. I think this is the most likely outcome, but Torrey and others disagree. I don’t know if this is the crux of our larger disagreement.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Actually it’s more complicated than this: if you look at [the simulation argument from last time](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic), it’s hopefully obvious that every case is caused *both* by genetic and by environmental factors, or that it’s not really meaningful to try to disentangle them. I don’t know whether real schizophrenia is like this.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Except the causation here is more like genes → some general high-psychopathology-risk state → schizophrenia. So the exact right analogy isn’t smoking/lung cancer, but something more like obesity/heart attacks. We know that obesity → some general metabolically dysregulated state → heart attacks, but we still colloquially say that obesity can cause heart attacks.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Would we really? If schizophrenia was caused by an omnipresent virus, but the only people who got it, got it entirely because of genetic differences from the rest of the population, why would we call the virus “the cause” rather than the genes? Is it just because we’re used to calling pathogens the causes of things from our long history with infectious disease? It might be equally reasonable in this case to think of schizophrenia as a genetic immunodeficiency. I don’t know exactly how to think about things like this. | Scott Alexander | 141000175 | It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic | acx |
# Seems Like Targeting
**I.**
Recently [Claudine Gay resigned](https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism-probe/h_9b201ce1347a198e668987858b47b730) as President of Harvard over plagiarism accusations and a fumbled Congressional testimony on anti-Semitism.
The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
* Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
* Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn’t seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be.
I’m not criticizing Rufo and Brunet. Investigative journalism is important, they found a real scandal, and they have every right to bring it to light.
But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them. Assuming that many important people have skeletons in their closets (or can be believably accused of such in ways hard for them to disprove), that creates chilling effects against letting anyone criticize Israel. If you know investigative journalism is a weapon pointed against people who do X, that scares people out of doing X.
**II.**
The latest chapter in the Claudine Gay saga is that Business Insider published [an expose accusing Neri Oxman of plagiarism](https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1).
Neri Oxman was a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, but nobody in history has ever cared about Media Arts and Sciences. Certainly they don’t care about it enough that plagiarism in a fifteen-year-old paper by a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences should be front-page news (though [see here for claims](https://twitter.com/MelancholyYuga/status/1745333692749304180) that there were many worse things wrong with Oxman’s paper). Everyone understands that they’re going after Oxman because she’s the wife of Bill Ackman, the bigshot investor who led the crusade against Gay. The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family.
Compare to the hypothetical situation about Israel above. Investigative journalists have credibly signaled that if you go after their allies in academia, they’ll go after you and your loved ones - elevating fifteen-year-stale peccadillos by nobodies into front page news. Business Insider did investigate itself, [and found no wrongdoing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2024/01/14/business-insider-oxman-ackman-axel-springer/). But is it really normal to mention the name of the plagiarist’s husband four times in a plagiarism article?
**III.**
I have a personal interest in this because of my experiences with effective altruism.
I can’t complain about the media coverage we got before 2023. The movement had lots of friends in the media, it was inherently sympathetic (give lots of money to charity!), and it had good pro-establishment credentials. Everyone was very nice to us. Sometimes it was kind of sickening - the endless drumbeat of praise for Will MacAskill’s summer-2022 book seemed excessive even by my standards.
Then, in the first few weeks of 2023, two hard-hitting pieces of investigative journalism came out against EA. One accused a prominent EA professor of sending a racist email 30 years ago. The other claimed there was a culture of sexist behavior, but mostly talked about vague community norms that had been the same forever. The clearest case of sexual assault it found happened ten years earlier, committed by a person who has long since left (and now vociferously opposes) the movement.
It might seem like a weird coincidence that - after years of unrelenting positive coverage - investigative journalists would take two 10+ year old cases and try to turn them into big scandals within three weeks of each other. But I’ll stop teasing you now - the obvious proximal cause was that FTX had just imploded, and suddenly people hated effective altruism.
After a few months, people were no longer as interested in FTX, and journalists stopped dredging up our dirty laundry and went back to harassing Professors of Media Arts and Science or whoever it is they usually harass.
As in the cases of Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman, the accusations against us were (mostly) true. But journalists had no interest in digging up the true accusations when we were popular. And they presented decades-old news as front-page bombshells as soon as we weren’t.
**IV.**
Okay, I’ll be honest, I have an even bigger personal interest in journalists targeting people, because I was told it absolutely never happens and I’m a screwed-up paranoiac for believing in it.
A few years ago, the *New York Times* wrote an article about me; when I publicly protested against it doxxing my real name, the tone of the incipient article went from positive (according to the journalist and the interviewees) to negative. I complained about this, and [journalist Elizabeth Spiers told me](https://mynewbandis.substack.com/p/slate-star-clusterfuck) that this doesn’t happen and I was proving my bad nature and the bad nature of my entire community by even suggesting it:
> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico. It is like the former in that it fails to understand processes and classifications that are integral to how journalism is done, and necessary, and it’s like the latter in the sense that it attributes personal qualities to journalists that both comically overstate the level of personal investment journalists have in the people they cover, and assumes that journalists are motivated by (maybe even *primarily* by) assorted flavors of malice.
>
> The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this . . . Only in a bubble as insular and tiny as the SSC community would this theory be even remotely plausible . . . [Journalists] do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.
And so on and so forth for another thirty-odd paragraphs listing all of my various psychological flaws.
I wonder if Spiers would be willing to write the same kind of essay for Neri Oxman. I worry Oxman is also starting to develop the kind of psychological flaws that make her think journalists sometimes target people out of malice. She could really use a pep talk to remind her how ridiculous that is!
