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# Book Review Contest 2022 Winners Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are: * 1st: *[The Dawn Of Everything](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything),* reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel [The Revelations](https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Novel-Erik-Hoel/dp/1419750224). He writes at his Substack [The Intrinsic Perspective](https://erikhoel.substack.com/). * 2nd: *[1587, A Year Of No Significance](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no), reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain. =3rd: *[The Castrato](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato), reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at [Secretorum](https://www.secretorum.life/) and serves as head editor at [Seeds of Science](https://www.theseedsofscience.org/)(ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles. =3rd: *[The Future Of Fusion Energy](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion), reviewed by [TheChaostician](http://thechaostician.com/). =3rd: *[The Internationalists](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists), reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled [best of a great lot](https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/a-beginning) about system design for effective governance. All three third place winners were within two votes of the others, so I decided to award a joint prize. First place gets $5,000, second place $2,500, all three third places get $1,000 each. Please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 1 or you lose your prize. The other Finalists were: *[Consciousness And The Brain](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and),* reviewed by Demost. Demost is a university researcher in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience. * *[Making Nature](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-making-nature), reviewed by Étienne F.D. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at [Atlas of Wonders and Monsters](https://etiennefd.substack.com/). *[The Anti-Politics Machine](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics), reviewed by Colin Aitken. Colin is a PhD student in Chicago. He blogs at [All of it Again](https://allofitagain.substack.com/) about religion, mental health, and effective altruism *[The Outlier](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier), reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at [Candy for Breakfast](https://www.candyforbreakfast.email). *[The Righteous Mind](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind), reviewed by Ben Wōden. Ben is an analyst from Reading, UK. *[Society Of The Spectacle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the),* reviewed by Jack F. Jack is a bartender from Nashville. * *[Viral](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral), reviewed by Mike Saint-Antoine. Mike is finishing up a PhD in computational biology and looking for a job. You can reach him at [mikest@udel.edu](mailto:mikest@udel.edu). *[Exhaustion: A History](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion), reviewed by Van Occupanther. Van is a psychiatrist from Australia who would prefer to remain pseudonymous *[God-Emperor Of Dune](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune), reviewed by Resident Contrarian. RC is a rapidly aging father from Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs at [residentcontrarian.com](https://residentcontrarian.com/)* and is available for [freelance work](https://writing.residentcontrarian.com) * *[Kora In Hell](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell), reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at [www.stackdamage.com.ar](http://www.stackdamage.com.ar). I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists* was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: * *[Unsettled](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFzjXliCAWjvheY-8Qd2fhbF79LnX0Xg6R9eqk9yIyI/edit#heading=h.ew7r2dmdq41a),reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at [Curious About Ideas](https://curiousaboutideas.substack.com/). *[Unsettled](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFzjXliCAWjvheY-8Qd2fhbF79LnX0Xg6R9eqk9yIyI/edit#heading=h.mn896ku7w0op),* reviewed by D.A. Haller (yes, two people reviewed this book, and both got Honorable Mentions). He is a software engineer and writer from Maryland. He has recently started writing his (villainous) thoughts down at [Affably Evil](https://affablyevil.substack.com/). * *[The Beginning Of Infinity](https://docs.google.com/document/d/100kMdSVFviZSSBvUyyEQPMNlvLptVQxHFD9i9wGuBWs/edit#heading=h.c9ry6h2ze0xi),* reviewed by Cam Peters. Cam is a data analyst who blogs at [Fallible Pieces](https://falliblepieces.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile&utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F12769514-cam-peters&utm_medium=reader2) and tweets at [@campeters4](https://twitter.com/campeters4).. * *[Now It Can Be Told](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQUUJhv-MpLawby2j4zXLZPDG6ligWd5xpIjH8UmWdw/edit#heading=h.qn8gv2bxe97e), reviewed by Sin-Pharion. *[Japan At War](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQUUJhv-MpLawby2j4zXLZPDG6ligWd5xpIjH8UmWdw/edit#heading=h.t7dax9xv3ggq), reviewed by TH *[Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFzjXliCAWjvheY-8Qd2fhbF79LnX0Xg6R9eqk9yIyI/edit#heading=h.lz66bhiar3d0), reviewed by Ashadyna. *[Albion: In Twelve Books](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.ooigg9ji4dp0), reviewed by Hal Johnson (who says he might be the only person to have ever read it all the way through). Hal is the author of several books including the upcoming (please pre-order! pre-orders make or break a book!) [Impossible Histories](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/impossible-histories-hal-johnson/1140974462), a book of alternate histories that quotes G.K. Chesterton and the old SSC comments section at least once each. *[An Education For Our Time](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.dgp00oivg41z), reviewed by Matt Mandel. Matt works at a startup and lives in New York. You can find his Substack [here](https://mandel.substack.com/). *[Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.yc7v86pkxeux), reviewed by NM. *[Civilization And Its Discontents](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.xt5wmaxjtmff), reviewed by AWanderingMind. He is an anonymous blogger that blogs at <https:/www.awanderingmind.blog/> *[From Paralysis To Fatigue](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.b1vgjvj65gjm), by APsychiatryBlogger. He is a psychiatrist who writes a [apsychiatryblogger.substack.com](https://apsychiatryblogger.substack.com/). *[Golem XIV](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.z7gcrb7hknaq), reviewed by Mechanical Mantis. *[Memories Of My Life](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQUUJhv-MpLawby2j4zXLZPDG6ligWd5xpIjH8UmWdw/edit#heading=h.qnec6j4dg9xy), reviewed by Adam Mastroianni. Adam is a psychologist and blogs at [Experimental History](https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/). *[Surface Detail](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQUUJhv-MpLawby2j4zXLZPDG6ligWd5xpIjH8UmWdw/edit#heading=h.ybywijihlbw4), reviewed by Froolow. Froolow is an economist and science-fiction enthusiast from the United Kingdom. *[The Fall Of Robespierre](https://docs.google.com/document/d/100kMdSVFviZSSBvUyyEQPMNlvLptVQxHFD9i9wGuBWs/edit#), reviewed by Duane McMullen. Duane is from Ottawa, Canada, and is trying to figure out how to make a difference. More comments: I really enjoyed Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom* and From Paralysis To Fatigue, but I couldn’t justify having two books on Chinese history or chronic fatigue in the finalists, so I had to demote them to Honorable Mentions. Memories Of My Life is Francis Galton’s autobiography; read it if you want to learn about things like how: > …at 16, Galton’s parents decide he should be a doctor. His medical training consists of following doctors around, mixing up potions, stitching up busted heads, relocating arms, and pulling teeth. While apprenticing at a hospital, he supplements his daily training by trying every medicine on himself in alphabetical order. He stops after he takes two drops of croton oil and shits himself so bad that he still remembers it fifty years later. Unsettled is about the science of global warming; both reviews were excellent but very long; read them if you’re interested in this topic. Trans got exactly 8.0 and I was forced to decide whether by “above 8” I meant “including 8” or “literally above 8” and how much I wanted to start World War III in the comments section; I apologize to the author for chickening out. Albion is a bizarre 19th-century experimental epic poem, and the review is excellent; this is another one I feel bad for not being able to include. All winners and finalists get a free ACX subscription at the email I have on record for them. I haven’t done this yet but I will next week. All winners and finalists also get the right to pitch me essays they want me to put up on ACX (warning that I am terrible to pitch to, reject most things without giving good reasons, and am generally described as awful to work with - but you can do it if you want! If I choose to publish your article, I will give you some fair amount of money we can negotiate at the time, probably around $1K. If it should be a different email, let me know). All winners and finalists get the opportunity to be named and honored publicly here; if I didn’t include your details, it’s because I didn’t get your response to my email asking me what details to include, and if you want to change that you should send me an email so I can name you in an open thread or something. I was happy with my decision to keep this contest anonymous, because the most “famous” person to enter won first place, and if it had been open-identity I would have wondered whether he was drawing on a pre-existing fan base. But no, Erik can rest assured he is actually very good at writing (which he probably already knew, being a novelist and all, but you never know). In fact, 2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here ([Hoel](https://erikhoel.substack.com/), [Roger’s Bacon](https://www.secretorum.life/?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F27192631-rogers-bacon&utm_medium=reader2&utm_campaign=substack_profile), [Resident Contrarian](https://www.residentcontrarian.com/), and the extra 0.5 is for Etienne who I didn’t know about before this week but just saw his post [Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards](https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/common-tech-jobs-described-as-cabals) on the subreddit). I’m always suspicious that everything is fake and good writers aren’t actually good and it’s just a social conspiracy to believe that they are, but these results are a vote in support of our existing writer-identification-institutions (are they all Substack? I guess it’s just Substack) - although many unknown people also did very well, including the 2nd place winner (I didn’t get a response to my email asking how I should reveal his identity, so I’m defaulting to initials, but I don’t recognize his real name either). Thanks again to everyone who made this possible, including a\_reader (who collected all the reviews into readable documents), everyone who participated in preliminary voting, everyone who participated in final-round voting, and of course the 141 people who entered. If you want to know how you did, I’ve put the scores of all entries in the preliminary round of voting up [here](http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/allbooks.pdf). Notice the small sample size and don’t take it too seriously! I’m planning another book review contest next year. I’ll post the official announcement sometime like January and demand final submissions sometime like April/May - but for now just assume everything will be the same, and start getting your entries ready!	Scott Alexander	71457020	Book Review Contest 2022 Winners	acx
# The Prophet And Caesar's Wife I. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spending the Church’s money on your own lavish lifestyle.” “Actually,” said the Bishop, “my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace of his and its well-stocked wine cellar. If I refused, he would just give it to someone else, or leave it empty. I’m not stealing church resources, and there’s no way to divert the resources to help the poor. And I am secure in my faith, and won’t be turned to hedonism by a glass of wine here and there. So what’s wrong with me enjoying myself a little?” “It is said,” said the Prophet, “that Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity. A good reputation is worth more than any treasure. Fat as you are, nobody will believe you are untainted by the temptations of wealth. Give the golden palace back to your brother, and live in a hovel in the woods. Only then will you earn the people’s trust.” II. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Belazzia, and found the Bishop living in a hovel and wearing a hair shirt. He spent so long in prayer each day that he barely ate, and seemed so dangerously thin that he might fall over at any moment. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “For the people of Belazzia are rich and sophisticated, and they mock you for your poverty and uncleanliness. Does the Church not give you enough funds to build a golden palace and wear silk robes? If you were the most resplendent citizen of this nation of splendor, would they not take you more seriously?” “I admit I haven’t converted very many people, looking like this,” said the Bishop. “But if I lived in a golden palace, how would I know that I was doing it for the right reasons - to gain credibility and convert more people - instead of because I secretly liked the ego boost of seeming rich and important?” “Do you even hear yourself?” asked the Prophet, fuming. “How will I know that I was…You won’t! If you value your psychological comfort more than the aims of the Church, you’ve already admitted that the ego boost is all you care about. Do you think God is fooled by your hovel and your hair shirt? You’re just as dumb as those nobles who think He cares about their golden crowns and shiny armor. Go serve Him in the actual way that works the best, and if you feel guilty, kvetch about it to your therapist or something.” III. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Zhodovsk, and found the Bishop living in a hovel and wearing a hair shirt. When the Prophet complained to the Bishop that he was tired and hungry, the Bishop smiled and led him through a trap door. There beneath his hovel was a gleaming golden palace full of fine wines. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “for the people of Zhodovsk are poor and hard-working and so on. How could you waste your money on this outrageous underground palace?” “Well,” said the Bishop, “I am very rich, and I used to live in a normal palace above ground. Then I talked to the Bishop of Cragmacnois, who said you’d told him that a lavish lifestyle alienated him from the poor people in his flock. I thought that made sense, but I didn’t want to live my whole life in a hovel, scratching in the dirt. So I made a fake hovel, excavated this palace underneath it, and ordered these fake hair shirts with fine silk on the inside. Now everyone thinks I’m a saint even though I live in luxury.” “But excavating this completely undetectable underground palace must have cost ten times what it would take to just build a palace the normal way!” “Oh yes,” said the Bishop. “But the Bishop of Cragmacnois said you told him a good reputation was worth more than any treasure.” “Sure, but…” The Prophet fumed. “Whatever. Fine. You’re doing the best you can, conditional on being a bad person. When you die, God will give you the best afterlife possible, conditional on sending you to Hell.” IV. The Prophet in his wanderings returned to Belazzia, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines. Everyone praised his splendor and generosity, and all the top nobles had converted and started attending church regularly. The Bishop offered to show the Prophet a secret, and led him to the sub-sub-sub-basement of his palace. There was a room full of dirt, with a little hovel in it. “This is where I actually spend my time,” said the Bishop. “And look at my silk robe”. The Prophet looked at it closely, and saw that the inside was covered with hair. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “This hovel probably cost . . . well, realistically, much less than the golden palace, but it was a totally unnecessary expense! God will count every penny you spent on it against you! And the hair shirts - it must have cost extra to have them custom-made. How dare you waste Church resources like this!” “I just thought…” said the Bishop “I was worried that maybe I would get used to lavish living, and then later I would start spending even more on my palace or my nice robes than the situation warranted. So I thought I would make sure I didn’t enjoy any of it, in order to keep my incentives aligned. I…didn’t want to get soft.” “Fine,” said the Prophet. “God forgives you. But He will send you to Hell anyway, because He doesn’t want to get soft.” V. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Fenswamp, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “for you are stealing money from the people and the Church to support your lavish lifestyle.” “Hmmm,” said the Bishop. “Actually, I heard about what you told the Bishop of Belazzia, and how well he’d been doing since he upped his swag level, and I thought maybe I could do the same.” “Your diocese is made of bog people, you moron,” fumed the Prophet. “They’re hardly going to think less of you for drinking the wrong vintage of wine.” “Oh well,” said the Bishop. “I guess that’s how moral hazard works. Because you told the Bishop of Belazzia that you supported him living lavishly, the rest of us thought maybe we should do the same. Perhaps you should have preached that no Bishop can live lavishly, in order to have a bright-line rule that prevents other people from getting confused or taking advantage of you. As they say, Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” “Or perhaps I’ll do what I want, and God will send overly-clever bastards like you to Hell for trying to take advantage of the system,” said the Prophet. VI. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Belazzia again. There he found the former Bishop of Zhodovsk, living in the golden palace and drinking the fine wines. “What are you doing here?” asked the Prophet. “I got to talking with the Bishop of Belazzia,” said Zhodovsk. “It turned out that I wished I was rich, but had to be poor for the sake of my diocese. And he wished he was poor, but had to be rich for the sake of his diocese. So we switched dioceses. Now he’s happily plodding in the dirt in Zhodovsk, and I’m here living it up in Belazzia.” "Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “Behold, you are serving white wine, although the people of Belazzia prefer reds at their parties! And you have dancing girls for entertainment, even though the people of Belazzia prefer bullfights! The old Bishop would never have made those mistakes, because he hated wine and entertainment, and it was all the same to him what kinds he chose. But you, who love them, let your own desires bleed in to your choices! Let God send you to Hell, and we will see if you find anyone there who will trade places with you!” VII. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Zhodovsk again, and found the Bishop living in a hovel and wearing a hair shirt. He was hoeing at the land, trying to plant crops in the rocky soil. “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “I thought I told you to stay in Belazzia!” “Yes, but I figure the new Bishop of Belazzia has explained our deal to you,” he said. “I must admit, I find this lifestyle much more agreeable. And any day now, the people will see that I till the soil in backbreaking labor, just as they do, and appreciate me for being one of the common people.” “How will they think you’re like them when your skin is perfectly smooth, without even a hint of tan or a callus on your hands?” The new Bishop of Zhodovsk looked at his hands. “It’s odd, isn’t it? I’ve been working out here for six months now, and still have perfect skin. My father said his skin was the same way, and my grandfather before him. I think it’s a family trait.” “Thus are you unsuited to preach in Zhodovsk! But since I cannot convince you, here, take this magic stone and rub it roughly over your skin and hands each morning. It will cause you to become as tanned and calloused as any peasant.” “Isn’t that dishonest?” “How is it dishonest? You’re working hard, you’re making them think you’re working hard, you’re communicating a true fact to them. Communicating true facts is the definition of honesty. If you care more about appearing honest than about genuinely conveying the truth, then you are a poor and selfish servant of God indeed.” VIII. The Prophet in his wanderings came to the Great Capital, where he was approached by literal Caesar’s literal wife. “Woe unto me!” she said, “I messed up. Many years ago, I had sex with the Grand Vizier. Just once, it’s the only time I ever did anything like that. But now his servant is blackmailing me, saying that unless I sleep with him too, he’ll tell everybody about it. What should I do?” “I’m not one of those fundamentalist prophets,” the Prophet responded. “I don’t care what you do in the bedroom. But if it comes out that Caesar has been cuckolded, everyone will lose respect for him, the realm will descend into civil war, and thousands of people will die. Under the circumstances, it’s your responsibility to do whatever you can to prevent rumors from spreading. For God’s sake, sleep with the Grand Vizier’s servant!” “But doesn’t everyone always talk about how Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity?” “Seems like you’ve already given up on Part A. My point is that Part B is still salvageable. Lie back and think of the Empire.” IX. The Prophet in his wanderings came to Zhodovsk again, and found the people looking glum. He asked what troubled them, and they said that their Bishop had just died. Worse, when they searched his belongings after death, they had found a magic stone, which - they noticed - made the skin of a noble look like that of a commoner. “All this time,” they told the Prophet “We had thought he was one of us. But in fact he must have been living lavishly in secret.” “Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “He was a humble hermit and faithful servant of God. He only used that stone to, um, look more convincing, because he had, uh, a genetic issue that prevented his skin from ever getting tanned or callused.” “Curse you,” said one of the peasants. “Curse you and your entire fake religion! We’re done with the Church, and with God too!” And they chased him out of Zhodovsk. So the Prophet fled to Belazzia. There, too, the people looked glum, and he asked what troubled them. “Our Bishop has died,” they said. “And when we searched his belongings after death, we found that underneath his golden palace was a sub-sub-sub-basement with a tiny hovel. And there we found shirts that were silken on the outside, but hair on the inside. He must have been a true saint, partying lavishly only to win our allegiance. We can’t even conceive of that level of piety. We’re raising money to erect a great cathedral in his honor. Some people are even talking about renaming the city after him.” “But,” said the Prophet, “that was his predeces…who switched…ah, whatever. Definitely invite me to the cathedral dedication, I’d love to come, really.” X. The Prophet in his wanderings returned to the Great Capital, where he was approached by Caesar, brandishing his sword menacingly. “My wife is pregnant,” said Caesar. “And I’ve been off campaigning for the past year.” “Fuck,” said the Prophet. “I forgot that could happen.” “She told me everything. If it had just been rumors, I could have imprisoned anyone who repeated them. Now it’s more serious. I’m going to have to make an example of a lot of people to restore my reputation. I think I should start with you.” “Now hold on a s-” said the Prophet, just before Caesar cut his throat. XI. The Prophet’s soul stood before the Judgment Seat of God. “MY CHILD,” said God. “YOU HAVE SPENT YOUR ENTIRE LIFE TRYING TO SERVE THE CHURCH. MANY THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE CAME TO THE FAITH BECAUSE OF YOU. STILL, I HAVE CERTAIN QUESTIONS…” “You have questions?” asked the Prophet. “Hold on a second. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are there famines? Plagues? Wars? How come the common people have to spend their lives in backbreaking labor? How come evil prospers? Why do…” “MY CHILD,” said God, “I REALIZE IT MAY BE HARD TO COMPREHEND, FROM YOUR MORTAL PERSPECTIVE, BUT ALL OF THIS IS FOR THE GREATER GOOD.” “Oh, I’m sure it is,” said the Prophet. “That’s not what I’m concerned about. My point it, it’s terrible PR. You’re totally tanking Church membership numbers. I’m sure you’re omnibenevolent and all, but, as the saying goes, Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity, and right now you’re looking suspicious as hell. I have a couple of suggestions for how you could improve your image…” And the chronicle does not tell us what happened next. Honestly it’s pretty impressive it told us about the conversation he had with God in Heaven at all.	