If I were writing that essay, I would try to retreat to a less damning explanation: maybe the journalists are just trying to get clicks by writing negative things about stuff who people already hate and would like to see brought down a few notches. That would amply explain all three cases. Unfortunately, Spiers has already closed off that defense, calling the claim that journalists write things for clicks “everyone’s favorite fallacious rationale”.
I suppose one could retreat even further: journalists are only human, and like to join on pile-ons against unpopular things. This is certainly a little true, and inherently sympathetic - we are all only human. Still, this one scares me most of all.
It means that if people like you, and you’re doing well, then you can commit lots of mild misdeeds and journalists will never bother you. But if you become unpopular, or seem weird, or take a stand against something widely believed, then investigative journalists will dig up all your decades-old mistakes and ruin your reputation.
If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.
(in her criticism of me, Spiers accused me and my philosophy of “ignor[ing] the role of power”. I would throw this accusation back at her - it’s always easy to notice and critique power, except when you’re it.)
But also, I think this is the other half of a phenomenon I mentioned in the recent article [Against Learning From Dramatic Effects](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events). The half spelled out there: Events are drawn from some distribution. You should probably base your estimate of the distribution on either priors or on studies with several data points. You shouldn’t base it on one very dramatic data point, because the generation of dramatic data points involves a lot of noise.
But the other half is - if everyone has a similar distribution, or distributions with subtle differences that are hard to notice directly, then whose distribution gets packaged into a dramatic data point depends on the whims of the packagers, ie journalists. I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups. But they are more likely to inspire articles accusing them of plagiarism. I don’t think movements that have just become unpopular because of unrelated crypto scams are more likely to have bad sexual consent norms than those same movements right before the scams were discovered. But they’re more likely to inspire articles calling them out.
This is another reason to trust priors, surveys, and studies, instead of updating your estimate of a distribution really hard based on one dramatic event that you heard about. | Scott Alexander | 140437487 | Seems Like Targeting | acx |
# Mantic Monday 1/29/24
### Do Prediction Markets Have An Election Problem?
This is the claim of [an article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/prediction-markets-have-an-elections-problem-jeremiah-johnson). The key graphic is this:
Original source: [First Sigma](https://firstsigma.substack.com/p/midterm-elections-forecast-comparison-analysis), who remind us that this is just one election cycle and we shouldn’t update too hard on it.
The two real-money prediction markets get 4th and 6th place.
And Johnson chronicles other problems with them. For example, long after the media called the 2020 election for Biden, PredictIt held on to a ~9% chance of a Trump landslide so massive it could not possibly have occurred even if he won all of his voting fraud challenges. Betting sites favored Biden to win all swing states, but Trump to win overall. The whole thing was a mess.
Johnson makes a pretty reasonable guess about the cause: lots of dumb money. People use their pocketbooks to root for their favorite candidate. Normally in a functioning market smart money would take the other side and set the final price, but the high transaction costs, long waits, and regulatory limits on prediction markets mean it’s not generally worth smart money’s time to correct the mispricing; Goldman Sachs isn’t going to hire statistics PhDs to make a model just so they can bet $850 on PredictIt.
All of this is true, so let me say a few words in prediction market’s defense.
First of all, my allegiance has always been to forecasting in general, of which prediction markets are just a particularly flashy sub-category. So I find it encouraging that forecasting site Metaculus beats 538, usually considering the gold standard for political prediction.
I also find it encouraging that the play-money prediction market site Manifold comes pretty close and beats all the real-money sites. Nate Silver is only one person, he has only one area of expertise, and you can’t hire him to predict random things for you (unless you’re rich and he’s bored). If Manifold can apply only-slightly-sub-Nate-Silver levels of analysis at scale to arbitrary topics, that’s a big deal.
As for the real-money prediction markets, yeah, they seem worse than other options. But solar power was worse than other options in 1990. They’re a fledgling technology, we have strong reasons to think they’ll work when they’re mature, and we know what we need to do to help them grow. Unlike 538, Metaculus, and play-money markets, they have bias-resistance properties that could be really useful if they ever get big.
So one way to think of this is that non-market forecasting systems will outperform market systems when the markets are small and immature, but we might expect this to change as they get bigger. If that’s true, Johnson reminds us we’re not there yet. You can find further discussion of the article on [r/slatestarcodex](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1adyz1n/why_prediction_markets_have_an_elections_problem/) and [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178750).
Asterisk is now releasing its issues piecemeal; along with Johnson on prediction markets, [Issue Five includes](https://asteriskmag.com/) articles on airline safety, PEPFAR, developing-world democracy, and a review of *Going Infinite.*
[EDIT: [Maxim Lott says this was a 2022-specific problem, and overall markets have tied 538](https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/deep-dive-on-predicting-elections)]
### Is Trump On Top?
The latest round of polls shows voters preferring Trump to Biden in 2024:
Biden’s popularity has been going down since the beginning of 2023:
And Trump’s has been going up since the same time:
Why? All the things voters might blame Biden for - inflation, Ukraine, Gaza - happened either well before or well after the early-2023 period when his numbers began to decline. So I’m not sure. Maybe people just got fed up?
Vox has [a standard article](https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/23949102/biden-polls-2024-losing-old-economy) about how we can’t be sure whether bad polls are bad, or whether they don’t matter this far before an election. This ought to be exactly the kind of problem prediction markets are good for, but:
…Metaculus and PredictIt are 50-50, Manifold favors Biden, and Polymarket favors Trump. Shouldn’t really be possible, should it?
This is probably the problem Johnson mentioned above. Manifold has lots of young people and rationalists, who probably lean Biden. Polymarket has lots of degenerate gamblers who use VPNs, who probably lean Trump.
But as we saw above, the two best sources for politics have previously been Metaculus and Nate Silver. Nate Silver says (unofficially, [here](https://www.natesilver.net/p/slouching-towards-trump)) that “If we do get a Trump-Biden rematch, I think the odds are roughly 50/50.” Metaculus agrees. So fine. The real odds are 50-50.
I do think you could probably make a lot of real money in expectation buying Biden on Polymarket - if you were a degenerate gambler with a VPN, of course.
### Aaronson’s Five AI Worlds
One forecasting flaw is that it can only distribute probability between pre-selected outcomes. Usually those outcomes are “yes” or “no” on a binary event.
For slightly more complicated events like the US Presidential Election, you can sort of chain these together - will Biden win the nomination Y/N? Will Biden win the Presidency Y/N? If Trump loses, will he concede gracefully Y/N? - and sort of get a picture of what might happen.
For much more complicated events, it’s not really obvious how to do this.
Here’s an experiment courtesy of Metaculus, Scott Aaronson, and Boaz Barak. Aaronson and Barak wrote a blog post trying to divide AI scenarios into five categories, which Metaculus summarizes as:
> **AI-Fizzle**. In this scenario, AI “runs out of steam” fairly soon. AI still has a significant impact on the world (so it’s not the same as a “cryptocurrency fizzle”), but relative to current expectations, this would be considered a disappointment. Rather than the industrial or computer revolutions, AI might be compared in this case to nuclear power: people were initially thrilled about the seemingly limitless potential, but decades later, that potential remains mostly unrealized.
>
> **Futurama**. In this scenario, AI unleashes a revolution that’s entirely comparable to the scientific, industrial, or information revolutions (but “merely” those). AI systems grow significantly in capabilities and perform many of the tasks currently performed by human experts at a small fraction of the cost, in some domains superhumanly. However, AI systems are still used as tools by humans, and except for a few fringe thinkers, no one treats them as sentient. AI easily passes the Turing test, can prove hard theorems, and can generate entertaining content (as well as deepfakes). But humanity gets used to that, just like we got used to computers creaming us in chess, translating text, and generating special effects in movies.
>
> **AI-Dystopia**. The technical assumptions of “AI-Dystopia” are similar to those of “Futurama,” but the upshot could hardly be more different. Here, again, AI unleashes a revolution on the scale of the industrial or computer revolutions, but the change is markedly for the worse. AI greatly increases the scale of surveillance by government and private corporations. It causes massive job losses while enriching a tiny elite. It entrenches society’s existing inequalities and biases. And it takes away a central tool against oppression: namely, the ability of humans to refuse or subvert orders.
>
> **Singularia**. Here AI breaks out of the current paradigm, where increasing capabilities require ever-growing resources of data and computation, and no longer needs human data or human-provided hardware and energy to become stronger at an ever-increasing pace. AIs improve their own intellectual capabilities, including by developing new science, and (whether by deliberate design or happenstance) they act as goal-oriented agents in the physical world. They can effectively be thought of as an alien civilization–or perhaps as a new species, which is to us as we were to Homo erectus. Fortunately, though (and again, whether by careful design or just as a byproduct of their human origins), the AIs act to us like benevolent gods and lead us to an “AI utopia.” They solve our material problems for us, giving us unlimited abundance and presumably virtual-reality adventures of our choosing.
>
> **Paperclipalypse**. In “Paperclipalypse” or “AI Doom,” we again think of future AIs as a superintelligent “alien race” that doesn’t need humanity for its own development. Here, though, the AIs are either actively opposed to human existence or else indifferent to it in a way that causes our extinction as a byproduct. In this scenario, AIs do not develop a notion of morality comparable to ours or even a notion that keeping a diversity of species and ensuring humans don’t go extinct might be useful to them in the long run. Rather, the interaction between AI and Homo sapiens ends about the same way that the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals ended.
I think Paperclipalypse requires human extinction before 2050. It’s at 11%. But Metaculus’ direct [“human extinction by 2100”](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/578/human-extinction-by-2100/) market is only at 1.5%. Either I’m missing something, or something’s wrong. My guess: different populations of forecasters looking at each question.
### This Month In The Markets
I haven’t been following the Trump Legal Issues Cinematic Universe, so I was surprised to see “Trump won’t go to jail” climbing so consistently. Maybe this is just because he has a higher chance of becoming President before the trials are over?
I was surprised to see this one; I’d previously seen that [only 15% of Israelis](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/only-15-israelis-want-netanyahu-keep-job-after-gaza-war-poll-finds-2024-01-02/) wanted him to stay after the war was over. But he’s [now up to 32%](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/public-support-in-israel-for-netanyahus-premiership-at-32-poll/3119432). Why? He [doesn’t seem](https://apnews.com/article/israel-war-netanyahu-gaza-elections-2cf0f1325dafbd07e7bf075b373a6358) to be handling the war very well. I think the difference might just be that the first poll asked if he was good, and the second poll asked if there was anyone else better.
Both 15% and 32% are low numbers, but Israelis in the comments bring up that there aren’t scheduled elections in 2024. So if Bibi didn’t resign and his coalition partners didn’t desert him, he could potentially cling on. And nobody clings to power more ferociously than Benjamin Netanyahu.
That recent spike comes from [Musk’s claim three hours ago](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1752098683024220632) that the first Neuralink has been implanted into a human being.
It looks like things have gone downhill for Ukraine since about October. Related:
What am I missing here? It’s got to be higher than 8%, right?