Scott Alexander	67986319	The Prophet And Caesar's Wife	acx
# Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they’re going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that value, both because it’s only fair, and because it incentivizes people to keep creating value in the future. How much should they keep? The usual answer is that the surplus gets distributed between the company and the customers. So suppose that this new type of car makes the world $200 billion better off. We could have the company charge exactly the same price as the old car, in which case customers get a better car for free. We could have the company charge enough extra to make a $200 billion profit, in which case customers are no better off than before (they have a bit less money, and a bit better car). Or they could split it down the middle, and customers would end up better off than before and the company would make some money. Which of these distributions happens depends on competition; if there’s no competition, the company will be able to take the whole surplus; if there’s a lot of competition, all the companies will compete to lower prices until they’ve handed most of the surplus to the customers. Then once the company has some portion of the surplus, it divides it among capital and labor in an abstractly similar way, although with lots of extra complications based on whether the labor is unionized, etc. This seems to me pretty hard to argue with - if someone creates a surplus, who doesn’t want them getting to keep some large fraction of it as a reward? Most arguments against involve a claim that the company’s capitalists must be oppressing labor. Regardless of whether capital generally oppresses labor, this doesn’t seem like a strong argument against billionaires getting rich off of innovation. Suppose the old mediocre car company paid its workers $50,000 per year. Now someone invents a new better car company, and its workers do the same job as the workers at the old car company (ie their advantage isn’t more skilled workers, it’s equally-skilled workers making a better-designed car). It seems pretty fair to also pay their workers $50,000, which means that the big surplus created by the better car should mostly go to the capitalists. (as an intuition pump, if Google and Bob’s Tools produce the same amount of value per employee in 2000, and the janitors at both get paid the same, and then in 2020 Google produces 1,000x more value per employee, should a janitor at Google get paid 1,000x more than a janitor at Bob’s?) But here’s an anti-billionaire argument that makes more sense to me. Suppose Amazon creates $1 trillion in extra value for the world, it gets split 50-50 with consumers, Amazon makes $500 billion, that gets split 50-50 with labor and other stockholders, and Jeff Bezos ends up with $250 billion. The standard argument would say that this is fair compensation for the $1 trillion Amazon provided to the world. But suppose that we go back in time and prevent Jeff Bezos from ever being born. Does this mean Amazon wouldn’t exist today? Probably not by that name. But does it mean that we wouldn’t be buying things online today? That we would have to walk to the brick-and-mortar store every time we wanted a book? Does it mean that Internet retail would be split across a hundred different storefronts, none of which had a good selection or was easy to use? It might mean that. But I think “Internet retail giant which dominates the market through economies of scale” is a natural niche which Jeff Bezos won the race to fill. When I say “natural niche”, I don’t want to discount Bezos’ accomplishment - I certainly didn’t notice that niche in 1994, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the business acumen to fill it effectively. I just mean that, probably sometime between 1994 and today, someone with business acumen would have noticed that niche and filled it successfully. Maybe not quite as successfully as Bezos. But successfully. (It’s like that old joke about how if Thomas Edison had never existed, we’d all be browsing the Internet in the dark; no, we would have waited another few years, and then some other genius would have invented electric light.) Suppose that if Jeff Bezos had never existed, someone would have founded pseudo-Amazon two years later. That means Bezos gets credit for Amazon being two years more advanced than it otherwise would have been. That’s actually still worth quite a lot of surplus value - maybe still enough to make him a billionaire many times over! But probably not enough for him to have $200 billion or however much he has right now. The problem with the neoliberal argument is that it gives the first person to fill a niche credit for the niche’s entire existence, not just for filling it earlier than it otherwise would have been filled. Just because Jeff Bezos solved Internet retail two years earlier than the person who would have done it if he was never born, he gets to collect rent on all transactions forever, while that other guy gets nothing. (as an intuition pump, consider an archaeologist who spends years narrowing down the location of a pirate treasure to a beach in Florida, then digs there and finds it. Whatever the finders-keepers law, we would feel like in some sense she had earned the treasure. But consider another world where God announces on 1/1/2023 “THERE IS A TREASURE ON THIS BEACH IN FLORIDA!”, and everyone rushes there, and whoever ran the fastest got it. Again, regardless of the actual finders-keepers law, we would feel like that person hadn’t really earned the treasure, just beaten the next person by a couple of seconds. Or maybe there are some weak qualifications - you have to be a strong person who owns a shovel - but there are many strong people with shovels and it’s mostly luck that one of them was closer than another. ) This . . . maybe still isn’t a good argument to tax Jeff Bezos or distribute his money to his employees? Taken seriously, it implies that the only person who Bezos has “stolen” any money from is the second-best entrepreneur. But that isn’t exactly right. Suppose that if Bezos hadn’t existed, the next potential Amazon founder would be two years later, the next founder one year after that, the next founder six months after that, and so on (we assume Amazon becomes more obvious and easier to found as the Internet revolution continues). A few years after Amazon was founded, the number of counterfactual founders reaches the thousands - at some point the tech space is so saturated, and the idea of founding a big store is so obvious, that each counterfactual-founder is only shaving days or hours off of the next one’s time. So one way of thinking about this is that of the $250 billion portion of the surplus that the system has allocated to Bezos, Bezos “deserves” two years’ worth, the second-best entrepreneur “deserves” one years’ worth, and then a whole bunch of other people “deserve” a few dollars. But this doesn’t really make sense, because all the other entrepreneurs didn’t (non-counterfactually) do any work. (you could argue that Bezos is being paid not just for his idea, but for the hard work of serving as CEO of Amazon over many years. I’m skeptical of this because it seems like the fair wage for that would be the going rate for top-tier CEOs, which is very high but not hundreds of billions of dollars. So fine, subtract that small amount out, but the rest still seems to be some sense of paying Bezos for his idea.) But another way of thinking about this might be to imagine these people in some kind of abstract counterfactual competition with Bezos; in a world where they were all able to found their giant retail sites (because there was no natural monopoly), they would have driven down Amazon prices and given more of the surplus to consumers - they might also have competed for workers and driven wages up. So in this sense, maybe Bezos’ extra portion of the surplus is in some sense coming from ordinary people. This would be surprising, because Amazon already has very low prices. But given that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion, there must be some world in which $200 billion more could have gone to consumers through lower prices. I don’t know what a fair economic system that takes this model into account would look like. It wouldn’t look like “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, because it might be that pushing Amazon forward by two years is indeed worth several billion dollars. It wouldn’t even look like “higher taxes on all billionaires in the hopes of having them have less money and maybe that will bring them closer to the fair level”, because plausibly some billionaires aren’t replaceable - I’m not sure anyone else would have started SpaceX if Musk hadn’t. But this model convinces me that “taxing billionaires a lot” and “taxing billionaires not at all” are at least two different unfair failure modes with their own advantages and disadvantages from a desert point of view.	Scott Alexander	68526927	Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability	acx
# Open Thread 239 1. I've decided to publish ten more book reviews the next ten Fridays. The new finalists are . . . haha, just kidding! The 2022 Book Review Contest is over. Please vote for your favorite [here](https://forms.gle/1SoLaZhR3ESN1CFA6). No fancy voting system this year, just pick one. In case you’ve forgotten your options, they are: * [Consciousness And The Brain](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and) * [Making Nature](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-making-nature) (history of the scientific journal Nature) * [The Anti-Politics Machine](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics) (how development aid goes wrong) * [The Castrato](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato) * [The Dawn Of Everything](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything) (ancient hunter-gatherers) * [The Future Of Fusion Energy](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion) * [The Internationalists](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists) (treaty to make war illegal) * [The Outlier](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier) (biography of Jimmy Carter) * [The Righteous Mind](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind) * [The Society Of The Spectacle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the) * [Viral](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral) (was COVID a lab leak?) * [Exhaustion](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion) (chronic fatigue) * [God Emperor Of Dune](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune) * [1587: A Year Of No Significance](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no) (Ming China) * [Kora In Hell](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell) (William Carlos Williams poetry) 2: The ACX podcast team is involved in a new project, [Radio Bostrom](https://radiobostrom.com/), broadcasting works by futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom. 3: In case you missed it, Astral Codex Ten [is having](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and) in-person meetups in about two hundred cities worldwide. This coming week’s biggest meetups include Canberra on Wednesday, Helsinki on Saturday, and Tel Aviv next Sunday - but there are also many more, [check here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and) for the full list.	Scott Alexander	70705925	Open Thread 239	acx
# Your Book Review: Kora In Hell [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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.] > The sense that everything is poetical is a > thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter > of phraseology or persuasion. — G.K. Chesterton ## I. William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references’ number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire: > “When they came to question the girl before the local judge it was discovered that there were seventeen men more or less involved so that there was nothing to do but to declare the child a common bastard and send the girl about her business. Her mother took her in and after the brat died of pneumonia a year later she called in the police one day. An officer opened the bedroom door. The girl was in bed with an eighteenth fellow, a young roaming loafer with a silly grin to his face. They forced a marriage which relieved the mother of her burden. The girl was weak minded so that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could cover her moves, in fact she never could do so with success.” In another interpretation of the title, the author sees himself as the Spring and he feels like he is being captured and taken to Hades. Although he also says he didn’t get very far, only to New York on weekends to drink with his artist buddies. Besides his friendship/rivalry with Pound, there’s also one of those with T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s gimmick is knowing everything, being very cultured, very erudite, speaking every language, mastering and combining and quoting every poetic form under the sun. And while Pound took himself very seriously and Eliot was somewhat more lighthearted, both represent Western Tradition incarnate in mortal bodies, cultural classicists who felt everything was obviously better in ages past, and their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition, reprising old forms but, in Pound’s slogan, “Making Them New” so as to keep them alive and fresh and fascist. WCW is in the antipodes of all that. He looks ahead. When seemingly every single one of his friends expatriated to the Old World, to Paris or London in order to build their audiences there, he stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he lived during most of his life. In America, he felt, everything was yet to be made, and Eliot, in his project of first somehow turning British and then knowing and preserving everything ancient in poetic jars of quotation, was robbing other American poets blind, contemporaries and even those yet to emerge in the future. So yet another interpretation of the title is that WCW is not the Spring taken to Hades. WCW is Demeter, Persephone’s mom, who is desperately moving Heaven and Earth to get her daughter, the American poets of the future, back from the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. ## II. As its name implies, the Improvisations is not a meticulously planned book. It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey. William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning and when he returned home at night, no matter how late it was, before going to bed, he wrote something, anything, and at the end of the year he had a pile of texts in front of him which were now the rough precursor of a book. Those texts were loosely based on what had happened to him throughout that day, or on something he had seen or thought about. Williams wrote the book during 1917, when he was around 34 years old. That’s the age Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy: > “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita > > mi ritrovai per una selva oscura > > ché la diritta via era smarrita.” Middle life, dark jungle, lost the way. Or, as WCW puts it: > “In middle life the mind passes to a variegated October. This is the time youth in its faulty aspirations has set for achievement of great summits. But having attained the mountain top one is not snatched into a cloud but the descent proffers its blandishments quite as a matter of course. At this the fellow is cast into a great confusion and rather plaintively looks about to see if any has fared better than he.” This is the early Midlife Crisis of a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. According to the doctor himself, some entries were basically gibberish and were discarded at the time of publication. Only 81 from presumably 365 days survived. Each one had a particular meaning, but Ezra Pound urged his friend to “give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at the poet’s intention”, so WCW added a commentary. In his own words: “Notes of explanation often more dense than the first writing. Explain further what I intended would be tautological.” They’re stuff like “It has always been the fashion to talk about the moon” or “The poet transforms himself into a satyr and goes in pursuit of a white skinned dryad. The gaiety of his mood full of lustihood, even so, turns back with a mocking jibe.“ What they very clearly state is that in middle life, WCW is very horny all the time. He drives around town and countryside, watches people, gets horny, then even hornier, talks to people, has a great ear for their voices, a great medical eye for little details, knows the names of all the flowers and which ones can be used in abortions (pennyroyal), then gets home and writes. The style is part aphoristic and part like the highbrow version of passive-aggressive Tweets, where you know the people you’re talking about might be reading and you want plausible deniability. Both the town and the artist circles WCW moved among were small communities, where everyone knew everyone else and probably could infer the specific person you were talking about when you said, for example: > “The empty form drops from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his phallus-like argument.” Or when you’re fashion policing everyone to death: > “Who can speak of justice when young men wear round hats and carry bundles wrapped in paper” > “It is no part of the eternal truth to wear white canvas shoes and a pink coat.” Williams also comments on his chosen profession: > “Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture. Over and above all this floats the philosophy of disease which is a stern dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing flowers to the sick.” Shares Don’t-speak-to-me-until-I’ve-had-my-coffee type of memes: > “Many a morning, were’t not for a cup of coffee, a man would be lonesome enough no matter how his child gambols.” And has opinions about the concept of Surplus Value: > “A lattice screen say fifty feet long by seven high, such a thing as is built to cut off some certain part of a yard from public view, is surprisingly expensive to put up” “Carry clapping bundles of lath-strips, adjust, dig, saw on a diagonal, hammer a thousand ends fast and discover afterward the lattice-arbor top’s clean lines in a dust of dew (...) It is a wonder the artisan cannot afford more than the luxury of these calculations” The general idea is that “A poem can be made of anything”.This is simply because any discreet word possesses many possible meanings. First, the immediate, direct, as in the word Apple means a type of fruit to anyone who speaks English. And then the internal, indirect: Apple means Sin or Temptation or New York or the color Red or the color Green or a Record Company or a Tech Company or all of that at the same time and more depending on the specific conjunction of reader and writer, and that internal meaning is, according to Wassily Kandinsky, “the pure matter of poetry and literature, the material which these arts alone can manipulate and through which they speak to the spirit” Kora In Hell follows a Romantic program in the sense that when one reads WCW one feels that what he is talking about has happened to him. That this is something personal. When he says: > “A man watches his wife clean house. He is filled with knowledge by his wife’s exertions. This is uncomprehensible to her. Knowing she will never understand his excitement he consoles himself with the thought of art.” He is talking about his house, himself and his wife, and also knows that she will probably read the book at some point. This is different from what happens with classical works of art. They have something alien in them. We don't really know if “that” has happened to Eliot or Pound, because they're outside and above the poem. Instead with Williams we are sure that when he talks about a white skinned dryad, that dryad really crossed paths with him. There is closeness between the artist and the work. So, in a sense, WCW and the way in which he wrote ARE the text. ## III. Improvisation is not random crap in a random order. Pizza banana turtle thirty nine ninja Carlos ninjams. Random crap is the Surrealist’s program. They were looking for ways for the unconscious to express itself unmediated by reason, such as hypnosis, drugs, dream mining or automatic writing, and the problem turned out to be that the unconscious is generally lazy or insane. Frida Kahlo met a bunch of them when she went to Paris and claimed: > “They talk endlessly about 'culture', 'art', 'revolution' etc. They think they are the gods of the world, they dream of the most fantastic nonsense and poison the air with theories and more theories that never come true. The next morning, they have nothing to eat at home, because none of them work.” And the Surrealists answered pizza banana turtle thirty nine ninja Carlos ninjams. Checkmate, Frida. Now, good improvisation is very rigorous. There is a method to the madness. A Jazz musician improvises, but within a few scales. That’s how a whole band can improvise in tandem. When someone improvises too much, that is, they are creating the rules as they go along or, worse still, decide that there are no rules, then it is not improvisation but delirium. Improvisation is establishing which rules I am going to follow and then, without taking time to plan, coordinate or strategize, all of the sudden, I do something artistic: writing, painting, music, etc. If I decide to play the piano and just bash a random key, that's not improvisation. That's, well, nothing. And what amazes the public about the improviser is how they create difficulties for themselves and then overcome them. When we see a good improviser in action, when we see them arting at such speed, we marvel like we’re seeing a wizard arriving precisely when he means to. Improvisation is the Zen way to do the thing. If a Zen Master asks you a question, you can’t stop and ponder it because then he starts beating you with his stick. You must Improvise. This is also the way martial artists are supposed to fight. My source is, of course, Jackie Chan movies. He doesn’t do the Robert Downey Jr. 's Sherlock Holmes thing where he freezes time to calculate in detail where every punch will land and how the opponent will react. He just goes. But before going he trained every day and repeated each move many many times until it became ingrained in his muscles. Williams: “That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it.” To improvise you reIy on intuition, the part of your brain which thinks so fast it’s not really thinking. If you speak Spanish every day and I say “La sombrero ser mucho grande” you know that’s wrong before you can explain exactly everything that’s wrong with that sentence. If you don’t speak Spanish, you may know that’s wrong even though you don’t speak Spanish just by virtue of having watched a buch of American movies where they show a dumb American saying stuff like that to show he’s a dumb American. There are many paths to knowledge, that’s what I’m trying to say, and as Jackie Chan knows very well, intuition has to be trained. If you don’t, you may still try to intuit your way out of problems, but your intuition will probably be wrong more often than not and you’ll get demolished. In the same way, imagination has to be trained. For Benedetto Croce, aesthetics is the science of expression. A strong artist relates to their environment like a prism with light. They take lame, generic white light and produce a rainbow. They take experience and turn it into symbols, which in the case of a poet would be discreet sounds, and words. “A frail imagination, unequal to the tasks before it, is easily led astray”. If you think in an endless stream of cliches, you will improvise an endless stream of cliches. If you’re the Hindu god Brahma, you’ll improvise the Universe like you’re dancing. And while dancing as creation is an important metaphor for Williams, that’s not the end of the story. We are not actually seeing WCW improvising on the fly. He takes his method from Kandinsky and the method is “Never go Full Unconscious”. For Kandinsky, improvisation is a way through which an artist reaches a higher form, which is composition. You use your improvisation as material for your final work. That’s why only 81 entries survive in Kora In Hell from the original 365. Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning. Composition is then an act of love and care towards the reader, and is what classicists and romantics share in their method. ## IV. That 81 number is not random. It’s the 3-based form Williams was following.There are three sections: the introduction, the improvisations and the commentaries, roughly equal in length. There are twenty seven parts with three improvisations each. Threes everywhere. All the triads come, of course, from Kandinsky, whose method also has three parts: The preparation, the improvisation and the composition. Kandinsky also had a theory of color, in which he claimed colors have physical and psychical effects and are also part of a system of correspondences. White is birth, black is death, green is nature, yellow is happiness, blue is peace and so on. Literary critics will sometimes talk about a text by mapping such correspondences, because the craft is descended from the hermeneutics of Holy Books, where correct interpretation could turn out to be the key to salvation or enlightenment or knowledge of divine will, and this often scares people away from reading primary sources. For example, every chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses references an event in the Odyssey, sure, but how the hell are you supposed to figure out on your own that each one is dominated by a particular color and a particular part of the body and so on if an expert doesn’t tell you that. Well, it turns out it’s not that important. It’s just something Joyce did to encourage himself to continue writing his Holy Book dedicated to the God of Art. You can extract meaning from his fried inner organs of beasts and fowls, but that’s because you can extract meaning from anywhere. What Joyce really wanted was an excuse to show off his verbal powers. It’s hard and complicated on purpose, like getting into a fight with ten people to justify that you’ve been doing martial arts every day for decades. Even if you don’t know that red is supposed to make you angry or that everything in the world is secretly the number three or what’s up with all the circles and rings, you can still enjoy Kora In Hell. Williams is usually thought of as a visual poet, in the sense that he uses a lot of visual metaphors and really really likes to talk about painting, paintings and painters like Kandinsky. But as he jumps from metaphor to metaphor I personally found the best way to understand what he is saying is to follow logically the way words unravel themselves in space. That is a visual metaphor for, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, a rational, continuous and uniform way of reading a text which is in itself not rational, but discontinuous and fragmentary. “Many matters are touched but not held by the speed of emotions thrashing, more often broken by the contact, and by the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way”. Like Cortazar's Hopscotch, Kora in Hell lets you alter the order in which you read it. Williams: “There’s more sense in a sentence heard backwards than forwards most times.” If you prefer, again in McLuhan's terms, the participatory, incomplete, mosaic images, you should definitely start with the improvisations, and maybe even skip the commentary altogether. Ezra Pound said “It is not necessary to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so.” But if you like rationality, and if you’re reading this you probably do, then you can start with the commentary and use it as a frame of reference. Just keep in mind the WCW dictum: “Poetry makes logic a butterfly.”	