### Short Links
**1:** For the past few years, ACX has run a yearly forecasting contest. This year I’m too busy, and have outsourced it to Metaculus. I linked it in an Open Thread and meant to link it here before it closed, but it took too long and I missed the January 21 end date. Still, you can find it [here](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/ACX2024/?has_group=false&project=2844&order_by=-activity). I realize I still have to judge last year’s contest. I predict this will happen in February, when a friend and I both have some more time to work on it.
**2:** [Manifold.Love](https://manifold.love/) added OKCupid-style compatibility questions and match percentage, but they got rid of the prediction markets. I can’t say the prediction market feature really worked so well. Still, it’s sad. Site administrator James Grugett says:
> I've temporarily removed the whole "Add matches" and betting UI for Manifold Love prediction markets. I hope to bring back something a bit better (and more useful!) via an opt-in premium feature.
**3:** Superforecaster Robert de Neufville [interviews Michael Story of the Swift Centre](https://tellingthefuture.substack.com/p/michael-story-on-making-useful-forecasts), a group trying to get policymakers to pay attention to (and maybe pay for) good forecasts.
**4:** Matt Yglesias grades his predictions for 2023, finds his calibration is improving ([paid post](https://www.slowboring.com/p/my-2024-predictions)). He also forecasts “a good election for Republicans [this] year”, including a 60% chance Trump wins.
**5:** Jake Gloudemans, who won Metaculus’ Quarterly Cup forecasting prize, [reflects on his experience and strategy](https://blog.jakegloudemans.com/post/24-qc-reflections). He says he’s new to forecasting and shouldn’t be that good and so maybe the real experts just sat this one out - but he also says:
> I would also add that I joined a different forecasting site, Manifold Markets back in August, and in 3 months have turned the 500 starting ‘Mana’ you get when you sign up into 8500 mana, and have specifically made a point to not do any research and just buy/sell based on intuition. Again, not sure what to conclude here, but it seems very possible that these sites are just full of people who are terrible at predicting things, such that it’s easy to do quite well by just being half-decent.
Maybe, but remember that from the inside, being good at something just feels like everyone else being inexplicably bad! | Scott Alexander | 141091808 | Mantic Monday 1/29/24 | acx |
# Open Thread 313
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Correction to [Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic): if schizophrenia is 80-20 genetic, that means genes matter 2x as much as the environment, not the more intuitive 4x, [see here for more](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic/comment/48011469). This somewhat invalidates my simulations, but in a way that makes my point stronger rather than weaker, so whatever. See also [this commenter’s more sophisticated model](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic/comment/48056811).
**2:** Correction to [Psychopolitics Of Trauma](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma): The study I cited on people making more errors in political reasoning [failed to replicate](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma/comment/48053016) (more discussion [here](https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1750721484773888174)). I cited that as an example of a larger literature about political reasoning errors (see eg [here](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/role-of-evidence-in-politics-motivated-reasoning-and-persuasion-among-politicians/6813A080C058E1BB4920661FF60BED6F)), but for all I know that larger literature doesn’t replicate either. I do think that [the Wason task](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task) (which does replicate) suggests context-dependent reasoning errors like these should be common. See also [Part V of this post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-hreha-on-behavioral-economics) for more on how I think of these kinds of questions.
**3:** Correction to [Should The Future Be Human](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-the-future-be-human): As part of my argument that humans would not merge with AIs, I cited our multi-thousand year history of not merging with earlier tools like swords and guns. But LosTiburon on [the Discord](https://discord.com/invite/RTKtdut) was able to find [this story about a medieval Italian man merging with a knife](https://www.sciencealert.com/a-medieval-italian-man-replaced-his-amputated-hand-with-a-knife). ACX regrets the error.
**4:** New subscriber-only post: [Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-name-was-changed-at-ellis-island), a short fiction story based on [this from Marginal Revolution](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/01/no-ones-name-was-changed-at-ellis-island.html).
**5:** ACX Grantee *Seeds of Science* asks me to make the following announcement:
> "*[Seeds of Science](http://theseedsofscience.org/)* would like to announce a new initiative for supporting independent researchers - the SoS Research Collective ([announcement post](https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/announcing-the-sos-research-collective)). In brief, members of the Collective receive the following: a title (SoS Research Fellow) and profile page on our website, payment of $50 for each peer-reviewed article published in the SoS journal (learn more about our format and review process [here](https://www.theseedsofscience.org/howtopublish)), editing and advising services, and promotion on the [SoS Substack](https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/). Independent researchers and early-career academics who conduct research activities outside of their academic work are welcome to apply. To apply, shoot us an email ([info@theseedsofscience.org](mailto:info@theseedsofscience.org)) that tells us who you are and what your research is about—CV, website, blog, twitter, etc.—and we will go from there.
>
> *[Seeds of Science](https://www.theseedsofscience.org/)* is also looking for more authors to feature on its [Best of Science Blogging feed](https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/s/the-best-of-science-blogging) - please reach out and share some of your work if you would like to be considered ([info@theseedsofscience.org](http://info@theseedsofscience.org))"
**6:** I’m still waiting for some technical issues to get resolved for this year’s ACX Grants. Depending on how that goes, I’ll post results either this Friday, or next Friday.
**7:** All Middle East-related Open Thread comments still need to be contained on [the Middle East subthread](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48369120). | Scott Alexander | 141154653 | Open Thread 313 | acx |
# The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
**I.**
Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?
I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?
You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized:
* Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, [it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments](https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid). You can give people simple math/logic problems and confirm that they get the right answers. Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things.
* Paranoia and conspiracy theories, considered psychotic symptoms in individuals, are almost the norm in politics. Forget the people who believe that Biden/Trump/FEMA/whoever literally want to put them in camps. The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia (if you don’t believe this about your side, at least consider it on the other!) I’m not just making fun of other people, I find *myself* making this mistake constantly.
* Politics can create such strong emotions that they impair normal social functioning. People mock college students who demand trigger warnings whenever they have to listen to a conservative speaker. But I’ve talked to some of these college students and they’re not making it up - they find listening a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space. If you’re a right-winger who feels tempted to dismiss this response, imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail. Obviously you could just fake the right answers and fly through easily, but doesn’t something about this still sound profoundly enraging and invalidating on a deep level? Enraging even beyond the level of (for example) having to fake the right answers in a class on acupuncture because you’re doing an undercover investigation or something?
* Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. To be clear, they hate this. Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it?
This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma.
## **II.**
When Donald Trump was elected, some people described themselves as “traumatized”. Someone asked me for comment on the record, hoping I would say something like “as a real psychiatrist, trauma is a real disorder with strict criteria, and all you people are dumb”.
I did not, in fact, make this comment.
“Trauma” isn’t technically a mental disorder. The DSM contains seven “trauma and stressor related disorders”, of which the best-known is PTSD. An eighth disorder, “complex PTSD”, didn’t quite make it into the DSM but has been accepted by other classification systems, including the ICD-10 and WHO; other proposed trauma disorders are even less well-established. “Trauma” itself is a vague word encompassing all of these plus many less-well-defined situations.
Although the vague concept “trauma” goes well beyond the DSM’s formal definition of PTSD, I think the latter makes a good reference point. Let’s look at the diagnostic criteria:
> [A trauma victim is someone who has] exposure to “actual or threatened death, injury, or sexual violence in one or more of the following ways:
>
> 1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).
> 2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.
> 3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of a family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.
> 4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse).
This is already quite broad! The victim doesn’t need to have anything bad happen to them - just be threatened with it. And they don’t need to personally be the victim of the threat. They can learn that it happened to someone close to them, or they can just hear about it happening to someone else. A police officer who hears about child abuse may be a trauma victim!
The DSM’s job is to draw a medico-legal boundary - *this* counts, but *that* doesn’t. The real world has no obligation to obey the DSM, and often doesn’t. For example, can someone be traumatized by something happening to a distant family member? It would be insane to think this has *never* happened, and that some law of nature limits it to *close* family members. The DSM is just using the heuristic that probably it’s worse when it’s someone close to you.
It goes on:
> [Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related.
Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise?
People not involved in the DSM, unbound by medicolegal considerations, have added all kinds of stuff to this basic definition. For example, even though it’s not in the strict DSM definition, psychologists almost universally agree that [emotional abuse](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7683637/) can be traumatizing.
And in the current social climate, inevitably people have started talking about collective trauma, eg [institutional racism may be traumatizing](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Janet-Helms/publication/258194114_Racism_and_Ethnoviolence_as_Trauma_Enhancing_Professional_Training/links/00b4952951cc752e94000000/Racism-and-Ethnoviolence-as-Trauma-Enhancing-Professional-Training.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=started_experiment_milestone&origin=journalDetail) for some individual black person even if they personally have never been victimized in any dramatic way. The knowledge that people hate their whole group serves as an adequate proxy for anybody abusing them personally.
Can you chain all of these exceptions together? Can witnessing a family member suffering emotional abuse be traumatizing? Can learning secondhand about someone encountering institutional racism be traumatizing? Can you be traumatized by hearing on TV that someone was emotionally abused on account of their race? Only if it’s part of your job? At this point the nice crisp distinctions of the DSM are starting to feel a little artificial.
I think of all of this in a deflationist, spectrum-y type of way. Anything can be traumatizing if it gives you strong negative emotions and makes you feel helpless and victimized. The DSM points to some categories that are especially likely to cause this kind of reaction. Other people have added their own. But if something you hear on TV makes you feel victimized and helpless, then sure, go ahead and call it traumatizing. If Trump’s election made you feel victimized and helpless, then I’m prepared to say “trauma” is a potentially fruitful lens through which to investigate this response.
(I’m not saying that Trump’s election was *inherently* traumatizing, or that trauma was the *correct* response. If you prefer, you can think of it as a condemnation of the media for irresponsibly fanning fear of Trump. I’m just saying, without trying to lay blame, that lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election.)
## **III.**
I didn’t personally feel traumatized by Trump’s election. My own story, which I don’t claim is atypical or sympathetic in any way, is that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke, but which apparently didn’t come out that way. Former friends turned against me, I got a few death threats, and I was told to attend a criticism session at a local social justice meeting group (which I foolishly did; I thought people would realize I was cooperative and agreed with them, and so lay off - obviously this didn’t work). I briefly considered dropping out of college to avoid the hatred; instead I spent a month locked in my room, waiting for the storm to blow over. It was the worst experience of my life.
Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions. When I read good arguments against these positions, I get some kind of nice calm feeling, like that I’m suddenly safer and the world has brightened a little bit. I try as hard as I can to approach these kinds of issues fairly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I make more of the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” style reasoning errors there than I would on some boring topic like taxes.
Of course, I hear similar stories from people on the other side of this particular culture war. A typical example (this is a pastiche of many people) would be a transgender person who sometimes gets harassed when they try to go into public restrooms. Even if it never gets beyond catcalling, they remember all the stories they read about trans people getting murdered, and even looks of disapproval feel like they carry the potential for physical violence. Then they hear about trans bathroom bills in North Carolina or wherever and absolutely see red; they feel like Society as an abstracted entity is trying to deny their right to exist. Then they invent [entirely new kinds of social technology](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shinigami-eyes/ijcpiojgefnkmcadacmacogglhjdjphj) to prevent themselves from ever having to talk to or interact with the sort of people who would support such a thing.