Scott Alexander	70509069	Your Book Review: Kora In Hell	acx
# Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq. You can find the list below, in the following order: 1. Africa & Middle East 2. Asia-Pacific (including Australia) 3. Canada 4. Europe (including UK) 5. Latin America 6. United States You can see a map of all the events on [the LessWrong community page](https://www.lesswrong.com/community). Within each section, it’s alphabetized first by country/state, then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria. Sorry if this is confusing. I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. ACX meetups coordinator Mingyuan will provisionally be attending Paris and London. I’ll be announcing some of the biggest ones on the blog, regardless of whether or not I attend. 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 for all 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 pens 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 meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com. ## AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: MA, tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: WolframSigma#1532, [Telegram](https://t.me/Wolfram_Sigma) Time: Friday, September 2, 11:00 AM Location: Grinders Coffeeshop Coordinates: [8H568FG6+73](https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3B2mXzRaLGBAkZLEK/baghdad-iraq-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) JERUSALEM, ISRAEL Contact: Zvi Schreiber, zvi[at]zvi[dot]net, WhatsApp +972 54 569 1100 Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:00 PM Location: Malcha technology park garden Coordinates: [8G3QP5XP+PP](https://plus.codes/8G3QP5XP+PP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pMjEs8y9CMjHCmKXA/jerusalem-israel-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) REHOVOT, ISRAEL Contact: David Manheim, David[at]alter[dot]org[dot]il Time: Sunday, September 11, 8:00 PM Location: Outside porch of Aroma Coffee, הרצל 218, רחובות Coordinates: [8G3PWR25+MP](https://plus.codes/8G3PWR25+MP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MRPvDBunQoNGdquct/rehovot-israel-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/737808667280605/) Notes: Please RSVP [on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/737808667280605/) so we can give updates if needed TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Adam & inbar M, projectscentrum[at]gmail[dot]com, inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com, Whatsapp +46762791415 (Adam) Time: Sunday, September 4, 7:00 PM Location: Hamenia industrial loft at Beit Alfa 7 (רחוב בית אלפא 7). Look for a door with ACX sign. Two floors up. Coordinates: [8G4P3Q8Q+85](https://plus.codes/8G4P3Q8Q+85) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M9s9akMJuBP5vEAp6/tel-aviv-israel-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We've just made a [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361) and are planning to organize monthly meetings going forward Notes: For questions contact Adam on email or WhatsApp. Feel free to bring a snack or a bottle of white wine. AMMAN, JORDAN Contact: Daniel, dnledvs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 6:30 PM Location: Rustic, Jabal al Weibdeh Coordinates: [8G3QXW49+WG](https://plus.codes/8G3QXW49+WG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3y5tkvBcEAoZ82Kqk/amman-jordan-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: We're hoping to grow the group, so feel free to come even if you've only read a few posts! +1s are also welcome. CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Mark Chimes, chimes[dot]mark[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 0826568573 Time: Saturday, September 17, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table Coordinates: [4FRW3CFF+3M](https://plus.codes/4FRW3CFF+3M) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N38LgkyBos3ecZsDn/cape-town-south-africa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We met up pre-Covid and pre-ACX as an SSC group. Now we're getting back in the swing of things. We eat lunch and chat about philosophy, politics, and sometimes SSC/ACX blog posts. Notes: We're planning on having another meetup on the 8th October if you can't make the first. DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA Contact: Arno, arnorohwedder[at]gmail[dot]com, +255763998637 Time: Thursday, September 29, 7:30 PM Location: The Deck, Masaki Coordinates: [6G5X776J+X6](https://plus.codes/6G5X776J+X6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/snioFFaDRwZGeJKbd/dar-es-salaam-tanzania-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Seeing if there are any interested people in Dar, look forward to meeting, if you are coming please send me a whatsapp. DUBAI, UAE Contact: RS, xyxyxz[at]gmail[dot]com, +971552726281 (WhatsApp) Time: Friday, September 30, 7:30 PM Location: Starbucks, Garhoud Coordinates: [7HQQ68VR+94](https://plus.codes/7HQQ68VR+94) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YQTCQbrDgnyJZGbrd/dubai-uae-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Met once before Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong, or message me on WhatsApp ## ASIA-PACIFIC BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jarred Filmer, jarred[dot]filmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: 52 McCaul Street Taringa (house) Coordinates: [5R4JFXXQ+P8](https://plus.codes/5R4JFXXQ+P8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMoWmm9K5yva9863c/brisbane-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/4GTPFvq9X) Group info: We used to meet once a month years ago, but now just meet whenever there's a Meetups Everywhere :) Notes: Snacks will be provided but dinner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: [4RPFP4FC+34](https://plus.codes/4RPFP4FC+34) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDc3qGbxzzshYkgQQ/canberra-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/canberra-astral-codex-ten-meetup-tickets-403786735997) Notes: Parking area just to the north of the pub, over the river, is free after 5pm! GOLD COAST (SOUTH), AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan, lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: [5R3MVF5W+555](https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+555) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5MtinxQrbLKm5MJ8C/gold-coast-south-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time etc. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan, xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 2, 6:00 PM Location: Beer Deluxe Federation Square Coordinates: [4RJ65XM9+3Q](https://plus.codes/4RJ65XM9+3Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dnEMoKTKHttDn4uMx/melbourne-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne) Group info: We're officially the Less Wrong Melbourne social meetup group, though our members include the broader rationalist community. We meet once a month for casual discussion (and beers for those so inclined). Please join [our Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne) to see the meeting invite; there you will see a WhatsApp group link - please join that group too to ensure timely updates in case of changes (Facebook notifications don't work reliably for this). Notes: Please RSVP to the meeting invite on the [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne) so that I can make an appropriate booking. PERTH, AUSTRALIA Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: [4PWQ3V34+W6](https://plus.codes/4PWQ3V34+W6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jvPXne8xLfSvBtphm/perth-western-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/1DzOT1Oc1) Group info: I run one meetup per year, if someone else wants to take over please do Notes: Please RSVP on [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jvPXne8xLfSvBtphm/perth-western-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) or [Facebook](https://fb.me/e/1DzOT1Oc1) SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 6:00 PM Location: City of Sydney rsl, lvl 2 in the fishbowl Coordinates: [4RRH46F4+983](https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+983) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7KWrgmkGBx4P6cGCq/sydney-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://meetu.ps/e/LlSlG/sqK6x/i) Group info: We meet monthly WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jason, jason[dot]bowkettblogs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: UOW Library Coordinates: [4RQGHVVH+69](https://plus.codes/4RQGHVVH+69) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EBNNjBsDKrjvXTrRm/wollongong-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) CHENGDU, CHINA Contact: Alex, acx[dot]chengdu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 7:00 PM Location: Chef Wenwu Hot & Spicy Jianghu Food (Yulin store)/文武大厨·热辣江湖菜(玉林店). I (a foreigner) will be wearing a green shirt. Coordinates: [8P26J3C5+462](https://plus.codes/8P26J3C5+462) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aWLLqJHj768bDuiej/chengdu-china-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP at the above email address, I will give you my Wechat contact if you're interested in attending. Open to time/date/location changes, so let me know if the proposed event doesn't work for you! Can be a bilingual event; all welcome. 有双语交流的可能性。如果想来的话，请提前发给我个电子邮件。 HONG KONG Contact: Nathan, nathan[at]xevarion[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan. Big wooden door. Coordinates: [862M74PW+6XP](https://plus.codes/862M74PW+6XP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/379uazsESWCoRofss/hong-kong-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal, propwash[at]duck[dot]com, Discord: propwash#4648 Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: [7J4VXJF4+PR](https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8rXYeNGZZLN8D3eCn/bangalore-acx-meetups-everywhere-22-september-social) Group info: We're the longest active group in Asia — we've been meeting monthly for the last 4 years, discussing ACX posts, LW content with a diverse and friendly group of people. Check [our website](https://bangalorelw.notion.site/Bangalore-LW-ACX-Group-55a0dcdec7a24217937fc8c9f6971458) for more info. Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8rXYeNGZZLN8D3eCn/bangalore-acx-meetups-everywhere-22-september-social) to help me be better prepared. HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal, vmehra[at]pm[dot]me, Whatsapp: +919944430856 (username: Vim) Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India Coordinates: [7J9WFF4X+5P](https://plus.codes/7J9WFF4X+5P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/42AqdjyNtD8pggg3v/hyderabad-india-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Our rationality meetup group has been around for about 3 months and we discuss articles and exercises (eg. CFAR handbook) that can help us improve epistemic and instrumental rationality. MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB, e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 4:00 PM Location: Jamjar Diner, Versova Coordinates: [7JFJ4RM6+5W](https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RM6+5W) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fdPdvbnXAnhjoMEwC/meetups-everywhere-2022-1) Notes: Please RSVP [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fdPdvbnXAnhjoMEwC/meetups-everywhere-2022-1) or via email so I can plan activities accordingly. NEW DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi, suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp/phone +919997299972 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Select CityWalk Mall, Saket. Where inside the mall depends on the number of people interested. Coordinates: [7JWVG6H9+8H](https://plus.codes/7JWVG6H9+8H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aJzhkotvXtRhbLGJE/acx-meetup-in-delhi) Notes: Please either send me an email or message me on WhatsApp if you want to attend. Any suggestions/changes are welcome. UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA Contact: Shailendra Paliwal, acx-meetup-2022[at]shailendra[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: We'll be at Doodh Talai near Pichola Lake and I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt carrying a sign ACX Meetup Coordinates: [7JPMHM9M+HG](https://plus.codes/7JPMHM9M+HG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vZNhLEukzdZoz6d8k/acx-meetup-udaipur-2022) Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vZNhLEukzdZoz6d8k/acx-meetup-udaipur-2022) so that I can plan ahead UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: William Ubud, Napaproject[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, August 30, 6:00 PM Location: PARQ Ubud Coordinates: [6P3QG789+F7](https://plus.codes/6P3QG789+F7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RaGPKQRPaWXRyKdCt/ubud-bali-indonesia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Godsoe, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 AM Location: Near Nakameguro station - RSVP for details Coordinates: [8Q7XJPV2+QFP](https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QFP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWdjjfqPB4Qnh4CMM/tokyo-japan-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/events/287853319/) Notes: ACX Tokyo meets monthly since Sept 2021. Our meetups are in English, so far. To join in, feel free to get in touch in any of the many ways to do so (email, [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/)). It's useful to be in contact before coming to an event, to help with that first leap of faith. KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang, yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com, [LessWrong profile](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/yiyang) Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: I'll be in [Lisette's Bangsar](https://g.page/Lisettes-Bangsar), which is a 5-minute walk from Bangsar LRT. I'll be wearing a pale green t-shirt and carrying an ACX sign. Coordinates: [6PM34MHH+VW](https://plus.codes/6PM34MHH+VW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iEJWoPyPYj5jBcbey/acx-ssc-kuala-lumpur-meetup) AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Jonathan De Wet, jonpdw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:30 PM Location: 32 Stanley Ave Milford, Auckland Coordinates: [4VMP6QH4+86](https://plus.codes/4VMP6QH4+86) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5vnCGsiqrf42PLBHx/auckland-new-zealand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/2a4Po9eKl) Notes: It’s a dinner party! Please [RSVP on FB](https://fb.me/e/2a4Po9eKl) so I know how much food to make DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin, bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Picnic tables outside of St. David's lecture theatre on Otago University campus. I'll make a sign with ACX meetup. Coordinates: [4V6G4GP7+GM5](https://plus.codes/4V6G4GP7+GM5) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nzk5rtFBszkhEbAg4/dunedin-new-zealand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: There is no Dunedin group as far as I'm aware of, but I'd be keen to meet other likeminded people and organise group hangouts occasionally. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 27, 5:30 PM Location: Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington. Room MZ05, which is on the mezzanine floor Coordinates: [4VCPPQCH+FGC](https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+FGC) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uyioaxnSKoMzieBHD/wellington-new-zealand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington LAPU LAPU, CEBU, PHILIPPINES Contact: Dave, tokkolizard[at]tutanota[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Starbucks in Mactan Newtown, there will be a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [7Q268257+4F](https://plus.codes/7Q268257+4F) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9imzeGnTpHFm33em/lapu-lapu-cebu-philippines-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP by mail so I know if I need to set up a bigger meeting place SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng, jonathan[dot]ng1[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram @derpy Time: Tuesday, September 6, 6:30 PM Location: Tanjong Pagar MRT gantry, I'll be wearing the dark blue EA Global 2022 jumper Coordinates: [6PH57RGW+J8](https://plus.codes/6PH57RGW+J8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/F2gPBiSKuWSaamRhG/acx-meetup-2022-singapore) ## CANADA CALGARY, AB Contact: David Piepgrass, qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Marlborough Mall food court Coordinates: [9538324C+CH9](https://plus.codes/9538324C+CH9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BkR7K9ogw6RKAhKvk/calgary-ab-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: It's small! EDMONTON, AB Contact: JS, ⁨ta1hynp09[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 13, 6:30 PM Location: Polar Park Brewing Company - we will have a sign. Coordinates: [9558GG82+GG](https://plus.codes/9558GG82+GG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bhAwA6CeQAwyz2BPp/meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG) VANCOUVER, BC Contact: Tom Ash and Dirk Haupt, events[at]philosofiles[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Dude Chilling (aka Guelph) Park, near the intersection of Main, Broadway & Kingsway. We'll be just west of the garden - look for Tom in a neon yellow shirt. Coordinates: [84XR7W73+PG](https://plus.codes/84XR7W73+PG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3vBpskKoyBFi3fuYX/vancouver-bc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/593192119179410/) Group info: For future events, join the following: For rationalism, [this Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/vanrationality), for effective altruism, [this Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/vancouvereffectivealtruists) for both, [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism/) Notes: 🍣 We'll have a sushi lunch for everyone who comes (fish or vegan). This is not at all necessary, but posting on the Facebook event to say you will or won't want this will help estimate numbers. RSVPing there will help boost attendance too. VICTORIA, BC Contact: Sarah McManus, sarahmcmanusbc[at]gmail[dot]com, Twitter @SarahAMcManus Time: Friday, September 23, 7:00 PM Location: Snowy Village, 4071 Shelbourne St #2a, Victoria, BC V8N 5Y1 - It's a small cafe, I'll be at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it Coordinates: [84WRFMG9+H3](https://plus.codes/84WRFMG9+H3) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ECZd4s9YAEqXHnxSz/victoria-bc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/5708264749193151/) HALIFAX, NS Contact: Conor Barnes (ideopunk), conorbarnes93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 1:00 PM Location: Seven Bays Cafe (2017 Gottingen Street) Coordinates: [87PRMC29+9C](https://plus.codes/87PRMC29+9C) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KvkAmjJJcRZzzwrrn/halifax-ns-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Join us at Seven Bayes KITCHENER-WATERLOO, ON Contact: Jenn, hi[at]jenn[dot]site Time: Sunday, September 25, 1:00 PM Location: Goudie's Lane, besides 8 Queen St N, Kitchener. I'll be wearing white boots and at one of the picnic tables if it's not raining, or further back in the parking area if it is. There will be some sort of ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: [86MXFG26+5CV](https://plus.codes/86MXFG26+5CV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zhdMvHgh6CfkCBzpB/meetups-everywhere-kitchener-waterloo) Group info: We have a new regular meetup group! We meet up every other Thursday. Events are posted [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NiM9cQJ5qXqhdmP5p), and we also have [a website](https://kwrationality.ca/). Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if possible, but show up anyways if you weren't able to! Generally, past meetups everywhere events have attracted 8-15 people. OTTAWA, ON Contact: Tess Walsh, rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:00 PM Location: We are meeting at the Atelier d'innovation sociale, located at 95 Clegg St, K1S1C5. Specifically in the Lounge area, there will be numerous signs for ACX MEETUP where needed. Coordinates: [87Q6C84F+PM4](https://plus.codes/87Q6C84F+PM4) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ugtbQxM8HhoKok6KB/ottawa-on-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/375274231447988) Group info: We meet weekly on Friday evenings, and that allows us enough opportunity to try out a huge variety of different types of events — probably some that you, yes you, would enjoy! Here are our [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa), [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4), and [Discord](https://discord.gg/zk7aAFt6FZ) (where the action really is) Notes: I always appreciate RSVP's in any form! It helps me set expectations/plan the best meetup I can! You can also contact me, Tess Walsh, with any questions whatsoever at [rationalottawa@gmail.com](mailto:rationalottawa@gmail.com) TORONTO, ON Contact: Sean Aubin, seanaubin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 3:00 PM Location: Located at the picnic tables located in The Bentway, which is the sheltered area underneath the Gardiner Expressway. Coordinates: [87M2JHPR+X5W](https://plus.codes/87M2JHPR+X5W) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jXAxEpnk8KK6xAfqX/acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Currently meeting monthly with ambitions to meet bi-monthly. Notes: Please RSVP [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jXAxEpnk8KK6xAfqX/acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) so I know how many people to anticipate. WATERLOO, ONSee Kitchener-Waterloo, ON MONTREAL, QC Contact: E, 90u610sye[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com⁩ Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:00 PM Location: Jeanne-Mance Park, at the corner of Duluth and Esplanade Coordinates: [87Q8GC89+37](https://plus.codes/87Q8GC89+37) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oSwZHswrEnudpYzBh/acx-montreal-meetups-everywhere-september-24-2022) Group info: We meet once a month. Upcoming events will be posted [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia) Notes: Please check the [LessWrong event page](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oSwZHswrEnudpYzBh/acx-montreal-meetups-everywhere-september-24-2022) the day of, as I will update it in the event of rain ## EUROPE VIENNA, AUSTRIA Contact: Manuel, manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: [8FWR693H+GP2](https://plus.codes/8FWR693H+GP2) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rQqd6vuNuLhvzMCc2/vienna-austria-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Rationality Vienna is a group of about 30 people who meet once a month in person or via Zoom. You can join our [Facebook group](https://facebook.com/groups/579192105439508). Notes: We may want to shift to an indoor location depending on weather and the local Covid numbers. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM Contact: Bruno D, bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Guingette Henri, George Henri parc Coordinates: [9F26RCWC+84](https://plus.codes/9F26RCWC+84) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/LExfCQMT7tq55pPsQ/acx-meetup-brussels) SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Shade Garden (Сенчестата градинка; part of Borisova garden) Coordinates: [8GJ5M8GW+J9](https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+J9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fMqAXv5styEfG5LFp/sofia-bulgaria-acx-september-2022-meetup) Group info: Sofia ACX started with last year's Meetups Everywhere round. We have Serious Meetups once per month at which we discuss a blog post, a short story, or a book (for instance, The Scout Mindset, The Money Illusion, The Metropolitan Man); and sporadic non-serious social meetups that mostly include getting dinner, going on a walk, watching a film, or playing board games. Attendance hovers around 6-8 people out of a pool of 13. People get invited to the Discord server after they've attended at least one in-person meetup. ZAGREB, CROATIA Contact: DJStern, dorian[dot]sternvukotic[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM Location: Krivi Put Coordinates: [8FQQRX38+V6W](https://plus.codes/8FQQRX38+V6W) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bujJZ3cvzT56avAC4/zagreb-croatia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Croatian LessWrong active group communicates mainly through a Telegram group, we meetup semi regularly, approx once a month. The group is mostly social, and the meetups are not structured (sometimes we all just meet at a random party) Notes: Send me an Email and I will add you to a Telegram group where everything (active) LessWrong Croatia/Zagreb happens LIMASSOL, CYPRUS Contact: Arseniy, runescape[at]list[dot]ru, @anchorheld (Telegram / Instagram) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: By the Municipal Zoo Coordinates: [8G6MM3M3+Q6](https://plus.codes/8G6MM3M3+Q6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEhdcj7YyCYNSPQvd/limassol-cyprus-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please hit me up on Mail, Telegram, or Instagram if you're actually going PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz Time: Thursday, October 6, 6:00 PM Location: Garden of Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: [9F2P3CRW+FP7](https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FP7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zYW643GauTYiZFtti/astral-codex-ten-meetup-in-prague-oct-6), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/773464107112862) COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: [9F7JMH38+GFP](https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/dxBR5r2qrudrQePps/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/1ZA7cFDYj), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/astralcodexten-lesswrong-copenhagen/events/287874823/) Notes: Please RSVP [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/dxBR5r2qrudrQePps/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup) TALLINN, ESTONIA Contact: Andrew W, andrew\_n\_west[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Monday, September 26, 7:00 PM Location: St Vitus, Tallinn. I don't know if anyone will turn up, but I'll be wearing a suit, a beard, and a book. Coordinates: [9GF6CPRH+MQ](https://plus.codes/9GF6CPRH+MQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mjJK5oMf5z7vi6Guo/tallinn-estonia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) HELSINKI, FINLAND Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56 Coordinates: [9GG65WMJ+2J](https://plus.codes/9GG65WMJ+2J) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oyNeedHHJ7BBAqBbT/helsinki-september-2022-meetup) Group info: [LessWrong group](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a995jZ2y2s9qWxjEy) FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE Contact: Ebrahim Akbari, ea[dot]akbari[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 6:00 PM Location: Glasgow bar, Fontainebleau Coordinates: [8FW4CP32+J8](https://plus.codes/8FW4CP32+J8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cjbKjK4RpxfmCqvMs/fontainebleau-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Olivier, w20l2qtf[at]mailer[dot]me, We have a [Discord](https://discord.gg/VMQq8r83GS) and a [matrix server](https://matrix.to/#/%23ssc-paris-meetups:matrix.org) (both servers are bridged together) Time: Friday, September 23, 6:00 PM Location: In the jardin du carrousel, next to jardin des Tuileries Coordinates: [8FW4V86J+GH](https://plus.codes/8FW4V86J+GH) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/So7Yy6o5ogH7sTzmy/paris-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Regular meetups organized via discord or the newsletter every 3 months with around 20 people. Notes: We have a mailing list if you are interested in future meetups. Please don't hesitate to send me an email to RSVP that you're coming to help gauge the interest. TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso, barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 7:00 PM Location: Bar 'Le Biergarten' (60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse). We'll be sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Coordinates: [8FM3HCQW+9H](https://plus.codes/8FM3HCQW+9H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SgPWHxawrek2PCYaG/toulouse-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP by email TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Evgenia Karunus, lakesare[at]gmail[dot]com, <https://twitter.com/lakesare> Time: Saturday, September 17, 7:00 PM Location: Coffee Place Coordinates: [8HH6MRQ2+WH](https://plus.codes/8HH6MRQ2+WH) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s9pjL8vktvEoxJHAi/tbilisi-georgia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Jörn, acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Tuesday, September 27, 7:00 PM Location: Chico Mendes Coordinates: [9F28Q3HJ+9Q](https://plus.codes/9F28Q3HJ+9Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i3Fx3uXZSnmkFE5ZA/aachen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP [here](https://terminplaner6.dfn.de/en/p/ddb19843a9a35fa506906ffb14f4f8a6-24950) so I can reserve the right number of tables. BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Ruben Arslan, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: Sunday, October 2, 2:00 PM Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: [9F4MG9H4+4X](https://plus.codes/9F4MG9H4+4X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/788mpeqMetW42v45m/berlin-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Google Calendar](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r?cid=YWh1dGtsMWk5ZWMxZXZmMTRnaGVvZGQzZXNAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ) Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. I'll bring some beverages. COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller, marcel\_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, October 8, 5:00 PM Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln, private venue, just ring the bell or follow the sign. Coordinates: [9F28WRMX+96H](https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+96H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/2QwpKyXvwiZ53G4HP) Group info: LW / ACX / Rationalist meetup group. Monthly, mostly social meetups. Other activities welcome. Unless noted otherwise we will meet at Marienweg 43 in 50858 Cologne on the 2nd Saturday of each month at 5 pm. Please email me to be added to our mailing list where deviations will be posted. Caution! September Meetup will be at a different venue! Notes: If you read this you are welcome. Our Covid rules are still in effect: You must be tested negative on the same day. Self tests will be available at the meetup. If there is any problem, like you do not find us or I did not see your mail, call me +491788862254. FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY Contact: Omar, info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 14, 6:00 PM Location: FlexRooms, Salzstr. 1, 79098 Freiburg. We will carry a cardboard sign saying “Rationality Freiburg”. Coordinates: [8FV9XVV2+V56](https://plus.codes/8FV9XVV2+V56) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4uaEuBkaKQDbuyvgh/freiburg-acx-ssc-meetup), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/rationality-freiburg/events/288007506/), [Website](https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/events/2022-10-14-acx-astral-codex-ten-meetup/) Group info: The group started in May 2022 and before the summer break we had five meetups with 4-11 people attending. Every two weeks seems like a good rhythm, but nothing is set in stone. So far we always read something beforehand and then discussed it, as well as trying some practical exercises such as TAPs and Personal Calibration. Afterwards we went to have dinner and continued talking about everything and anything for hours. Everything is new and flexible, so come and help us improve! Notes: We have a Signal messenger group and ask you to attend a meetup once to be able to join. HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. Here is [an Open Street Map link](https://routing.openstreetmap.de/?z=19&center=53.556405%2C9.979070&loc=53.556750%2C9.979792&loc=53.556922%2C9.977807&hl=de&alt=0&srv=1) which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station. Coordinates: [9F5FHX4H+RXC](https://plus.codes/9F5FHX4H+RXC) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5ZrDt9df7hAJMzdr3/hamburg-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022)[LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ZrDt9df7hAJMzdr3/hamburg-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5ZrDt9df7hAJMzdr3/hamburg-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) KARLSRUHE, GERMANY Contact: Marcus Wilhelm, mail[at]marcuswilhelm[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Botanischer Garten Karlsruhe Coordinates: [8FXC2C72+85X](https://plus.codes/8FXC2C72+85X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jarmJZpwSD8fJf23E/karlsruhe-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet weekly, alternating offline and online, see [our LessWrong page](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/kw7Zb8DLmZtsK8g3R) KASSEL, HESSEN, GERMANY Contact: Tobias, Sphinxfire[at]outlook[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Friedrichsplatz, to the left of the DocumentaHall Coordinates: [9F3F8F6X+R6](https://plus.codes/9F3F8F6X+R6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dXDsCvbC5bg5ePDWP/kassel-hessen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [Telegram group](https://t.me/+pmOE79F5Y7UzNDM6) Notes: Please join the [Telegram group](https://t.me/+pmOE79F5Y7UzNDM6) if you are interested in coming. It will be helpful for coordinating something beyond 'let's just see who shows up and take it from there', plus, it will also make me feel a lot better on a purely subjective level if I know beforehand that at least one other person is interested. If you prefer the surprise factor of 'knowing as little as possible about who you're going to meet', you can also just write me via E-mail, of course. LEIPZIG, GERMANY Contact: Gunther Forderung, notavailable[at]riseup[dot]net Time: Tuesday, October 4, 6:00 PM Location: In the Lene-Voigt-Park, in the secluded area opposite of the swings Coordinates: [9F3J8CM2+PF](https://plus.codes/9F3J8CM2+PF) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mx9i7SE4oycNAzEJ6/leipzig-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) TÜBINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Emma, emma[dot]tuebingen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 23, 6:00 PM Location: The ACX/SSC meetup and dinner (with vegan options) will be on October 23rd at the Annette Kade dormitory (Mohlstraße 44, [8FWFG3H5+XR](https://plus.codes/8FWFG3G6+4Q)). If you’d like to attend, please write me an email, and I’ll send you an invitation to our WhatsApp group. Coordinates: [8FWFG3H5+XR](https://plus.codes/8FWFG3H5+XR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sNHA8HqaQ8WgRqbZR/tuebingen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please email me to get my phone number. If a lot of people are out of town for the holidays and can't come we could meet on, say, October 1st. I would like to know how many people to expect. ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros, spyros[dot]dovas[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: [8G95WMQR+WRP](https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mrfg3rToDYdfydrwF/athens-greece-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/) Group info: We have organized 2 events so far, fall and spring, we just sit around and discuss. We have a Whatsapp group that hasn't picked up momentum yet. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/) BUDAPEST, HUNGARY Contact: Tim Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 19513120591 Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: Champs Sziget bar on Margit Sziget, near the front. I'll have a big hardcover copy in Hungarian of a book by Richard Dawkins. Coordinates: [8FVXG2CW+2H](https://plus.codes/8FVXG2CW+2H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/qWYn3YnAiDMM9zeGv/september-budapest-less-wrong-acx-meetup) Group info: We've been meeting in Budapest for two years now, with our first meeting being the 2020 ACX meetups everywhere. We meet about once a month, and usually we have two articles that are suggested reading that we discuss. CORK, IRELAND Contact: Mikey, Godojhana[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 6:00 PM Location: If sunny: The Lough. If not, then the game arcade on the parade Coordinates: [9C3HVGQ7+JQ](https://plus.codes/9C3HVGQ7+JQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uBDhAapmuFexLRHQd/cork-ireland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Lucius, lucius[at]bushnaq[dot]de, [LessWrong profile](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/lblack) Time: Sunday, October 2, 12:30 PM Location: Clement & Pekoe, William Street South, Dublin 2. We'll be sitting inside, and there'll be a sign with ACX written on it on the table Coordinates: [9C5M8PRP+JV](https://plus.codes/9C5M8PRP+JV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cP6hDGTKQJ36dwoXC/dublin-ireland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/g/BL6kvwT5iceHihitA/p/Rmxai4MXsPRopkYMT/) FOLIGNO, ITALY Contact: Mauro, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com, [LW profile](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/orfino-dottorsi), [Telegram](https://www.telegram.me/dottorsi) Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Coordinates: [8FJJXP22+HC](https://plus.codes/8FJJXP22+HC) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6uutDauxZwJsLjCM2/foligno-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. No kids please. MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - Primo Ventures / T8P, IInd floor. Coordinates: [8FQFF6C4+9C](https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJ37Y2k9RF8hpDJv4/milano-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet once per month. The group started in May 2022. Notes: Please RSVP by email by the 1st of September PADOVA, ITALY Contact: Carlo, carlo[dot]martinucci[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:30 PM Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :) Coordinates: [8FQH9VXG+9J](https://plus.codes/8FQH9VXG+9J) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hKdGGCBLi8tkD3bTw/padova-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: We'll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :) PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele, raffaelesalvia[at]alice[dot]it Time: Saturday, October 22, 5:00 PM Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri, near the steps of Palazzo della Carovana Coordinates: [8FMGPC92+R44](https://plus.codes/8FMGPC92+R44) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Tjrw8JzgaW9zahZM2/acx-schelling-meetup-3) ROMA, ITALY Contact: Grigorio, greghero12[at]gmail[dot]com, [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/GregorDeVillain), +393920366026 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be around Gardenie metro station, at the benches, and I will be wearing a red shirt and sitting on top of the station to be seen Coordinates: [8FHJVHP9+8F](https://plus.codes/8FHJVHP9+8F) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2jiaLnoadvAWWeac/roma-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet around 20-25 times a year but it is asymmetrical, focused in summer, Christmas and Easter. We discuss opinions, engage in circling, play games where we spot logical fallacies and biases by attacking our members ideological weakpoints and formalize some debating stances. Occasionally we find the willpower to devote meetups in steelmanning and understanding the outgroup (roughly 4-5 times a year) Notes: If you are into ACX enough to see this post, I believe we have enough common ground to be worth meeting each other. Aren't you curious who else is within this niche community in Rome? Come on, take a leap of faith. P.S. Would be nice if you sent me a message in WhatsApp with your name and probability of attendance, but I love walk-ins just fine. No space limit after all ;-) RIGA, LATVIA Contact: Andis, cerulean[dot]lemniscate[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill) Coordinates: [9G86X426+Q5Q](https://plus.codes/9G86X426+Q5Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/qepb2PenDsQjZ99a6) AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Kanarie Klub (Bellamyplein 51, 1053 AT Amsterdam) Coordinates: [9F469V89+W4](https://plus.codes/9F469V89+W4) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/rqcCFok8Je5cucsgi/acx-meetup-amsterdam) Group info: The rationality community is growing in the Netherlands, and we're now planning on having monthly meetups! Join the [Rationality NL Discord server](https://discord.gg/nAp9FQ26W4). Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/rqcCFok8Je5cucsgi/acx-meetup-amsterdam) so I can plan a different venue if needed DELFT, NETHERLANDS Contact: Pierre Bongrand, bongrand[dot]pierre[at]gmail[dot]com, 0033620644013 (Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal) Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: Delftse Hout Beach, on the grass, in the center of the beach, I will be wearing a red T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [9F4629FG+66](https://plus.codes/9F4629FG+66) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hmoCG5un5qhpyJZc/delft-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) HATTEM, NETHERLANDS Contact: Shoshannah, shos[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Dark#0849 Time: Saturday, October 8, 2:00 PM Location: Lijsterbeslaan 6, Hattem Coordinates: [9F48F378+PR](https://plus.codes/9F48F378+PR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdztgFcC4Mh2eaGxL/hattem-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/2br6ppSN3) Group info: We support and coordinate groups across the country, including everything from social meetups to structured events and applied rationality. The intention is to connect all Dutch rationalists and rationalists in the Netherlands. We also discuss rationality topics online and coordinate events on our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/nAp9FQ26W4). Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Ours will be there :) Also, please park 't Heem if you are coming by car. It's a 2 minute walk to our house. HELMOND, NETHERLANDS Contact: Rutger, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: De Motte (On top of the hill). Nearest road is Palladio. Coordinates: [9F37FMC5+VR](https://plus.codes/9F37FMC5+VR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/unrrGibxptCgid4mr/helmond-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Contact: Kristof Redei, acxmeetup[at]kristof[dot]me Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Paleistuin, Prinsessewal, 2513 EE Den Haag, Netherlands. We'll have a picnic blanket with an ACX sign on the large central field, somewhere near the playground. Coordinates: [9F4638J3+GP](https://plus.codes/9F4638J3+GP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qh3AeTyREkrJFwGH4/the-hague-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/728757288220162) Notes: Please RSVP [on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/728757288220162) if possible! All ages/species welcome. If it's not outdoor weather, we'll go to The Bookstor Cafe next door as a backup. OSLO, NORWAY Contact: Hans Andreas & Jonas, acxoslomeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: Look for the sign of Moloch at Café Billabong - Bogstadveien 53B 0366 Oslo Coordinates: [9FFGWPH7+QP](https://plus.codes/9FFGWPH7+QP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/WzEvS7rt3ckKvdL2n/oslo-norway-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/acx-oslo/events/287948206/) Group info: We're hoping to do at least a quarterly meetup, but we'll base it on the turnout and enthusiasm of this event. Notes: The cafe has historically been accepting of guests' not ordering--please don't let financial reasons keep you away! GDAŃSK, POLAND Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: frhrpr#1663 Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: Next to Park Kuźniczki, opposite the train station, on the circular benches around the water pump; I will be wearing a red armband Coordinates: [9F6W9JJ4+JW](https://plus.codes/9F6W9JJ4+JW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CgqjL7CTWCgRtsWXs/gdansk-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński, bagginsmatthew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:30 PM Location: Celna 6/9, the office of the Optimum Pareto Foundation Coordinates: [9F2X2WVX+V2](https://plus.codes/9F2X2WVX+V2) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HGJmtqSEeKN2siAZy/krakow-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/2k7IwUrfV) Group info: We meet every month, here is [our Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/LWKrakow). LUBLIN, POLAND Contact: Piotr, piotrekzlublina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Między Słowami cafe, Rybna 4, Lublin Coordinates: [9G346HX8+FX](https://plus.codes/9G346HX8+FX) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWmHzBwB7GmZ5yCbv/lublin-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) POZNAŃ, POLAND Contact: Ofelia Kerr, ofel[dot]kerr[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ofelia#0001 Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:00 PM Location: Van Gogh Pub, Żydowska 12, 61-761. I'll most likely be on the ground floor and I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: [9F4RCW5P+X3F](https://plus.codes/9F4RCW5P+X3F) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5WTZfGWnBx9fizMnE/poznan-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) WARSAW, POLAND Contact: Michał, rationalwarsaw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 6:00 PM Location: Południk Zero, Wilcza 25 Coordinates: [9G4362G8+2V](https://plus.codes/9G4362G8+2V) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z6aC4hQovqDnwwiKf/warsaw-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/lesswrongwarsaw/events/287979030/) Group info: The community of Warsaw LessWrong/SSC/ACX/etc. readers is active for over 8 years now. We're trying to organise regular monthly meetups. You can join our [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw) or [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/lesswrongwarsaw/). LISBOA, PORTUGAL Contact: Luís Campos, luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, close to Linha d'Água cafe, in the top of a hill, below a bunch of trees Coordinates: [8CCGPRJW+V8](https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yGowsAYYcMSMNfzup/acx-ea-lisbon-september-2022-meetup) Group info: We've been meeting every month for around 1 year. Get in contact if you want to participate in the WhatsApp group. :) BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Contact: Tony, skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: Plaza România Mall, Bd. Timișoara 26 - food court Coordinates: [8GP8C2HM+9X](https://plus.codes/8GP8C2HM+9X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sRGECzX6fnfFchrbR/bucharest-romania-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP by email CLUJ-NAPOCA, ROMANIA Contact: Marius Pop, pop[dot]marius[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 11:00 AM Location: Deva Host, Strada Deva 1-7 Coordinates: [8GR5QH8F+MW](https://plus.codes/8GR5QH8F+MW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fcxbbu3QwKQTXxCTv/cluj-napoca-romania-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Ivica Bogosavljevic, ibogosavljevic[at]gmail[dot]com, Viber +381 65 3473 433 Time: Monday, September 12, 6:00 PM Location: Pool Cafe on Prve pruge Coordinates: [8GP2RCP7+G7](https://plus.codes/8GP2RCP7+G7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8oaDandqTygnubr3u/belgrade-serbia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP on my Viber number, so I know how big the room we need. BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Viliam, viliam[at]bur[dot]sk Time: Saturday, September 10, 3:00 PM Location: Medická záhrada, by the fountain Coordinates: [8FWV44X9+XW8](https://plus.codes/8FWV44X9+XW8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/STabHQYpFEYPGqkmH/bratislava-slovakia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: I will post an announcement on LessWrong later. In case of rain, a new meeting place nearby will be announced there. LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan Vester, demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 14, 6:00 PM Location: Probably Lili Novy bar, near modern gallery and park Tivoli Coordinates: [8FRP3F3X+6V](https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/sDMgGQ9agejeCvtw5/acx-meetups-everywhere-ljubljana), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/ljubljana-ssc-less-wrong/events/288022766/) Group info: We meet about 0.7 times a month. Notes: Please RSVP because last time we just barely got a place big enough. BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso, alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu, WhatsApp +34693846738 Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:30 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion Catcher statue; I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: [8FH495QP+96](https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+96) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PayjNgnG7jywbXm6F/barcelona-spain-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: The idea is to sit on the grass; bring a foulard along for your comfort, or a foldable chair if preferred. Don't worry about the language: English, Spanish, Catalan, we'll find a way. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Jaime, jaimesevillamolina[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Teatro de títeres del Parque del Retiro. We'll be on the stands with an ACX sign Coordinates: [8CGRC897+F8C](https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8C) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GxucDGFJFPtxpGziN/acx-meetup-madrid) Group info: We are an EA / rationality group, we've been active for around 5 years but have less in-person activity since the pandemic started. We have a WhatsApp group and a channel in the Spanish-speaking EA Slack. SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu, edur[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 8:00 PM Location: Parque de María Luisa. I'll be on the grass behind the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. I'll be the guy next to an ACX sign, a white wooden chair, and a cardboard ukulele with a tiny cardboard hat on it. Coordinates: [8C9P92F6+3RG](https://plus.codes/8C9P92F6+3RG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z399Ku8uXowckRGYp/sevilla-spain-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Joacim, joacimj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan. I'll have a stack of three books on my table. Coordinates: [9F9HPX4C+39G](https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39G) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b7boLYLEoTAje9Bdt/gothenburg-sweden-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://facebook.com/events/s/acx-meetup-gothenburg/2231181767045942/) STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal, niktonick[at]gmail[dot]com, [Telegram](https://t.me/sallatik) Time: Sunday, September 25, 3:00 PM Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have 'ACX meetup' sign. Coordinates: [9FFW83RF+3M5](https://plus.codes/9FFW83RF+3M5) Group info: [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists) BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel, dd14214+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 4:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building, heading to the Pittaria if it's cold or raining Coordinates: [8FR9XC2Q+4G](https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+4G) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXC3vmL5rP29Rb2WH/bern-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Eric, eric[dot]c[dot]p[dot]meier[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Park de la Grange, just towards the lake below Villa de la grange Coordinates: [8FR86548+J4](https://plus.codes/8FR86548+J4) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/EQgQcecwFKGvnzM8c/acx-meetup-geneva) Group info: We have a small persistent group who has tried to meet up once a month since last years Meetup. Notes: Feel free to bring other people you think would be interested! ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB, acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 24, 3:00 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwhRmwmemyDoLMJsr/zurich-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: J, jinai[dot]jyap[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 4:00 PM Location: The House Cafe in Ortaköy. I am a young Asian woman and imagine I'll be easy to spot, but will also try to bring a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [8GHF22XG+23P](https://plus.codes/8GHF22XG+23P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2LLa2egtH8XDf3dCX/istanbul-turkey-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Partiful](https://partiful.com/e/0EN29ip67RVGnP7nF9WY) Group info: I do not live here; I am just digital nomading for an indefinite amount of time and would like to meet anyone who's here! Notes: Please RSVP via the Partiful link (you can RSVP as a Maybe)! BIRMINGHAM, UK Contact: Thomas Read, thomas[dot]read[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be at The Wellington, 37 Bennetts Hill, on the roof terrace if possible. I'll wear an orange shirt and have a sign saying ACX on the table. Coordinates: [9C4WF3JX+7Q](https://plus.codes/9C4WF3JX+7Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/MmeWbmiXN4BBEhhDf/birmingham-acx-everywhere-meetup-2022) Notes: It's only a few minutes walk from the stations, so hopefully people can join from all over the West Midlands! BRIGHTON, UK Contact: Alan Enright, alanenright[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be at the Alcampo Lounge on London Road—we will try and get a table on the raised area in front of you and to the left as you come in but will also have a little ACX sign. Coordinates: [9C2XRVM6+3X](https://plus.codes/9C2XRVM6+3X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fA8CfssLcXmAZNLgG/brighton-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/brighton-rationalish/) BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: We’ll be meeting at entrance closet to Tesco Express in the Galleries, Bristol City Centre Coordinates: [9C3VFC45+RJM](https://plus.codes/9C3VFC45+RJM) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tr8anM2yR7EQ5v2GF/bristol-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/2nvLdyGVz), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/bristol-effective-altruism/events/286472111/) Group info: Meet twice monthly for socials, more regular 'productive' meetups. Been active for 3+ years, please message for WhatsApp group CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd, hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bath House Pub, UPSTAIRS!! I will have a copy of Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do Coordinates: [9F426439+J9](https://plus.codes/9F426439+J9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hXyzP2Lh295vTCRbw/cambridge-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/Rationalish-Cambridge-Astral-Codex-TenSlatestarcodex-meetups-107072022120997) Group info: We meet on the third Saturday of every month. The group has been around almost a year and is well-attended! Notes: My phone/WhatsApp number is +44 0730 \\\* 3550, where the \\\* are replaced by the serial number of the Boeing plane whose first flight was on September 2, 1998. Email me to get on the mailing list for future events if you'd like that :) CARDIFF, WALES Contact: AF, strmnova[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 5:00 PM Location: Little Man Coffee (note new location!) Coordinates: [9C3RFRHH+W2](https://plus.codes/9C3RFRHH+W2) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/izybmEGPtjYCH4hnq/cardiff-wales-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam, acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Pleasance Cafe. Go through the arch and the door to the cafe is on your left Coordinates: [9C7RWRW9+M8](https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW9+M8) Group info: ~Monthly meetups, often in Pleasance Cafe but have experimented with other locations. Email me to join the mailing list & WhatsApp group. LANCASTER, UK Contact: Gruffydd Gozali, gruffyddgozali[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Lancaster University Library, will be on the ground floor by the tree wearing an EA shirt. Coordinates: [9C6V2657+WJR](https://plus.codes/9C6V2657+WJR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RkiEmLe7s5R2tdAn8/lancaster-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) LINCOLN, UK Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Nosey Parker pub, I'll bring a little paper ACX sign. Coordinates: [9C5X6C9R+XJ](https://plus.codes/9C5X6C9R+XJ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEyt2AR9CF2nFtycj/lincoln-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) LONDON, UK Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Newspeak House Coordinates: [9C3XGWGH+3F7](https://plus.codes/9C3XGWGH+3F7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DRCypugGcywjWrdTM/astral-codex-ten-london-schelling-meetup), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/386703536910822), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-london/events/287847594/?isFirstPublish=true), [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/astral-codex-ten-london-meetup-tickets-402584078817) Group info: You can join [our mailing list](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ghQAudW4BhaGxjuxQ/tinyletter.com/ACXLondon) or our [Meetup.com group](https://www.meetup.com/pro/london-rationalists/) MANCHESTER, UK Contact: Matthew Gibson, melkartmtg[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: Sackville Gardens, Alan Turing Memorial Coordinates: [9C5VFQG7+MH](https://plus.codes/9C5VFQG7+MH) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhQMFy4f2AWrTxgPq/manchester-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK Contact: Joshua William, iamjoshwilliam[at]icloud[dot]com, [Telegram](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ghQAudW4BhaGxjuxQ/t.me/dokkodian) Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:30 PM Location: Trinity Square, High Street Gosforth. You can get the bus to Gosforth from the city center just outside the famous 'Tyneside Cinema' (bus number: 30, 31, or 35 at [Monument Pilgrim Street bus stop](https://plus.codes/9C6WX9FQ+G8)), or you can take a walk if you want to get your 'steps' in (if you'd like to do the latter, send me an email and I'll send you the directions), which takes ~60-min. Coordinates: [9C7W294H+5V](https://plus.codes/9C7W294H+5V) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GWL8Q3Z8jmggMNZEX/newcastle-upon-tyne-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: To my knowledge, there isn't an ACX meet up in this city, or region of the UK, though if there is a demand for a reoccurrence, I'd be happy to keep facilitating such. I'd also happily formulate a WhatsApp group if theres interest, after the meet up. Notes: We have a deli, '1901 cafe', on the square, which we can grab an immediate bite to eat at [so save some hunger if you'd like to do that]. There's a safe [and lovely] park with some benches just by the way, which, if the weather is nice, we can sit at after a bite to eat, or, otherwise, we can remain in the cafe. OXFORD, UK Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, There's a Signal group people can join :) contact Sam for info Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:30 PM Location: The Star, Rectory Road, Oxford. We'll be in the beer garden round the back, with a sign 🙂 Coordinates: [9C3WPQX6+QP9](https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QP9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DKMphwNAgcCwgZABQ/oxrat-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1242791443213738), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/oxford-rationalish/events/287903723) Group info: We run socials every months, and applied rationality workshops from time to time! Notes: Please RSVP on any of the platforms (or email) for free pizza PENRYN, CORNWALL, UK Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 3:00 PM Location: glasney playing field and valley Coordinates: [9C2P5V8V+P9](https://plus.codes/9C2P5V8V+P9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2qGrwE67WBomPmLss/penryn-cornwall-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: I don't mind rescheduling, or organizing another event, not many people are likely to turn up this far out of the way. ## LATIN AMERICA SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL Contact: [Update on 2025-02-03: Removed at organizers’s request] Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Ibirapuera Park in Praca do Porquinho. I will be wearing a white t-shirt, be very tall and have a sign. Coordinates: [588MC85Q+6X](https://plus.codes/588MC85Q+6X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAjXzT7QpuquB6vTa/sao-paulo-brazil-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA Contact: Dan P, shorty[dot]george[dot]productions[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Illy Cafe, Kr 15 with Park Virrey. Sign will say ACX Coordinates: [67P7MWFW+3F7](https://plus.codes/67P7MWFW+3F7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xcbFYSqbqpi8iDWwz/bogota-colombia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA Contact: HP, hp-med-acx[at]proton[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 5:00 PM Location: Hija Mia Nomada Coordinates: [67R66C7G+8V](https://plus.codes/67R66C7G+8V) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijitMz3WJ9JoiptCM/medellin-colombia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) MÉRIDA, MEXICO Contact: Mati Roy, mathieu[dot]roy[dot]37[at]gmail[dot]com, [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/) Time: Sunday, August 28, 5:00 PM Location: Parque Gardenia, C. 65-A, Residencial Floresta, 97309 Mérida, Yuc. Coordinates: [76HG2C7X+8F](https://plus.codes/76HG2C7X+8F) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g6JvxxgetvznQQhYk/merida-mexico-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/5369782209776018) Group info: [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmerida) Notes: Please let me know if you'll be coming. MEXICO CITY, MEXICO Contact: Calcifer, fagarrido[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Francisco (Mexico City)#0227 Time: Saturday, September 10, 4:00 PM Location: Comedor de los Milagros. I'll be wearing a green shirt and will carry a 'ACX/CDMX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: [76F2CR6P+37](https://plus.codes/76F2CR6P+37) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/uzTxYaFupgz9ZnCT5) Group info: We are a rather new group. We've been meeting sporadically since April, and we recently settled on a formal twice-per-month frequency. We have a WhatsApp group which we use mostly for coordination purposes. Send me an email if you want in. Notes: If possible, [RSVP on Less Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/uzTxYaFupgz9ZnCT5) to get a sense of how many people to expect. Feel free to come if you haven't RSVP'd, though! PUNTA DEL ESTE, URUGUAY Contact: Manuel, acx[at]maraoz[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Borneo Coffee, patio del fondo. Ruta 10, 20001 La Barra, Departamento de Maldonado, Uruguay Coordinates: [48Q734PQ+58](https://plus.codes/48Q734PQ+58) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g37b6mmYna3yCxuuL/punta-del-este-uruguay-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) ## UNITED STATES HUNTSVILLE, AL Contact: Mike, mjhouse[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Barnes & Noble – 300 The Bridge St #100, Huntsville, AL 35806. I'll be in the cafe with a sign that says ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [866MP88H+53](https://plus.codes/866MP88H+53) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zJFpGQJ5dnwgwSuuh/huntsville-al-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Barnes & Noble has an area for little kids. If you want to bring a service animal, that's probably fine, but I doubt they allow pets. PHOENIX, AZ Contact: Ben Morin, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 1:00 PM Location: Thirsty Lion Pub in Tempe. I will have a table with an ACX sign. Coordinates: [8559FVVQ+6C](https://plus.codes/8559FVVQ+6C) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbQGxGXhckpnstkG8/phoenix-az-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: This will be our 5th meetup (started during the meetups everywhere last year). Notes: Please email if interested to be added to the email list, even if you can't make this event BELMONT, CA Contact: Moshe Z., belmont-acx[at]devskillup[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Twin Pines Park, Picnic Tables. The table will have some sign saying 'ACX Meetup' on it. Coordinates: [849VGP8C+RRG](https://plus.codes/849VGP8C+RRG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cuvgpD9Y3SFCeNXL/belmont-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: You can join the mailing list [here](https://buttondown.email/belmont-acx). BERKELEY, CA Contact: Scott Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist event space at 2740 Telegraph Ave. Come in through the front gate on Telegraph. Coordinates: [849VVP5R+X7V](https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X7V) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G9LyJABgPSLXSmEcf/berkeley-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: The Bay rationality community has a [mailing list](https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong), a [Discord server](https://discord.gg/Yqus2bFhww), and a [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/566160007909175/). There are dinner meetups every Thursday at 7 PM in the East Bay, and occasional meetups in SF and South Bay. FILLMORE, CA Contact: Ryan, wiserd[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Wiserd#0906 Time: Saturday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: It's my house. There are a bunch of plants on the porch and garbage bins in the driveway. Coordinates: [856393VX+VQ](https://plus.codes/856393VX+VQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3SvwSjaiMCFa8tJvB/fillmore-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP to my email or Discord. Kids and dogs are welcome in the back yard. Full vaccinations (on the honor system) and masks required. GRASS VALLEY, CA Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Condon Park by the prospector statue. In the case of rain we'll change the location to a residence, so RSVP to get updated! Coordinates: [84FW6W8H+C5](https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+C5) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AiA2vpkYZCoTQEeEP/grass-valley-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) IRVINE, CA Contact: Nick C, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: University Town Center Coordinates: [8554M526+7H](https://plus.codes/8554M526+7H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z4vxJKCAtsmYnBwmr/irvine-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet once a month at the same location. LOS ANGELES, CA Contact: Vishal Prasad (koreindian), vprasadcs[at]gmail[dot]com, Contact me on Discord. I am "Vishal" on [the server](https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN). Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:30 PM Location: 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, CA 90039 Coordinates: [8553XHWM+GP](https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zYkY8dKMAwTCYorTG/acx-everywhere-fall-meetup-lw-acx-meetup-saturday-oct-8th) Group info: We meet weekly every Wednesday. We have been around for over 8 years. We discuss articles, watch movies, lift weights. We have a [Discord server](https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN), a [LessWrong group](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/GSN7BypgiJcjEiRRS), and a [website](https://losangelesrationality.com/)! Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. NEWPORT BEACH, CA Contact: Michael M, michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 2:00 PM Location: Picnic tables next to 1900 Port Carlow community clubhouse. The park is verdant and pleasant and easy to access. Free street parking nearby. In case of bad weather, we have a couple of near by places to relocate to. Coordinates: [8554J48R+WCX](https://plus.codes/8554J48R+WCX) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dGGpudCFEFz4rTCaC/newport-beach-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/groups/883959279640466) Group info: We will meet most Saturdays at 2pm until whenever. There will be short suggested readings and question most weeks to spur conversation, but they are optional. Each week we will ask if people have had something happen recently that surprised them or changed the way they looked at the world. Something that should or did update their priors. Participation is optional. Notes: Its a public park with tables and BBQ's so you can bring food and well behaved pets. We may regularly go on casual walks in the surrounding area. SAN DIEGO, CA Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 3:00 PM Location: We will meet up in Bird Park. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: [8544PVQ8+Q7](https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+Q7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iferav2xZHi6dfaZT/san-diego-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/events/287922342/) Group info: Join our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/QcVx7kjj33) SAN FRANCISCO, CA Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: We'll between in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with a 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: [849VQHC3+V8](https://plus.codes/849VQHC3+V8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zspSy7abCivFwDDJW/san-francisco-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) SAN JOSE, CA Contact: David Friedman, ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: [849W825J+6P](https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbLHFo2xjshsPuf9G/san-jose-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Before Covid we hosted every month or two. No structure, just conversation and food. We feed everyone who is still there at dinner time. We have done it once or twice since Covid. I have an email list of interested people. Notes: Kids are welcome. Please RSVP to my email so I will have a rough count of how many we are feeding. SAN MARCOS, CA Contact: Eric F., EricF14159[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Hollandia Park Soccer Field. At the tables near the top parking lot. Coordinates: [85544VW4+RV](https://plus.codes/85544VW4+RV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQEwczvEPn99QmCqv/san-marcos-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) BOULDER, CO Contact: Josh Sacks, josh[dot]sacks+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301 Coordinates: [85GP2V96+JQ](https://plus.codes/85GP2V96+JQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BrsnfyKFDAzwptJHg/slatestarcodex-boulder-meetup-oct-2022) Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we know ~ how many people to expect! CARBONDALE, CO Contact: Nick, naj[at]njarboe[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: Sopris Park - Center covered picnic tables - blue shirt with ACX sign on table Coordinates: [85FJ9QXP+QMF](https://plus.codes/85FJ9QXP+QMF) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/23MZyEewhQFFmEYeA/carbondale-co-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) DENVER, CO Contact: Ian Philips, iansphilips[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: palebone#2796 Time: Sunday, October 2, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be in the backyard patio of St. Mark's Coffee House. I'll wear a white shirt with (my brothers') baby faces on it and have a brown hat on. Coordinates: [85FQP2VP+9R](https://plus.codes/85FQP2VP+9R) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/QFiHfZsKcoYi8LKXE/acx-schelling-meetup-4) Group info: We meet typically 4 times a year. LAKEWOOD, CO Contact: Steven Zuber, stevenjzuber[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 5, 7:00 PM Location: We meet in the clubhouse located in this townhome community: 8769 W Cornell Ave Lakewood, CO 80227 Coordinates: [85FPMW64+MW](https://plus.codes/85FPMW64+MW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnjXgqvKaNoeDgCcF/lakewood-co-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/colorado-rationality/events/287917731/) Group info: We meet the first Wednesday of every month. Informal, casual atmosphere with occasional presentations by people. Notes: Check the [Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/colorado-rationality/events/287917731/) or [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/969594296461197/) for updates. FAIRFIELD, CT Contact: Justin Barclay, barclay[dot]justin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 10:00 AM Location: South Pine Creek Beach. I'll set up near the lifeguard stand. Coordinates: [87H84PCH+CM](https://plus.codes/87H84PCH+CM) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3NvJ7vbhDmpqxCkCu/fairfield-ct-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) MANCHESTER, CT Contact: Mike, park-mike[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Near flagpole on top of hill Coordinates: [87H9QFFH+J7](https://plus.codes/87H9QFFH+J7) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gScz46ehLJxNR2noD/manchester-ct-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) NEW HAVEN, CT Contact: RM, acx[dot]meetup[dot]nhv[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 12:30 PM Location: Cross Campus (Yale University), New Haven, CT 06511. We'll be on the grass on the northern half of Cross Campus, closest to Sterling Memorial Library. I'll be wearing an orange shirt. Coordinates: [87H9836C+8VG](https://plus.codes/87H9836C+8VG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8swWgJ2mMuDqo2e5L/new-haven-ct-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Feel free to bring friends! The vibe will be welcoming and relaxed, and you can stay for any amount of time. Please email me if you're thinking about coming so I can get the right number of Insomnia cookies! WASHINGTON, DC Contact: John Bennett, WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub: 2021 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20006 Coordinates: [87C4WX33+3J](https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/L3PSrGxAjgms6QHDm/), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/8007880305919632/) Group info: The Washington DC ACX/SSC group has been active since the first Meetups Everywhere in 2017. We have Monthly Socials downtown, hikes, board game days, and other cultural events. We're looking to spin up more rationality Dojo-type events with nearby groups in the coming months. Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. Metered street parking on nearby blocks is free after 6:30. Closest Metros are Farragut West and Farragut North. CAPE CORAL / FORT MYERS, FL Contact: Shawn Spilman, shawn[dot]spilman[at]outlook[dot]com, 508 655 8123 Time: Sunday, October 2, 1:00 PM Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914 Coordinates: [76RWH224+44](https://plus.codes/76RWH224+44) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6RXoay2y9pztqMHbP/cape-coral-fort-myers-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: RSVP via email. I can be flexible about the date. GULF BREEZE / PENSACOLA, FL Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 12, 7:30 PM Location: The Bridge Bar - 33 Gulf Breeze Pkwy A, Gulf Breeze, FL 32561 Coordinates: [862J9RCF+G6](https://plus.codes/862J9RCF+G6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zZApZEyKqHCprHNPC/gulf-breeze-pensacola-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP by emailing me. Thanks! If I don't hear from anyone, I won't be there. I work for Metaculus, but promise not to talk your ear off about forecasting. (Unless you want it talked off.) MIAMI, FL Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: eric135#4943 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Buckminster Fuller Fly's Eye Dome 140 NE 39th St #001, Miami, FL 33137 ----- Look for a paper sign on a table that says ACX MEETUP west of the dome. Coordinates: [76QXRR65+V2](https://plus.codes/76QXRR65+V2) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/HQKw95t9dYjqoMHPq/miami-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Miami ACX started in 2017. Our official meetup happens monthly in either Miami or Broward. There are activities happening on a weekly basis from Miami to Palm Beach. We have a [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1931644027057534), [Discord server](https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP), and [Meetup.com group](https://www.meetup.com/miami-astral-codex-ten-lesswrong-meetup-group/). ORLANDO, FL Contact: Noah Topper, noah[dot]topper[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 7:00 PM Location: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL. We'll be meeting up at UCF's pavilion near Garages A and I. I'll have a pretty ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: [76WWJQ2X+82](https://plus.codes/76WWJQ2X+82) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/sRFzkff78gCpSgnPc/acx-lw-meetup-4) Group info: We try to meet up once a month, so far they've just been casual social meetups with natural discussions of rationality topics. Here's our [Discord link](https://discord.gg/sAYUf4pTza) :) Notes: RSVPs [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/sRFzkff78gCpSgnPc/acx-lw-meetup-4) would be greatly appreciated. :) TALLAHASSEE, FL Contact: JF, jf19o[at]fsu[dot]edu Time: Monday, August 29, 2:00 PM Location: Landis, FSU. I will be wearing a black shirt Coordinates: [862QCPR3+PX](https://plus.codes/862QCPR3+PX) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MaKbLBPNaKKEtvxhE/tallahassee-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) ATHENS, GA Contact: Dallon, knox[dot]dallon[dot]a[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: leonard#4208 Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Hendershots on Prince Avenue Coordinates: [865RXJ68+2W](https://plus.codes/865RXJ68+2W) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qfktAPKrDRiwMv9Am/athens-ga-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: I might bring some board games ATLANTA, GA Contact: Steve French, steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1 · Atlanta, GA (upstairs – look for the ACX Atlanta sign) Coordinates: [865QRH2F+V8](https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MJhgymsfnpBvYAske/atlanta-ga-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/acx-atlanta/events/287993740/) Group info: We've been in existence for four years – we have a dedicated crew and a very active Slack group Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/acx-atlanta/events/287993740/) HONOLULU, HI Contact: Matt Popovich, mattpopovich[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Magic Island at Ala Moana Beach Park, 1201 Ala Moana Blvd, Honolulu, HI 96814. From the parking lot, walk along the left side of the peninsula out toward Magic Island Lagoon. We're usually near the end of the peninsula, somewhere around the bathroom building. Look for the large 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: [73H475M3+JP](https://plus.codes/73H475M3+JP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g66Dnn9arduJeHu6A/honolulu-hi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/honolulurationality/events/287808458/) Group info: Honolulu Rationality hosts discussion meetups about twice a month in Ala Moana Beach Park. Check us out on [our website](https://honolulurationality.com/) BOISE, ID Contact: Julia and John, jae[dot]miomu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 7, 6:00 PM Location: Old Timer's Shelter in Ann Morrison Park. I will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: [85M5JQ6P+96](https://plus.codes/85M5JQ6P+96) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2jE9uvvDjqNQekSy/boise-id-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP and feel free to bring kids. CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, IL Contact: Ben, cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 7:00 PM Location: Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 4403 Coordinates: [86GH4Q7G+H8F](https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Tdp9wFztyS3MmRfiH/meetups-everywhere-fall-2022) Group info: [Discord server](https://discord.gg/2jR38JAHyD) Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building (see Coordinates) - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord. CHICAGO, IL Contact: Todd, info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com, https://chicagorationality.com/ Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Grant Park - North side of Balbo between the tracks and Columbus Coordinates: [86HJV9FH+84](https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+84) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uXCdr5ezZEGq4ZJ8A/chicago-il-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [Chicago Rationality](https://chicagorationality.com/) does a monthly discussion meetup (typically the first Saturday of the month) and a monthly social meetup (typically the third weekend of the month) Notes: Sign up for our [email list](https://chicagorationality.com/) to be notified of future meetups EVANSTON, IL Contact: Uzair, uzairq93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 7:00 PM Location: 626 Church Street, Evanston IL 60201 Coordinates: [86JJ28X9+5WQ](https://plus.codes/86JJ28X9+5WQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDGJ5LxFY5CyAfge2/evanston-il-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: The venue is a pub but it's really more of a restaurant, big long tables available so space should be fine and non drinkers shouldn't feel too out of place. BLOOMINGTON, IN Contact: Avery, acxbloomington[at]fastmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 2:00 PM Location: Switchyard Park. Will be at one of the tables near the Rogers Street parking lot. I will bring a cardboard sign that says “ACX”. Coordinates: [86FM4FX6+4Q](https://plus.codes/86FM4FX6+4Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9JpZ4XHvkrnt6NbBh/bloomington-in-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We met last year for Meetups Everywhere and it was fun! Here's a link to [our Discord](https://discord.com/invite/jvN2p3HB). Notes: You can RSVP via Discord or email, but you are encouraged to show up even if you did not RSVP! WEST LAFAYETTE, IN Contact: NR, mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: 1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906. We'll be in the south of the Earhart Hall lobby (not the dining court) near the piano, and I will be wearing a green shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [86GMC3GG+728](https://plus.codes/86GMC3GG+728) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTHeAsnhuHDhpc3sY/west-lafayette-in-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) LEXINGTON, KY Contact: Nathan, nwculley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 7:00 PM Location: Blue Stallion Brewing. 610 W. 3rd St., Lexington, KY 40508. We will have a sign indicating we are the ACX meetup. Coordinates: [86CQ3F4X+VF](https://plus.codes/86CQ3F4X+VF) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TthoR6ZACfjdKbzuH/lexington-ky-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet 1-2 times a month to talk about ACX, books, memes, etc., often over drinks and board games. NEW ORLEANS, LA Contact: Blake, blake[at]philosophers[dot]group Time: Sunday, September 4, 11:11 AM Location: Petite Clouet Cafe. Look for the group with an iPad that has a People’s Pint sticker. Coordinates: [76XFXX73+8R](https://plus.codes/76XFXX73+8R) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGo2wKHbyhju3BM2Q/new-orleans-la-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [Website](https://bbertucc.notion.site/Sunday-Open-Hangs-at-11-11-f5ce807c86c3470b870d9f679a9ee72d) Notes: Hybrid in-person and online, video link sent weekly. Email for the link. BOSTON, MA Contact: Robi Rahman, robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com, 7039818526 Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Boston Common, at the Parkman Bandstand gazebo Coordinates: [87JC9W3M+PR](https://plus.codes/87JC9W3M+PR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6viRmWasidurpqDfa/boston-ma-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/3267233143606936) Group info: [Mailing list](https://groups.google.com/g/ssc-boston), [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1023018131571906/), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/boston-astral-codex-meetup/) Notes: We'll be providing food at the meetup, and giving out free books related to ACX, rationality, and effective altruism. Email the hosts if you'd like a particular book or you have any dietary restrictions. Our group is also doing a tour of the JFK Presidential Library on September 9, you’re welcome to join! NORTHAMPTON, MA Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 6:00 PM Location: The Deck, 125A Pleasant St., Northampton MA 01096. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; it's the outdoor dining part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to get to The Deck is to enter The Platform, one of the other restaurants, by its street entrance around 36 Strong Ave., [here](https://what3words.com/soda.frosted.props) (make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to The Deck. We'll have a sign. Coordinates: [87J9899F+H7H](https://plus.codes/87J9899F+H7H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JyWmazpyCpkjeAvGb), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/386535730331519) Group info: We started in the 2018 Meetups Everywhere and is still going strong. We aim to meet about once every two weeks. At most meetups we get about 5-7 people out of a rotation of 15-20; Meetups Everywhere and other special events tend to bring in a few more than usual. We're a totally social meetup with no 'format' or suggested readings. Although it's not rare for us to touch on ACX articles and related topics, the conversation varies wildly, and you are welcome even if you're the most occasional ACX reader. Notes: We have a (not very active) [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/JEnfefn) where you can DM me or post on a public channel. I'm most responsive by email. There is a small chance we'll have to change the location to somewhere else in Northampton. Please check the Less Wrong or Facebook posts on or after August 26 to get the final word on location. BALTIMORE, MD Contact: Rivka, rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 7:00 PM Location: UMBC outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, on the north side. I will have a sign that says ACX meetup. Parking is free on the weekends. Edit: Rain is forecasted; if it’s raining, we will be inside of the Performing Arts building, on the ground floor just inside the entrance. Coordinates: [87F5774P+53](https://plus.codes/87F5774P+53) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yBwkgHSMYHronhirA/baltimore-md-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet Sundays at 7pm — half are in person and half are virtual. Notes: There will be pizza and drinks DETROIT, MI Contact: Matt Arnold, matt[dot]mattarn[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 7:00 PM Location: Tenacity Craft, 8517 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI 48202 Coordinates: [86JR9WG9+R6](https://plus.codes/86JR9WG9+R6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/QzMTBSstCrwqjYihu/detroit-acx-september-meetup) MINNEAPOLIS, MN Contact: Timothy, tmbond[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at the picnic tables near the southeast corner of Powderhorn Park - the ones by the parking lot. I will be wearing a green Google t-shirt and have a sign that says ACX. Coordinates: [86P8WPRW+76](https://plus.codes/86P8WPRW+76) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JajbfTHkbzbjfHiqZ/twin-cities-acx-meetup) Notes: I will bring some snacks (but not a full lunch, so eat before or bring something if you'll be that hungry). Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JajbfTHkbzbjfHiqZ/twin-cities-acx-meetup). KANSAS CITY, MO Contact: Alex, alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: We will be in the courtyard above Whole Foods (which is also an apartment complex). You can enter through the apartment lobby, located on Oak Street. We will have runners shepherding people from the entrance up to the courtyard. Coordinates: [86F72CM8+RR](https://plus.codes/86F72CM8+RR) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hdxBA537zZCFkeYWa/kansas-city-mo-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://meetu.ps/e/LnmZ4/BSLmD/i) SAINT LOUIS, MO Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: Lily Pond Shelter, Tower Grove Park, St. Louis Coordinates: [86CFJP4R+XV](https://plus.codes/86CFJP4R+XV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uKqND22xB2FvA3ejw/saint-louis-mo-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: BYOB WEST PLAINS, MO Contact: Liam, liamhession[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 12:00 PM Location: 10/40 Coffee, 24 Court Square, West Plains, MO Coordinates: [868CP4HW+CV](https://plus.codes/868CP4HW+CV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qbtkjEwHpFhR2ex6c/west-plains-mo-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Hoping to get anyone from around the Ozark region DURHAM, NC Contact: Will Jarvis, willdjarvis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 8, 7:30 PM Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Company, 219 Hood St, Durham Coordinates: [8773X4Q3+QW](https://plus.codes/8773X4Q3+QW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/5q5ZspGeJ9GMmdTSi) Group info: We meet weekly! We also have [a Discord](https://discord.gg/a45QxjXx) LAKEWOOD, NJ Contact: Ben L, mywebdev3[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 29, 8:30 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wwsteLA52Zx75Jfau/lakewood-nj-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) MORRISTOWN, NJ Contact: Matt, matt[dot]brooks[at]impactmarkets[dot]io, Discord: Matt B#0216 Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: 10 N Park Pl, Morristown, NJ 07960 (at the center of the Morristown Green) Coordinates: [87G7QGW9+RJ](https://plus.codes/87G7QGW9+RJ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/PrATtWiHNB9YqdzC2/morristown-nj-acx-meetup) Group info: This is the first meetup, come be a founding member of the Northern NJ ACX/EA/LW group! PRINCETON, NJ Contact: Danny K, dskumpf[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:00 PM Location: Palmer Square, Princeton, NJ 08540. On the green right outside The Bent Spoon and Rojo's Roastary, near the big tree. I'll have some sort of ACX Meetup sign! Coordinates: [87G7982Q+2CP](https://plus.codes/87G7982Q+2CP) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/42XeEjend8vFjRFTK/princeton-nj-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) LAS VEGAS, NV Contact: Jonathan Ray, ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 11:45 AM Location: At El Segundo Sol restaurant with giant ACX MEETUP signs Coordinates: [85864RHJ+3H](https://plus.codes/85864RHJ+3H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M6fLgzvbfkkJciD4n/las-vegas-nv-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/318842413736336/) Group info: We meet regularly and mostly just socialize. We have a new [Discord server](https://discord.gg/aw6fP2bkHp). RENO, NV Contact: Steven, stevenl451[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Steeven#7407 Time: Friday, September 2, 5:30 PM Location: We'll be in Crissie Caughlin Park, near the tables and the swing set Coordinates: [85F2G46W+FG](https://plus.codes/85F2G46W+FG) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tFrgEx2TwCJdnADwC/ssc-reno-meetup) Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs and please RSVP [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tFrgEx2TwCJdnADwC/ssc-reno-meetup) if you are going BUFFALO, NY Contact: George Herold, ggherold[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 1:00 PM Location: 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, NY 14082 Coordinates: [87J3W467+8P](https://plus.codes/87J3W467+8P) Notes: Last-minute location change! LONG ISLAND, NY Contact: Gabe, gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 27, 7:00 PM Location: Whales Tale in Northport Coordinates: [87G8VJRW+99](https://plus.codes/87G8VJRW+99) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jyRkrCkhwYPzEopH5/long-island-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) NEW YORK CITY, NY Contact: Jasmine, jasminermj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Pavillion @ Rockefeller Park, Warren St / River Terrace Coordinates: [87G7PX9M+4J3](https://plus.codes/87G7PX9M+4J3) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rFLGkSGcz37Mgd9zg/new-york-city-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: OBNYC has a [Discord](https://discord.gg/Hfktfhrs) and a [Google Group](https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc); the Google Group is the main mailing list we use for events NEWBURGH, NY Contact: Pedro David Bonilla, proportionatetoevidence[at]gmail[dot]com, Cell 8452001681 Time: Saturday, September 24, 10:00 AM Location: [Perkins Restaurant & Bakery](https://maps.app.goo.gl/G2FZ4QeiDWH6JZiM9), 1421 NY-300, Newburgh, NY 12550 Coordinates: [87H7GWCH+GF](https://plus.codes/87H7GWCH+GF) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/47fw2kcNr2DMoEgeT/newburgh-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) ROCHESTER, NY Contact: Skivverus, skivverus[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Skivverus#5915 Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: 4870 Culver Road; will be wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and glasses, and may or may not have figured out a sign due to just getting back from honeymoon. Look for a pair of parrots, one white, one green with a yellow/orange head. Coordinates: [87M46FM6+Q5P](https://plus.codes/87M46FM6+Q5P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gYtS4Z3Deu8T4mWx4/rochester-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Venue very near amusement park; non-bathroom, non-parking amenities are therefore available but not free. Plan accordingly. Not particularly attached to specific location named, just happen to live reasonably close to there; alternative suggestions acceptable. Canadian visitors also welcome should your logistics permit; airport transportation available. RSVP via Discord preferred, but email will also work. CLEVELAND, OH Contact: Jack Zhang, LukeZhao9[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:00 PM Location: Picnic tables at Wade Oval (university circle) Coordinates: [86HWG96Q+GC5](https://plus.codes/86HWG96Q+GC5) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qRtgrnAHQH2FkKm9z/cleveland-oh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) COLUMBUS, OH Contact: Daniel, daniel[dot]m[dot]adamiak[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: Jeffrey Park - [Clinton Shelter](https://w3w.co/appeal.august.post). I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: [86FVX3C3+QF](https://plus.codes/86FVX3C3+QF) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4NePMT5LmoBiZvxBY/columbus-oh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet once a month. We discuss EA, AI and other two letter initialisms. Occasionally we go for walks in local grottos and nature trails. Notes: Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list to receive any updates or future invites. RSVPing is appreciated. TOLEDO, OH Contact: Scout, scout[dot]sivar[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 12:00 PM Location: Black Kite Coffee Coordinates: [86HRMCCV+9R](https://plus.codes/86HRMCCV+9R) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y8Qcy2xjsNtW4HpHx/toledo-oh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Contact: bean, battleshipbean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 1:00 PM Location: Edmond Public Library/Shannon Miller Park. I will be wearing a hat that says USS Iowa on it. Coordinates: [8674MG3C+MW](https://plus.codes/8674MG3C+MW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqMXSYJMLaLf9YnC8/oklahoma-city-ok-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: Had four people last year and a good time, moved to Edmond because a lot of us are up here. ALBANY, OR Contact: Kenan (he/him), kbitikofer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: Bowman Park, Albany, Oregon. In or near the shelter. I will wear a bright red shirt and carry a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: [84PRJWR7+XC6](https://plus.codes/84PRJWR7+XC6) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NvKAzKNYtBsnacixC/albany-or-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) CORVALLIS, OR Contact: Ethan Ashkie, ethanashkie[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 7, 6:00 PM Location: Common Fields, in the reserved outdoor seating near the entrance Coordinates: [84PRHP5P+VQ](https://plus.codes/84PRHP5P+VQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hTpgRrrn5LzuxWSBa/corvallis-or-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) EUGENE, OR Contact: Ben Smith, benjsmith[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 7:00 PM Location: The Barn Light, 924 Willamette St, Eugene 97401 Coordinates: [84PR2WX4+VV](https://plus.codes/84PR2WX4+VV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/42ydSEnzLzeQjA4fQ/that-time-of-year-astral-codex-ten-meetup) Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/42ydSEnzLzeQjA4fQ/that-time-of-year-astral-codex-ten-meetup) so I know how much pizza to get, but if you forget, don't worry about it, we want you to come along anyway PORTLAND, OR Contact: Sam F Celarek, support[at]pearcommunity[dot]com, 513-432-3310, Discord: Sam Celarek#2845 Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: 205 NW 4th Ave Coordinates: [84QVG8FG+V4](https://plus.codes/84QVG8FG+V4) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fm7Pdbkk9HajjGuw3/portland-or-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/portland-effective-altruists-and-rationalists/events/287917611/) Group info: Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality is very active. We have book clubs, bi-weekly AI safety meet-ups, bi-weekly topical meet-ups, bi-weekly socials, and have an active Discord. Notes: We would prefer you RSVP on [Meetup.com](http://meetup.com/) a week beforehand so that we can get the right amount of food! HARRISBURG, PA Contact: Phil, acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Ever Grain Brewing Co, 4444 Carlisle Pike, Camp Hill, PA 17011 - We will be sitting at one of the picnic tables outside with an ACX MEETUP sign Coordinates: [87G562QQ+8P](https://plus.codes/87G562QQ+8P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JvmDW83JJYr7ugk2T/acx-harrisburg-public-meetup-2022) Group info: Small monthly meetup group based out of Harrisburg - celebrating 1 year of actuality! You can see more of our events [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD). INDIANA, PA Contact: Eric, ericindianapa[at]gmail[dot]com, 717-256-2717 Time: Saturday, September 24, 11:00 AM Location: Caffè Amadeus in downtown Indiana, PA. I will have a sign with 'ACX Meetup' on one of the tables. Coordinates: [87G2JRFX+48](https://plus.codes/87G2JRFX+48) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e7fBLvfkPtsGh7ag2/indiana-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please RSVP via email or text message so I know how many to expect. PHILADELPHIA, PA Contact: Wes and Diana, rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: The Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. The meeting room is in the basement, look for the signs. Coordinates: [87F6WRXG+FQ](https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3S2qmYLeBizkcWZQ/philadelphia-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We tend to meet in downtown Philly on the last Thursday of the month. We're aiming to make the Ethical Society our new steady location. We have many links: [Discord](https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB), [Google Calendar](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly), [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/), [Google Group](https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia) Notes: We'll be ordering food from a local restaurant, so no need to eat first. BYOB PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin, pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Westinghouse Shelter @ Schenley Park (W Circuit Rd near Schenley Dr). We have the outdoor shelter reserved, so light rain shouldn't be a problem, but in the event of extreme weather, we may relocate indoors (our default 'contingency indoor location' is Crazy Mocha Coffee on 2100 Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill). Coordinates: [87G2C3Q4+773](https://plus.codes/87G2C3Q4+773) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AhzqngXFmiSiC3wtw/pittsburgh-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet monthly-ish for general discussion and chit-chat, email me if you'd like to be notified of future meetups. STATE COLLEGE, PA Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu Time: Thursday, September 8, 5:00 PM Location: Old Main. I will be carrying an ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: [87G4Q4WP+HV](https://plus.codes/87G4Q4WP+HV) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcqLS9ScSxgohdnmn/state-college-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Contact: Dan Gelfarb, danielgelfarb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Lote 23, back corner under the tents. I will be wearing a blue shirt with a sign that says ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: [77CMCWVM+W32](https://plus.codes/77CMCWVM+W32) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zDioyddFMQmKckymZ/san-juan-puerto-rico-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) PROVIDENCE, RI Contact: James Bailey, feanor1600[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Prospect Terrace park, to the right of the Roger Williams statue Coordinates: [87HCRHJV+24](https://plus.codes/87HCRHJV+24) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CRisZM6g9awxn75D9/providence-ri-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) SIOUX FALLS, SD Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:00 PM Location: 410 E 26th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105 - the pavillion on the west side of McKennan Park, or the tables just south of it if I can't book it. I'll be the guy with the grill. Coordinates: [86M5G7JH+W57](https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W57) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmHZ8GFpMSRqChirv/sioux-falls-sd-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) MEMPHIS, TN Contact: Michael, michael[at]postlibertarian[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 1:00 PM Location: French Truck Coffee at Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium 1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104. We will be at one of the many tables near French Truck Coffee and I will have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: [867F5X2P+QHC](https://plus.codes/867F5X2P+QHC) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FKEMyh4WDjmedhP6W/memphis-tn-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet about every month or so. We've been around since 2019 but only regularly since mid 2021 due to the pandemic. We have a [Discord server](https://discord.gg/Pv2W7rjHG3). NASHVILLE, TN Contact: Ellen, enwiegand[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 11:00 AM Location: OneCity Nashville (8 City Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209), next to the volleyball courts. I'll have a pink ballcap that says SPINSTER on it. Coordinates: [868M552H+XW](https://plus.codes/868M552H+XW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6oBQiEKEccjQNoA5t/nashville-tn-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) AUSTIN, TX Contact: Silas Barta, sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 12:00 PM Location: 4001 N Lamar, Austin Texas, park by Central Market near stone tables and tents Coordinates: [86248746+8C](https://plus.codes/86248746+8C) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3sf5BvRaDvFFuR7fw/austin-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: [Austin LessWrong](http://austinlesswrong.com/) has a weekly focused discussion, a weekly social mixer, a weekly online book club, and a monthly movie night. Been around since 2011. Notes: Location may change as we are talking to other venues BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX Contact: Kenny, easwaran[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: Back patio of Torchy's Tacos at Texas and New Main. I'll have a yellow umbrella and pinkish/purple hair Coordinates: [JMFC+4J](https://plus.codes/JMFC+4J) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6rmtnzpieKNf9dgzK/bryan-college-station-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) DALLAS, TX