Most people haven’t personally been cancelled or discriminated against, and they might not have stories like these. But they might feel like society is “threatening” them with these kinds of experiences. Or they might have “close family” or “close friends” who qualify. Or they might have heard about them on TV.
(In a work-related context? Sure, let’s say yes.)
But also, there’s the collective trauma exemption! Everybody belongs to various groups - black people, white people, Jews, Christians, men, women, LGBTs, gun owners, socialists, cops. Parts of each of these groups have developed narratives about how they’re being singled out for special persecution by the people in power. You probably believe that some of these groups’ narratives are valid, and others are false and offensive. That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that (some of) the group members believe it. The DSM is quite clear that people react to *threatened* trauma, not actual trauma. If some very silly person works himself up into a frenzy believing he’s being abused and persecuted because he eats eggs for breakfast, that’s potentially traumatizing, even if his concerns have no basis.
But also, everyday political debate crosses lines that would qualify as emotional abuse in any other sphere of life. People get told they’re disgusting or idiotic or deserve to die. They have to watch as powerful rivals plot openly how to ostracize them from polite society. Groups of their enemies get together to spread the rumor that they are Satanists, Nazis, or pedophiles. They have their views twisted into totally false claims that they want to murder children, which then “go viral” to people who otherwise know nothing about them.
If you’re not famous, this might not happen to you personally - nobody says “John Smith is a Nazi pedophile”. But John Smith might be a socialist, and someone might say “All socialists are Nazi pedophiles”. If we believe that racism can traumatize minority individuals even if they’re not personally named in the stereotypes, we should believe that the discourse around socialism can traumatize socialists, even if they’re not personally involved. I’m probably not describing this well, so I can only beg you to supplement my inadequate words with your lived experience. All bullying sounds trivial when you’re not involved. “He called me a fatty on the playground!” Well, whatever, laugh it off. But somehow from the inside, iterated over many experiences, coming from people you perceive as more socially powerful than you, it creeps up on you, starts getting power you definitely don’t remember giving it. Think of some discourse you’re involved in, some issue you feel really invested in, and think about the people you find most unfair and enraging on the other side. I dunno, either you’ve had this experience or you haven’t.
I think a lot of people feel persecuted and threatened by politics, a lot of people feel emotionally abused by politics, and a lot of people feel like they’ve had vicarious experiences of people they identify with being harmed by politics. This isn’t enough for a formal PTSD diagnosis - they probably didn’t watch the relevant TV news segments in a work-related context. But it might be enough to start doing some really unhealthy things to their brains.
## **IV.**
Here’s what the DSM has to say about some symptoms of PTSD:
**B4: Intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.**
The popular term for criterion B4 is “a trigger”. For example, if you were raped, you might be triggered by hearing someone describe rape. This is justification for so-called “trigger warnings” in books and movies.
Triggers have long since jumped from the lexicon of PTSD to the lexicon of politics. Left-wingers describe exposure to right-wing ideas or symbols as “triggering”. Right-wingers try to avoid the terminology, because it sounds too leftie, but they have the *experience* so often that lefties asking right-wingers “oh, are you TRIGGERED?” has become a meme.
Twitter searches for “triggered” are an interesting anthropological experience.
A Google search brought up this lovely t-shirt. I think eBay’s policy of promoting inclusiveness by displaying shirts on ethnically diverse models may have failed them in this case.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Donald Trump Jr has a book called [Triggered](https://www.amazon.com/Triggered-Left-Thrives-Wants-Silence/dp/154608603X), and a biweekly TV show of the same name. Sheila Jeffreys’ biography is called [Trigger Warning: My Radical Feminist Life](https://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Warning-Lesbian-Feminist-Life/dp/1925950204/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3N0QSWZU9XOJH&keywords=trigger+warning+jeffreys&qid=1685923694&sprefix=trigger+warning+jeffrey%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1). Jeffreys and Trump Jr may not have much else in common, but they are united by a shared appreciation for applying this technical psychiatric term to politics.
I think this makes the most sense if political triggering and psychiatric triggering are literally the same thing because political toxicity is a subspecies of PTSD.
**D2: Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world.**
Do I even need to explain this one?
**D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others.**
As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics. But I claim this is an overly restrictive description of the true problem, which is a general distortion of cognition around traumatic stimuli.
See for example [Reasoning, trauma, and PTSD: insights into emotion–cognition interaction](https://ebrary.net/178489/psychology/reasoning_trauma_ptsd_insights_emotion_cognition_interaction). Here the researchers make people solve math/logic puzzles with five apples and eight oranges or whatever; as usual, most people do fine. Then they change the content to traumatic stimuli, like five rapists and eight abusers. Nobody is particularly happy about this change, but traumatized people seem to do worse when the stimuli relate to their own trauma. This is an exact analog to the “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” task discussed above; I don’t know if one line of research inspired the others, but they show some similar results.
Other people have even more general findings. You may remember the Stroop Effect, where people have to say the color of words without getting distracted by their content. One variant is the Emotional Stroop Effect, where instead of giving color words (“yellow”, “red”, etc), you use emotional words and traumatic stimuli. Traumatized people tend to do worse at Emotional Stroop tasks relating to their specific trauma. See [Modification of cognitive biases related to posttraumatic stress: A systematic review and research agenda.](https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/450465)
See also [The Precision Of Sensory Evidence](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence) for a discussion of how this effect might happen.
**E1: Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people and objects.**
As seen at your family Thanksgiving table. Politics makes otherwise kind people into angry jerks.
**E3: Hypervigilance**
This is defined as a heightened awareness of surroundings, constantly scanning for danger, and misinterpreting innocuous stimuli as threatening. Wikipedia describes it as “there is a perpetual scanning of the environment to search for sights, sounds, people, behaviors, smells, or anything else that is reminiscent of activity, threat or trauma”.
[Dog whistles](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/). Microaggressions. The hallmark of the advanced political partisan is the ability to describe everything the other side (or neutral third parties) do as secretly a political offense, and to reduce every possible situation to their issue of choice.
For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the anti-AI-existential risk movement, and have gotten to know other people in this movement pretty well. I can say with high certainty that the number one motive of these people is that they do not want to be killed by robots. Still, over the years people have ascribed every possible motive to us except that one, for example:
* It’s a plot by Big Tech to distract from other harms they are committing.
* It’s a plot by Big Government to regulate Big Tech.
* It’s a plot to support white supremacy, though nobody can explain exactly how this would work.
* It’s a plot by woke people to make AI biased in favor of liberal values.
* It’s a plot by STEM people to feel self-satisfied about their own intelligence and superior to more well-rounded types.
It constantly fascinates me how, confronted with an apparently nonpolitical stimulus, everyone will hallucinate whatever feels most politically threatening to them personally. If this example doesn’t move you, think up one of your own. Or just pick a random blog post on the economics of oil prices, or the life cycle of the Latvian pine slug, and see how long it takes someone to use the word “woke” in the comments section.
## **V.**
I want to be transparent: I’m cherry-picking here; there are about a dozen other criteria for PTSD that politics *don’t* meet. Most of these are optional. Not all cases need to have all symptoms. The ones I mentioned are almost enough for a diagnosis on their own.
But I’m skipping entirely over the non-optional Section C: “persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event”. You could sort of apply this to politics if you squint; conservatives get “triggered by” and so avoid liberal arguments and institutions, and vice versa. Still, the overall picture of 21st century American life hardly looks like the most triggered extremists avoiding political stimuli!
Here I want to bring in a more speculative concept from traumatology: traumatic reenactment. Along with the standard picture where people avoid traumatic stimuli, there’s another picture where they paradoxically seek them out. From [a paper on the topic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330499/):
> Victims of trauma often experience a wide range of psychiatric symptoms, including intrusive recollections of the trauma, numbing and avoidance of stimuli associated with it, anxiety, hypervigilance, and other symptoms indicative of increased arousal. Many individuals re-create and repetitively relive the trauma in their present lives. These phenomena have been called reenactments. For example, it has been found that women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in their marriages. It has been noted that traumatized individuals seem to have an addiction to trauma. A number of researchers have observed that retraumatization and revictimization of people who have experienced trauma, especially trauma in childhood, are all too common phenomena.
An acquaintance of mine who got raped now seems to have a pretty rape-centric view of the world. Whenever she talks to me, it’s to tell me some new fact about rape that she recently learned or thought about. She seems to spend her time planning and debating interesting new governance structures that communities can use to prevent rape. While I think this is healthy (she is using her bad experience to potentially help others), it sometimes seems to go beyond that; I cannot imagine that most of her speculation ends in concrete changes to social norms. In any case, she certainly isn’t doing the “expected” victim behavior of meticulously avoiding all rape-related stimuli.
(She might have gotten off easy: a lot of victims develop rape fetishes. Again, not judging; again, doesn’t fit the usual victims-avoid-stimuli view.)
A transgender friend explicitly describes themselves as “hate-reading” transphobic blogs. They admit this is a “form of self-harm” but can’t stop themselves. My experience is that the most traumatized transgender people don’t avoid ever thinking about transphobia. They obsess over it, and who is doing it, and what types there are, and let it consume their entire lives. Again, it’s admirable and understandable to care about an issue that affects you and other people. But if someone cared about their risk of getting bitten by spiders at that level, I would call them clinically arachnophobic.
Several sources (eg [here](https://www.pacesconnection.com/blog/addicted-to-trauma)) describe an “addiction to trauma”. The exact mechanism is vague. Some people say it’s endorphin release (the same postulated mechanism as exercise addiction, spicy food enjoyment, and some forms of masochism). Other people say it’s desire to gain control over the trauma, feel like you’re choosing it rather than being helplessly victimized. Still others say that it’s a wish that you can re-enact it but give it a better ending.
This last one rings true to me. I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
Everyone agrees we’re [“addicted to outrage”](https://icccr.tc.columbia.edu/news-and-events/news/the-new-addiction-to-outrage-our-american-psychosis/). I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it.
## **VI.**
In order to defuse the question of whether political partisans literally have PTSD, I want to take a step back and discuss the neuroscience of trauma. No two psychiatrists ever agree on anything and this is my interpretation of the science only.
The brain is a learning machine. It learns responses at various levels: instinctive, emotional, rational. These form “priors” (assumptions, schemas, stereotypes) that guide action in a range of situations. As the brain gathers more evidence, it refines and updates these priors to stay relevant and functional.
For example, suppose your parents abuse you as a child. You might learn a prior that people are scary and violent. This is a correct lesson during childhood, and will help you navigate the situation. Then you get taken from your parents and adopted by a loving foster family. Since you’ve never known loving people before, you start with your assumption that they will be violent. But as time goes on and they show you love, you update. If you’re healthy, you update towards “some people are nice and some people are mean and it’s hard to know which are which”. If you’re a bit more anxious, you might update towards “all people are mean except for this one new family, they seem okay”. But you should, hopefully, update a little.
Some priors are very hard to update. [I talk more about trapped priors in this post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem). For example, suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person. As soon as they talk to you, alarm bells start ringing in your brain and you flee and hide. You “learn” that they were actually pretty mean - they made you afraid and miserable! No matter how nice they are to you, your distorted picture will cause each encounter with them to further update you in the direction of “they, and everyone else, are mean.”
A diagram from the Trapped Priors post
Trauma, in this model, is a negative event so compelling that it creates a new threat-related prior strong enough to become trapped. The soldier whose wartime experience was so terrifying that even back at home they can’t shake the feeling that guerillas might pop out from behind the bushes. The rape victim who feels so violated that they can’t trust any men, even those who have repeatedly established their good nature. The cynophobe who got bitten once and now hates all dogs, including friendly puppies.
When I say that politics is analogous to trauma, I mean that decades of consuming news favoring your chosen side, learning its arguments, learning the approved counterarguments to the other side’s points, and hearing about the outrages perpetrated by your enemies - have trapped both the relevant cognitive and emotional priors: you are absolutely sure your side is right, and you feel such intense negative emotion about the other side that it makes it impossible to interpret anything they say fairly.
I discuss this a little in the Trapped Priors post:
> [More scientifically literate people are](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/36/9587) *[more](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/36/9587)* [likely to have partisan positions on science](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/36/9587) (eg agree with their own party's position on scientifically contentious issues, even when outsiders view it as science-denialist). If they were merely biased, they should start out wrong, but each new fact they learn about science should make them update a little toward the correct position. That's not what we see. Rather, they start out wrong, and each new fact they learn, each unit of effort they put into becoming more scientifically educated, *just makes them wronger*. That's not what you see in normal Bayesian updating. It's a sign of a trapped prior.
>
> Political scientists have traced out some of the steps of how this happens, and it looks a lot like the dog example: zealots' priors determine what information they pay attention to, then distorts their judgment of that information.
>
> So for example, [in 1979 some psychologists](http://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-Ross-Lepper.pdf) asked partisans to read pairs of studies about capital punishment (a controversial issue at the time), then asked them to rate the methodologies on a scale from -8 to 8. Conservatives rated the pro-punishment study at about +2 and the anti-execution study as about -2; liberals gave an only slightly smaller difference the opposite direction. Of course, the psychologists had designed the studies to be about equally good, and even switched the conclusion of each study from subject to subject to average out any remaining real difference in study quality. At the end of reading the two studies, both the liberal and conservative groups reported believing that the evidence had confirmed their position, and described themselves as more certain than before that they were right. The more information they got on the details of the studies, the stronger their belief.
>
> This pattern - increasing evidence just making you more certain of your preexisting belief, regardless of what it is - is pathognomonic of a trapped prior. These people are doomed.
>
> I want to tie this back to [one of my occasional hobbyhorses](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/17/against-dog-whistles/) - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But [various](https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-04-08/does-ted-cruzs-new-york-values-comment-convey-anti-semitism) [news](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeffrey-toobin-new-york-values-anti-semitic-cruz) [sources](https://newrepublic.com/minutes/129338/ted-cruz-confirms-new-york-values-code-jewish) argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
>
> Maybe this kind of thing is real sometimes. But think about how it interacts with a trapped prior. Whenever the party you don't like says something seemingly reasonable, you can interpret in context as them wanting something horrible. Whenever they want a seemingly desirable thing, you secretly know it means they want a horrible moral atrocity. If a Republican talks about "law and order", it doesn't mean they're concerned about the victims of violent crime, it means they want to lock up as many black people as possible to strike a blow for white supremacy. When a Democrat talks about "gay rights", it doesn't mean letting people marry the people they love, it means destroying the family so they can replace it with state control over your children. I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission. Once you're at the point where all these things sound plausible, *you are doomed*. You can get a piece of evidence as neutral as "there's a deadly pandemic, so those people think you should wear a mask" and convert it into "they're trying to create an authoritarian dictatorship". And if someone calls you on it, you'll just tell them they need to look at it *in context*. It’s the bitch eating cracker syndrome except for politics - even when the other party does something completely neutral, it seems like extra reason to hate them.
In that post, I speculated that trapped priors might be responsible for some of the cognitive symptoms of political hyperpartisanship. But trapped priors have both cognitive and emotional manifestations, and I’m starting to think that they might just explain the whole picture. I think the easiest way to express this concept for public consumption is “political hyperpartisanship is a form of trauma.”
## **VII.**
Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
I’m nervous about the creeping expansion of “trauma”. On the one hand, it’s good that people who feel traumatized by things can have access to trauma-related resources and have other people respect/validate their suffering. On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Ancient warriors [apparently didn’t get PTSD](https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/). Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by [cross-cultural comparisons](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us) and [research on depression](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3958946/): thinking you’re *supposed to* feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
So this theory is dangerous even if it’s true: it might make people feel more triggered by political disagreements and less able to laugh them off. On the other hand, I don’t really see a lot of people laughing off political disagreements now. Maybe we’ve already maxed our our ability to feel traumatized by political stimuli?
This is a strong claim, but I make it in the context of the whole political ecosystem. Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points. On the internal level, it means making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil and everything they do is for specific threatening and evil reasons. Once you have a machine like that running, I’m not sure that identifying it will make things too much worse.
But thinking of things this way has made me less interested in consuming this kind of media, and I hope it does the same for you. | Scott Alexander | 125990073 | The Psychopolitics Of Trauma | acx |
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