Contact: Ethan Morse, ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ethanmorse#5255 Time: Sunday, September 11, 12:00 PM Location: Union, 3705 Cedar Springs Rd, Dallas, TX 75219. We'll be in the upstairs conference room. Coordinates: [8645R55R+9M9](https://plus.codes/8645R55R+9M9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oLWuzusELwSEqn27m/dallas-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oLWuzusELwSEqn27m/dallas-meetups-everywhere-2022) so I know how much food to get HOUSTON, TX Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Empire Cafe, 1732 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098 ---- Look for a table with an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: [76X6PHVW+5H](https://plus.codes/76X6PHVW+5H) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/7K9SN7kyywJqHKCcL/houston-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: There are meetups every week. We have a [Discord](https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS) and a [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1816070091838828). WACO, TX Contact: Mike, BaylorACX[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 1:00 PM Location: Cameron Park, picnic tables next to Jacob's Ladder Coordinates: [8634HVG2+V9](https://plus.codes/8634HVG2+V9) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZuqbkpBmwkG6judpZ/waco-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Please email me if you're thinking about attending! Would love to start an ACX community here :) SALT LAKE CITY, UT Contact: Ross Richey (aka Jeremiah), wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park near the ChargePoint stations Coordinates: [85GCP4WF+VJ](https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/apr797RGL9RgzhKpM/salt-lake-city-ut-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Group info: We meet every other month, we do book clubs and movie nights as well. Notes: Will be outdoors. If the weather looks bad, email event organizer to check on location. CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA Contact: RL, effectivealtruismatuva[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 5:00 PM Location: 12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 - We’ll meet at the picnic tables across the street from The Virginian. There will be an ACX sign. Coordinates: [87C32FPX+3H4](https://plus.codes/87C32FPX+3H4) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T9KyFJgsdE3r8K27R/charlottesville-va-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) LYNCHBURG, VA Contact: Craig, craigbdaniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Three Roads Brewing - I will be wearing a purple t-shirt and will place an ""ACX"" card on the table Coordinates: [8792CV65+5G](https://plus.codes/8792CV65+5G) NORFOLK, VA Contact: Willa, walambert[at]pm[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Pagoda & Oriental Garden, 265 W Tazewell St, Norfolk, VA 23510. I will be wearing a bright green shirt, will have a large green & yellow hat on, and will have a sign with ACX Meetup on it. Coordinates: [8785RPX4+W3](https://plus.codes/8785RPX4+W3) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TfjaWB8fDXsW2tfLr/acx-meetups-everywhere-norfolk-va), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1137310713809435/) Group info: Hi! Virginia Rationalists was co-founded in Norfolk VA earlier this year by Willa & Yitzi with the goal of growing a thriving ACX / LW / EA community in our city & the state of Virginia. We meet every week at Fair Grounds cafe on Wednesday evenings from 5-7:30pm Eastern Time. We have a [Discord server](https://discord.gg/Gcb5AzcS7r) and a [Twitter](https://twitter.com/VA_Rationalists). RESTON, VA Contact: James, jrbalch333[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:30 PM Location: The matchbox at 1900 Reston Station Blvd, Reston, VA 20190 on the 1st floor of the giant Google building. I'll be holding a copy of Sapiens. Coordinates: [87C4WMX6+9X](https://plus.codes/87C4WMX6+9X) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cE27eWSQjEfRCqhCu/reston-va-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022) Notes: Email me to be added to the WhatsApp group RICHMOND, VA Contact: Cedar, cedar[dot]ren+acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com, @Cedar at [this Discord server](https://discord.gg/XQYYVCYaNk) Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:30 PM Location: Richmond Public Libraries, West End Branch 5420 Patterson Ave, Richmond, VA 23226 Coordinates: [8794HFHQ+3G](https://plus.codes/8794HFHQ+3G) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KcjAh6Wb9wxse3CjY/meetup-west-end-trolleys-saturday-october-1-richmond-va-lw) Notes: Please RSVP [on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KcjAh6Wb9wxse3CjY/meetup-west-end-trolleys-saturday-october-1-richmond-va-lw) & optionally reach out to me on Discord to introduce yourself! BURLINGTON, VT Contact: Forrest, lucidobservor[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Battery Park, at the benches in the south-western corner of the park, near the cannons facing the lake. I will have an 'ACX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: [87P8FQJH+8P](https://plus.codes/87P8FQJH+8P) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5GdLrK7JnGNvF2HEa/burlington-vt-acx-meetup) BELLINGHAM, WA Contact: Alex, bellinghamrationalish[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 5:30 PM Location: Lake Padden Park, at one of the tables near the lake by the dog park. If it's rainy, we'll meet in one of the two covered gazebo areas just north (right, if you're facing the lake) of the planned spot. If the forecast looks really bad (e.g. very cold), I'll post an indoor location to the Meetup.com page at least three days in advance. Coordinates: [84WVMHX3+GM](https://plus.codes/84WVMHX3+GM) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnaYabPsANxY2NbeF/bellingham-wa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/bellingham-rationalish-community/events/287869950/) Group info: Bellingham Rationalish discusses (in good faith!) topics in and around rationality. We usually meet the evening of the last Wednesday of each month. Our first meeting was a 2021 ACX Everywhere meetup. Notes: Please [RSVP on Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/bellingham-rationalish-community/events/287869950/) so I have an idea how many people to expect. Kids, animals, food, beverages, etc. are all welcome. SEATTLE, WA Contact: Nikita Sokolsky, sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 5:00 PM Location: Optimism Brewing (1158 Broadway, Seattle) Coordinates: [84VVJM7H+4Q](https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Bcyko7BskBLbPHTCt/seattle-acx-everywhere-october-2022), [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/438861581523358/), [Meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/287897493/) Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong (or FB/Meetup) for planning purposes MADISON, WI Contact: Mary Wang, mmwang[at]wisc[dot]edu Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: 1022 High St. Blue house with red porches. If weather permits, we'll be in my large backyard, which has more seating now than last year. If rain, come in the side door. There will be air purifiers and open windows. Masks optional. Look for a sign at the end of the driveway that says ACX/SSC Meetup. Coordinates: [86MG3H3X+XW](https://plus.codes/86MG3H3X+XW) Event link(s): [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5vriBSqwX2bgcESgi/madison-wi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2022), [Facebook event](https://fb.me/e/1YlydMulh) Group info: We have met fortnightly in the past, but quit last year when it got too cold to meet outside. We typically have shared a meal, sat around my kitchen table and talked. Have held a Solstice celebration.	mingyuan	70177923	Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF (Original post [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future)) 1: Petey [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8565975): > When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, even under great duress. So a suicidal person would have a happiness level well under 0, probably for an extended period of time. > > If you think of a person with 0.01 happiness as someone whose life is pretty decent by our standards, the repugnant conclusion doesn't seem so repugnant. If you take a page from the negative utilitarians' book (without subscribing fully to them), you can weight the negatives of pain higher than the positives of pleasure, and say that neutral needs many times more pleasure than pain because pain is more bad than pleasure is good. > > Another way to put it is that a life of 0.01 happiness is a life you must actually decide you'd want to live, in addition to your own life, if you had the choice to. If your intuition tells you that you wouldn't want to live it, then its value is not truly >0, and you must shift the scale. Then, once your intuition tells you that this is a life you'd marginally prefer to get to experience yourself, then the repugnant conclusion no longer seems repugnant. This is a good point, but two responses. First, for me the conclusion’s repugnance doesn’t hinge on the lives of the people involved being especially bad. It hinges on people having to be sadder and poorer than the alternative, their standard of living forever capped, just in order to tile the world with as many warm bodies as possible. I genuinely don’t care how big the population is. I don’t think you can do harm to potential people by not causing them to come into existence. Hurting actual people in order to please potential people seems plenty repugnant to me regardless of the exact level of the injury. Second, MacAskill actually cites some research about where we should put the zero point. Weirdly, it’s not in the section about the repugnant conclusion, it’s in a separate section about whether we should ascribe the future positive value. In one study, researchers ask people to rate their lives on a 1-10 scale; in another, they ask people to rate where they think the neutral point where being alive no longer has positive value is. These aren’t the same people, so we can’t take this too seriously, but if we combine the two studies than about 5-10% of people’s lives are below neutral. Another study contacted people at random times during their day and asked them whether they would like to skip over their current activity (eg sleepwalk through work, then “wake up” once they got home). Then they compared these in various ways to see whether people would want to skip their entire lives, and about 12% of people did. I don’t entirely understand this study and I’m only repeating it for the nominative determinism value - one of the authors was named Dr. Killingsworth. There are also a few studies that just ask this question directly; apparently 16% of Americans say their lives contain more suffering than happiness, 44% say even, and 40% say more happiness than suffering; nine percent wish they were never born. A replication in India found similar numbers. Based on all of this, I think if we trust this methodology about 10% of people live net negative lives today, which means the neutral point where the Repugnant Conclusion would force us to is at about the tenth percentile of the population. This doesn’t quite make sense, because you would think the tenth percentile of America and the tenth percentile of India are very different; there could be positional effects going on here, or it could be that India has some other advantages counterbalancing its poverty (better at family/community/religion?) and so tenth-percentile Indians and Americans are about equally happy. Happiness isn’t exactly the same as income, but if we assume they sort of correlate, it’s worth pointing out that someone in the tenth percent of the US income distribution makes about $15,000. So maybe we could estimate that the average person in the Repugnant Conclusion would be like an American who makes $15,000. Another way of thinking about this: [about 8% of Americans](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression) are depressed, so the tenth-percentile American is just barely about the threshold for a depression diagnosis; we might expect the average Repugnant Conclusion resident to be in a similar state. --- 2: Jack Johnson [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8565925): > I always used to make arguments against the repugnant conclusion by saying step C (equalising happiness) was smuggling in communism, or the abolition of Art and Science, etc. > > I still think it shows some weird unconscious modern axioms that the step "now equalise everything between people" is seen as uncontroversial and most proofs spend little time on it. I think this way of thinking about things is understandable but subtly wrong, and that the “now equalize happiness” step in Repugnant Conclusion is more defensible than communism or other forms of real-life equalizing. In the Repugnant Conclusion, we’re not creating a world, then redistributing resources equally. We’re asking which of two worlds to create. It’s only coincidence that we were thinking of the unequal one first. Imagine we thought about them in the opposite order. Start with World P, with 10 billion people, all happiness level 95. Would you like to switch to World Q, which has 5 billion people of happiness level 80 plus 5 billion of happiness level 100? If so, why? You’re just choosing half the people at random, making their lives a little better, and then making the lives of the other half a lot worse, while on average leaving everyone worse off. MacAskill calls the necessary assumption “non-anti-egalitarianism”, ie you don’t think equality is so bad in and of itself that you would be willing to make the world worse off on average just to avoid equality. While you can always come up with justifications for this (maybe the lack of equality creates something to strive for and gives life meaning, or whatever) I don’t think most people would naturally support this form of anti-egalitarianism if they didn’t know they needed it to “win” the thought experiment. Communism wants to take stuff away from people who have it for some specific reason (maybe because they earned it), and (according to its opponents), makes people on average worse off. In the thought experiment, nothing is being taken away (because the “losers” never non-counterfactually had it), there was never any reason for half the population to have more than the other half, and it makes people on average better off. So we can’t use our anti-communism intuitions to reject the equalizing step of the Repugnant Conclusion. --- 3: Regarding MacAskill’s thought experiment intending to show that creating hapy people is net good, Blacktrance [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8565939): > Conditional on the child's existence, it's better for them to be healthy than neutral, but you can't condition on that if you're trying to decide whether to create them. > > If our options are "sick child", "neutral child", and "do nothing", it's reasonable to say that creating the neutral child and doing nothing are morally equal for the purposes of this comparison; but if we also have the option "healthy child", then in that comparison we might treat doing nothing as equal to creating the healthy child. That might sound inconsistent, but the actual rule here is that doing nothing is equal to the best positive-or-neutral child creation option (whatever that might be), and better than any negative one. > > For an example of other choices that work kind of like this - imagine you have two options: play Civilization and lose, or go to a moderately interesting museum. It's hard to say that one of these options is better than the other, so you might as well treat them as equal. But now suppose that you also have the option of playing Civ and winning. That's presumably more fun than losing, but it's still not clearly better than the museum, so now "play Civ and win" and "museum" are equal, while "play Civ and lose" is eliminated as an inferior choice. This is a fascinating analogy, but I’m not sure it’s true. If playing Civ and losing was genuinely exactly equal in utility to going to the museum, then it might be true that playing Civ and winning dominates it. I agree with Blacktrance that this dones’t feel true, but I think this is just because I’m bad at estimating utilities and they’re so close together that they don’t register as different to me. --- 4: MartinW [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8566047): > Do people who accept the Repugnant Conclusion, also believe in a concrete moral obligation for individuals to strive to have as many children as possible? > > Some religions do, but I'd be surprised to find a modern atheist philosopher among them. But if you accept the premise that preventing the existence of a future person is as bad as killing an existing person. I should stress that even the people who accept the repugnant conclusion don’t believe that “preventing the existence of a future person is as bad as killing an existing person”; in many years of talking to weird utilitarians, I have never heard someone assert this. More generally, I think that talk of “moral obligation” is misleading here. If you accept the repugnant conclusion, creating new people is good. Other things that are good include donating money to charity, being vegetarian, spending time with elderly people, donating your kidney, and living a zero-carbon lifestyle. Basically nobody does all these things, and most people have an attitude of “it is admirable to do this stuff but you don’t have to”. Anyone who did all this stuff would be very strange and probably get a Larissa MacFarquahar profile about them. If having children is good, it would be another thing in this category. In fact, it’s worth pointing out how incredibly unlikely it is that your decision to have children has an expected utility of exactly zero. Either you believe creating happy people is good in and of itself, or you believe in the underpopulation crisis, or you believe in the overpopulation crisis, or maybe your kid will become a doctor and save lives, or maybe your kid will become a criminal and murder people. When you add up the probabilities of all of that, it would be quite surprising if it equalled zero. But that means having a child is either mildly-positive-utility or mildly-negative-utility. Unless you want to ban people from having kids / require them to do so, you had better get on board with the program of “some things can have nonzero utility but also be optional”. Also, a few commenters point out that even if you did have an obligation to have children, you would probably have an even stronger obligation to spend that money saving other people’s children (eg donating it to orphanages, etc). --- 5: Rana Dexsin [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8567696): > Before reading the rest of this, I want to register this bit: > > > Is it morally good to add five billion more people with slightly less constant excruciating suffering (happiness -90) to hell? No, this is obviously bad > > My intuition straightforwardly disagreed with this on first read! It is a good thing to add five billion more people with slightly less constant excruciating suffering to hell, conditional on hell being the universe you start with. It is not a good thing to add them to non-hell, for instance such as by adding them to the world we currently live in. You are the first person I’ve ever met or heard of who genuinely has average utilitarian philosophical intuitions. I feel like you should be in a museum somewhere. Also, I hope no one ever puts you in charge of Hell. --- 6: Magic9Mushroom writes: > >If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity, > > The philosophers have gotten ahead of you on that one. Surprised you haven't already read it, actually. > > <https://www.iffs.se/media/2264/an-impossibility-theorem-for-welfarist-axiologies-in-ep-2000.pdf> > > It's a proof that any consistent system of utilitarianism must either accept the Repugnant Conclusion ("a larger population with very low but positive welfare is better than a small population with very high welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Sadistic Conclusion ("it is better, for high-average-welfare populations, to add a small number of people with negative welfare than a larger number with low-but-positive welfare, for sufficient values of 'larger'"), the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion ("for any population of some number of people and equal utility among all of those people, there is a population with lower average utility distributed unevenly that is better"), or the Oppression Olympics ("all improvement of people's lives is of zero moral value unless it is improvement of the worst life in existence"). > > This proof probably has something to do with why those 29 philosophers said the Repugnant Conclusion shouldn't be grounds to disqualify a moral accounting - it is known that no coherent system of utilitarian ethics avoids all unintuitive results, and the RC is one of the more palatable candidates (this is where the "it's not actually as bad as it looks, because by definition low positive welfare is still a life actually worth living, and also in reality people of 0.001 welfare eat more than 1/1000 as much as people of 1 welfare so the result of applying RC-logic in the real world isn't infinitesimal individual welfare" arguments come in). > > (Also, the most obvious eye-pecking of "making kids that are below average is wrong" is "if everyone follows this, the human race goes extinct, as for any non-empty population of real people there will be someone below average who shouldn't have been born". You also get the Sadistic Conclusion, because you assigned a non-infinitesimal negative value to creating people with positive welfare.) Thanks, I had forgotten about that. I think I am going to go with “morality prohibits bringing below-zero-happiness people into existence, and says nothing at all about bringing new above-zero-happiness people into existence, we’ll make decisions about those based on how we’re feeling that day and how likely it is to lead to some terrible result down the line.” --- 7: hammerspacetime [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8569539): > Have we considered that there is a middle ground between "future people matter as much as current people" and "future people don't matter at all"? If you want numbers you can use a function that discounts the value the further in the future it is, just like we do for money or simulations, to account for uncertainty. > > I imagine people would argue over what the right discount function should be, but this seems better than the alternative. It also lets us factor in the extent to which we are in a better position to find solutions for our near term problems than for far-future problems. There’s a pragmatic discount rate, where we discount future actions based on our uncertainty about whether we can do them at all. I am near-certain that if I give a beggar $100 today, he will get the $100. But if I leave $100 in a bank with a will saying that it should be given to a poor person in the year 5000 AD, someone could steal it, the bank could go out of business, the bank could lose my will, humankind could go extinct, etc. If there’s only a 1% chance that money saved in this way will really reach its target, then we have an implicit 99% discount rate per 3000 years. There’s been some debate about whether we should additionally have an explicit discount rate, where we count future people as genuinely less important than us. Most people come out against, because why should we? It doesn’t intuitively seem true that the suffering of future people matters less than the suffering of people today. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson had an interesting debate about this in 2008; you can read Eliezer [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AvJeJw52NL9y7RJDJ/against-discount-rates) and Robin [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/protecting-acro.html). I think Robin later admitted that his view meant people in the past were much more valuable than people today, so much so that we should let an entire continent worth of present people die in order to prevent a caveman from stubbing his toe, and that he sort of kind of endorses this conclusion; see [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/ancestor-worship-is-efficient.html). --- 8: Hari Seldon writes: > The issue I always have with ultralarge-potential-future utilitarian arguments is that the Carter Catastrophe argument can be made the same way from the same premises, and that that argument says that the probability of this ultralarge future is proportionately ultrasmall. > > Imagine two black boxes (and this will sound very familiar to anyone who has read \Manifold: Time\). Put one red marble in both Box A and Box B. Then, put nine black marbles in Box A and nine hundred ninety-nine black marbles in Box B. Then, shuffle the boxes around so that you don't know which is which, pick a box, and start drawing out marbles at random. And then suppose that the third marble you get is the red marble, after two black ones. > > If you were asked, with that information and nothing else, whether the box in front of you was Box A or Box B, you'd probably say 'Box A'. Sure, it's possible to pull the red marble out from 999 black ones after just three tries. It \could\ happen. But it's a lot less likely than pulling it out from a box with just 9 black marbles. > > The biggest projected future mentioned in this book is the one where humanity colonizes the entire Virgo Cluster, and has a total population of 100 nonillion over the course of its entire history. By comparison, roughly 100 billion human beings have ever lived. If the Virgo Cluster future is in fact our actual future, then only 1 thousand billion billionth of all the humans across history have been born yet. But, the odds of me being in the first thousand billion billionth of humanity are somewhere on the order of a thousand billion billion to one against. The larger the proposed future, the earlier in its history we'd have to be, and the less likely we would declare that a priori. > > If every human who ever lived or ever will live said "I am not in the first 0.01% of humans to be born", 99.99% of them would be right. If we're going by Bayesian reasoning, that's an awfully strong prior to overcome. I also thought about that when reading this! My main concern is that it’s hard to come up with a model where the future doesn’t have more beings in it than the present. The universe is still relatively young. Suppose humankind wipes itself out tomorrow; surely most intelligent life in the universe will be aliens who live after this point? But I think something like the [Grabby Aliens model](https://grabbyaliens.com/) could explain this: intelligent species arise relatively young in the universe’s history, get replaced by non-conscious AIs, and the AIs spread across the universe until there are no more uncolonized stars to spawn biological life. This is really awkward because it suggests AIs can’t be conscious - not just that one particular AI design isn’t conscious, but that no alien race will design a conscious AI. An alternative possibility is that AIs naturally remain single hiveminds, so that most individuals are biological lifeforms even if AI eventually dominates the galaxy. But how could an AI remain a single hivemind when spread across distances so vast that the lightspeed limit hinders communication? I’m not sure how to resolve this except that maybe some idiot destroys the universe in the next few hundred million years. --- 9: David Chapman and many other people [took me as](https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1562059228977590277) attacking philosophy: I disagree with this. I joked about it defeating the point of philosophy, but I think that realistically I was doing philosophy just like everyone else. In a sense all attacks on philosophy are doing philosophy, but I feel like I was doing philosophy even more than the bare minimum that you have to in order to have an opinion at all. I’m not sure how moral realist vs. anti-realist I am. The best I can do is say I’m some kind of intuitionist. I have some moral intuitions. Maybe some of them are contradictory. Maybe I will abandon some of them when I think about them more clearly. When we do moral philosophy, we’re examining our intuitions to see which ones survive vs. dissolve under logical argument. The repugnant conclusion tries to collide two intuitions: first, that the series of steps that gets you there are all valid, and second that the conclusion is bad. If you feel the first intuition very strongly and the second one weakly, then you “have discovered” that the repugnant conclusion is actually okay and you really should be creating lots of mildly happy people. I have the opposite intuitions: I’m less sure about the series of steps than I am that I’m definitely unhappy with the conclusion, and I will reject whatever I need to reject to avoid ending up there. In fact, I’m not sure what to reject. Most of the simple solutions (eg switch to average utilitarianism) end up somewhere even worse. On the other hand, I know that it’s not impossible to come up with something that satisfies my intuitions, because “just stay at World A” (the 5 billion very happy people) satisfies them just fine. So I think of this as a question of dividing up a surplus. World A is very nice. It seems possible that we can do better than World A. How much better? I’m not sure, because some things which superficially appear better turn out to be worse. Someone who is smarter than I am might be able to come up with a proof that the best we can do according to my intuitions is X amount better - in which case I will acknowledge they are a great philosopher. Nobody knows exactly what their moral system is - even the very serious utilitarians who accept the Repugnant Conclusion can’t explain their moral system so precisely that a computer could calculate it. We all have speculative guesses about which parts of our intuition we can describe by clear rules, and which ones have to stay vague and “I know it when I see it”. I prefer to leave this part of population ethics vague until someone can find rules that don’t violate my intuitions so blatantly. This isn’t “anti-philosophy”, it’s doing philosophy the same as we do it everywhere else. --- --- 10: Siberian Fox writes: I’m also sympathetic to the galactic civilization, but only because it’s glorious. This is different from “it has a lot of people experiencing mild contentment”. Isaac Asimov wrote some books about the Spacers, far-future humans who live the lives of old-timey aristocrats with thousands of robot servants each. Suppose we imagine a civilization of super-Spacers with only one human per thousand star systems - even though all of these star systems are inhabited by robots who have built beautiful monuments and are doing good scientific and creative work (which the humans know about and appreciate). Overall there are only five thousand humans in the galaxy, but galactic civilization is super-impressive and getting better every day. Sometimes some people die and others are born, but it’s always around five thousand. Or you can have the city of Jonesboro, Arkanasas (population: 80,000) exactly as it currently exists, preserved in some kind of force field. For some reason the economy doesn’t collapse even though it has no trade partners; maybe if you send trucks full of goods into the force field, it sends back trucks full of other goods. Sometimes some people die and others are born, but it never changes much or gets better. I find that the same part of me that prefers the galactic supercivilization in Siberian Fox’s example also prefers the galactic supercivilization in my example, even though it’s hard to justify with total utilitarianism (there are fewer than 10% as many people; even though their lives are probably much better, I don’t think the intuition depends on them being more than 10x better). --- 11: Alexander Berger writes: You can probably predict my response here - I don’t think I’m doing anything that could be described as “getting off the crazy train”. Like if someone is thinking “Scott believes in so many weird things, like AI risk and deregulating the FDA and so on, it’s weird that this is where he’s choosing to stop believing weird things”, I think you’re drawing the weird-thing category in the wrong place. I believe in AI risk because I think it is going to happen. If I’m a biased person, I can choose to bias myself not to believe in it, but if I try to be unbiased, the best I can do is just follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it goes somewhere crazy. But in the end I am kind of a moral nonrealist who is playing at moral realism because it seems to help my intuitions be more coherent. If I ever discovered that my moral system requires me to torture as many people as possible, I would back off, realize something was wrong, and decide not to play the moral realism game in that particular way. This is what’s happening with the repugnant conclusion. Maybe Berger was including my belief in eg animal welfare as a crazy train stop. I do think this is different. If my moral code is “suffering is wrong”, and I learn that animals can suffer, that’s a real fact about the universe that I can’t deny without potentially violating my moral code. If someone says “I think we should treat potential people exactly the same as real people”, and I notice my moral intuitions don’t care about this, then you can’t make me. On questions of truth, or questions of how to genuinely help promote happiness and avoid suffering, I will follow the crazy train to the ends of the earth. But if it’s some weird spur line to “how about we make everyone worse off for no reason?” I don’t think my epistemic or moral commitments require me to follow it there. --- 12: Long Disc [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8572925): > The hockey stick chart with world economic growth does not prove that we live in an exceptional time. Indeed, if you take a chart of a simple exponential function y=exp(A\x) between 0 and T, then for any T you can find a value of A such that the chart looks just like that. An yet there is nothing special about that or another value of T. Several people had this concern but I think the chart isn’t exponential, it’s hyperbolic. An exponential chart would have the same growth rate at all times, but I think growth rate in ancient times was more like 0.1% per year, compared to more like 2% per year today. --- 13:* David Manheim [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8566330): > I think there's a really simple argument for pushing longtermism . . . the default behavior of humanity is so very short-term that pushing in the direction of considering long-term issues is critical. > > For example, AI risk. As I've argued before, many AI-risk skeptics have the view that we're decades away from AGI, so we don't need to worry, whereas many AI-safety researchers have the view that we might have as little as a few decades until AGI. Is 30 years "long-term"? Well, in the current view of countries, companies, and most people, it's unimaginably far away for planning. If MacAskill suggesting that we should care about the long-term future gets people to discuss AI-risk, and I think we'd all agree it has, then we're all better off for it. > > Ditto seeing how little action climate change receives, for all the attention it gets. And the same for pandemic prevention. It's even worse for nuclear war prevention, or food supply security, which don't even get attention. And to be clear, all of these seem like they are obviously under-resourced with a discount rate of 2%, rather than MackAskill's suggested 0%. I'd argue this is true for the neglected issues even if we were discounting at 5%, where the 30-year future is only worth about a quarter as much as the present - though the case for economic reactions to climate change like imposing a tax of $500/ton CO2, which I think is probably justified using a more reasonable discount rate, is harmed. --- 14: BK [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8565828): > Stealing my own comment from a related reddit thread on MacAskill: "The thing I took away from [his profile in the New Yorker] is that contrary to "near-termist" views, longtermism has no effective feedback mechanism for when it's gone off the rails. > > As covered in the review of The Antipolitics Machine, even neartermist interventions can go off the rails. Even simple, effective interventions like bednets are resulting in environmental pollution or being used as fishing nets! But at least we can pick up on these mistakes after a couple of years, and course correct or repriotise. > > With longtermist views, there is no feedback mechanism on unforeseen externalities, mistaken assumptions, etc. All you get at best in deontological assessments like "hmmm, they seem to be spending money on nice offices instead of doing the work", as covered in the article, or maybe "holy crap they're speeding up where we want them to slow down!" The need for epistemic humility in light of exceedingly poor feedback mechanisms calls for a deprioritisation of longtermist concerns compared to what is currently the general feel in what is communicated from the community." I agree this is a consideration, but I don’t think we should elevate good feedback mechanisms into the be-all-and-end-all of decision-making criteria. Consider smashing your toes with a hammer. It has a great feedback mechanism; if you’re not in terrible pain, you probably missed, and you should re-check your aim. In contrast, trying to cure cancer has very poor feedback; although you might have subgoals like “kill tumor cells in a test tube”, you can never be sure that those subgoals are really on the path to curing cancer (lots of things that kill tumor cells in a test tube are useless in real life). But this doesn’t mean that people currently trying to cure cancer should switch to trying to smash their toes with a hammer. If something’s important, then the lack of a good feedback mechanism should worry you but not necessarily turn you off entirely. --- 15: Mentat Saboteur [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future/comment/8565960): > > MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium? > > This is a really bad hypothetical! I've done a lot of barefoot running. The sharp edges of glass erode very quickly, and glass quickly becomes pretty much harmless to barefoot runners unless it has been recently broken (less than a week in most outdoor conditions). Even if it's still sharp, it's not a very serious threat (I've cut my foot fairly early in a run and had no trouble running many more miles with no lasting harm done). When you run barefoot you watch where you step and would simply not step on the glass. And trail running is extremely advanced for barefooters - rocks and branches are far more dangerous to a barefoot runner than glass, so any child who can comfortably run on a trail has experience and very tough feet, and would not be threatened by mere glass shards. This is a scenario imagined by someone who has clearly never ran even a mile unshod. Thanks, now I don’t have to be a long-termist! Heck, if someone can convince me that water doesn’t really damage fancy suits, I won’t have to be an altruist at all!	Scott Alexander	70086027	Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF	acx
# Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions I have an essay that my friends won’t let me post because it’s too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts: > Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. > A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities? > > Q: Long-termism is just an excuse to avoid helping people today! > A: Are you helping people today? > > Q: I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change. > A: Are you working hard to produce systemic change? > > Q: Here are some exotic philosophical scenarios where utilitarianism gives the wrong answer. > A: Are you donating 10% of your income to poor people who aren’t in those exotic philosophical scenarios? Many people will answer yes to all of these! In which case, fine! But…well, suppose you’re a Christian. An atheist comes up to you and says “Christianity is stupid, because the New International Version of the Bible has serious translation errors”. You might immediately have questions like “Couldn’t you just use a different Bible version?” or “Couldn’t you just worship Jesus and love your fellow man while accepting that you might be misunderstanding parts of the Bible?” But beyond that, you might wonder why the atheist didn’t think of these things. Are the translation errors his real objection to Christianity, or is he just seizing on them as an excuse? And if he’s just seizing on them as an excuse, what’s his real objection? And why isn’t he trying to convince you of that? This is also how I feel about these kinds of critiques of effective altruism. To me, the core of effective altruism is the [Drowning Child scenario](https://newint.org/features/1997/04/05/peter-singer-drowning-child-new-internationalist). The world is full of death and suffering. Your money (or time, or whatever resource you prefer to spend) could fix more of it than you think - one controversial analysis estimates $5,000 to save a life. You would go crazy if you tried to devote 100% of your time and money to helping others. But if you decide to just help when you feel like it or a situation comes up, you’ll probably forget. Is there some more systematic way to commit yourself to some amount between 0% and 100% of your effort (traditionally 10%)? And once you’ve done that, how do you make those resources go as far as possible? This is effective altruism, the rest is just commentary. There’s a lot of commentary. Effective altruism is now a semi-organized movement, with leaders like Will MacAskill and Toby Ord and institutions like the Open Philanthropy Project. It’s produced a vast literature on effective charities, ranging from how to best prevent malaria to how to promote animal welfare to speculative scenarios about AI apocalypse. These aren’t above criticism, and lots of people have criticized them. But if you criticize them successfully, and feel like they’re discredited, then you’re back at the basic tenets of the movement again. Think of it as a tower of assumptions. If you destroy the foundation, the whole tower falls. But if you destroy the top floor, all the other floors are still standing: Not intended to be canonical; realistically it would be more of a tree or flowchart than a tower. When people say things like “I think AI risk is stupid, so I’m against effective altruism”, the two halves of that sentence might both be true, but the “so” joining them isn’t. Freddie deBoer [writes that](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-has-a-novelty): > The correct ideas of EA are great, but some of them are so obvious that they shouldn’t be ascribed to the movement at all, while the interesting, provocative ideas are fucking insane and bad. The first time I googled “effective altruism,” within 10 minutes I was reading an argument that we should commit genocide against all predatory species, as they kill herbivores, see, and that’s negative utility or whatever. I don’t think “kill predatory animals” is an especially common EA belief, but if it were, fine, retreat back to the next-lowest level of the tower! Spend 10% of your income on normal animal welfare causes like ending factory farming. Think that animal welfare is also wacky? Then donate 10% of your income to helping poor people in developing countries. Are those kinds of things “so obvious that [they] shouldn’t be ascribed to the movement at all”? Then how come so few other people do them? Think that 10% is the wrong number, and you should be helping people closer to home? Fine, then go even lower on the tower, and donate . . . some amount of your time, money, something, to poor people in your home country, in some kind of systematic considered way beyond “I saw an ad for March of Dimes at the supermarket so I guess I’ll give them my spare change”. If you’re not doing this, your beef with effective altruism isn’t “the culture around Open Philanthropy Project devalues such and such a form of change”, your beef is whatever’s preventing you from doing that. You may additionally have an interesting intellectual point about the culture around Open Phil, much as you might have an interesting intellectual point about which Bible translations you’d prefer if you were Christian. But don’t mistake it for a real crux. Near the end of my too-spicy-to-publish essay: > Q: Separate from any questions about my personal obligations, I just think it’s important to call out the ways effective altruism as a movement is doing harm. > A: Separate from any callouts of effective altruism as a movement, I just think it’s important to confront the question of whether you personally should be donating 10% of your income to the poorest people in the world. For me, basically every other question around effective altruism is less interesting than this basic one of moral obligation. It’s fun to debate whether some people/institutions should gain or lose status, and I participate in those debates myself, but they seem less important than these basic questions of how we should live and what our ethics should be. > Q: Come on,effective altruism doesn’t even emphasize the “donate 10% of your income to effective charities” thing anymore! Now it emphasizes searching for an altruistic career! > A: Are you pursuing an altruistic career? > > Q: No, because I think all the altruistic careers on their list are stupid and won’t really help anybody! > A: Then are you donating 10% of your income to charity? > > Q: You’re just doing a sneaky equivocation thing where you conflate “effective altruism”, a specific flawed community, with the idea of altruism itself, thus deflecting all possible criticism! > A: You caught me. Are you donating 10% of your income to the poorest people in the world? Why not? > > Q: FINE. YOU WIN. Now I’m donating 10% of my income to charity. > A: You should donate more effectively.	Scott Alexander	69906838	Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions	acx
# Book Review: What We Owe The Future I. An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign. If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: “How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?” They can make your book’s title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness. If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book [What We Owe The Future](https://amzn.to/3PN5B9M) have recently been featured in the [New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism), [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/opinion/the-case-for-longtermism.html), [Vox](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/8/23150496/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-dustin-moskovitz-billionaire-philanthropy-crytocurrency), [NPR](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/08/16/1114353811/how-can-we-help-humans-thrive-trillions-of-years-from-now-this-philosopher-has-a), [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220805-what-is-longtermism-and-why-does-it-matter), [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/future-generations-climate-change-pandemics-ai/671148/), [Wired](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/will-macaskill-longtermism), and [Boston Review](https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathematics/). He’s been interviewed by [Sam Harris](https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/292-how-much-does-the-future-matter), [Ezra Klein](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-will-macaskill.html), [Tim Ferriss](https://tim.blog/2022/08/02/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/), [Dwarkesh Patel](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-macaskill#details), and [Tyler Cowen](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill/). Tweeted about by [Elon Musk](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1554335028313718784), [Andrew Yang](https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1560104257499668483), and [Matt Yglesias](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1559571197616070656). The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded. But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep. I was briefly puzzled before remembering that some PR strategies hinge on a book having lots of pre-orders, so effective altruist leadership [asked everyone to pre-order the book back in March](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JfaF3DgwNN6itcmtm/announcing-what-we-owe-the-future), so I did. Like the book as a whole, my physical copy was a byproduct of the marketing campaign. Still, I had a perverse urge to check if it really was just lorem ipsum text, one thing led to another, and I ended up reading it. I am pleased to say that it is actual words and sentences and not just filler (aside from pages 15 through 19, which are just a glyph of a human figure copy-pasted nine hundred fifty four times) There are important philosophical and altruistic reasons for this. So fine. At the risk of joining on an already-overcrowded bandwagon, let’s see what we owe the future. II. All utilitarian philosophers have one thing in common: hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children. The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place. MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium? Most people say that you need to pick up the shards regardless of how long it will be - a kid getting injured is a kid getting injured. (do your intuitions change if you spot glass shards left by someone else, and have to decide whether to pick them up?) [Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LPDyAvwYyp4tzPmED/common-sense-cases-where-hypothetical-future-people-matter) rephrases this thought experiment to be about our obligations to people who aren’t born yet: > You drop the bottle and don't clean it up. Ten years later, you return to the same spot and remember the glass bottle. The shards are still there, and, to your horror, before your eyes, a child does cut herself on the shards. > > You feel a pang of guilt, realizing that your lack of care 10 years ago was morally reprehensible. But then, you remember the totally plausible moral theory that hypothetical future people don't matter, and shout out: "How old are you?" > > The child looks up, confused. "I'm eight." > > "Whew," you say. Off the hook! While it's a shame that a child was injured, your decision not to clean up 10 years ago turns out not to have had any moral significance. So it would appear we have moral obligations to people who have not yet been born, and to people in the far future who might be millennia away. This shouldn’t be too shocking a notion. We talk about leaving a better world for our children and grandchildren, and praise people who “plant trees in whose shade they will never sit”. Older people may fight climate change even though its worst effects won’t materialize until after they’re dead. When we build nuclear waste repositories, we try to build ones that won’t crack in ten thousand years and give our distant descendants weird cancers. But the future (hopefully) has more people than the present. MacAskill frames this as: if humanity stays at the same population, but exists for another 500 million years, the future will contain about 50,000,000,000,000,000 (50 quadrillion) people. For some reason he stops there, but we don’t have to: if humanity [colonizes the whole Virgo Supercluster](https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste) and lasts a billion years, there could be as many as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 nonillion) people. (All those pages full of person glyphs were a half-assed attempt to put these numbers in perspective - half-assed because MacAskill uses each glyph to represent 10 billion people, and cuts it off after five pages despite admitting it would take 20,000 pages to do accurately. Coward.) Stalin said that one death was a tragedy but a million was a statistic, but he was joking. We usually accept that a disaster which kills a million people is worse than one that kills a thousand. A disaster that killed a billion people would be utterly awful. But the future is 20,000 pages worth of glyphs representing 10 billion people each. Are we morally entangled with all of those people, just as we would have an obligation to pick up a glass bottle that might injure them? Imagine you are a wise counselor, and you have the opportunity to spend your life advising one country. Whichever country you advise will become much richer and happier (and for whatever reason, you can’t choose your own homeland). You might think: “If I help Andorra, it will only benefit a few thousand people. If I help Lithuania, it will only benefit a few million people. But if I help India, it will benefit over a billion people. So I will devote my life to helping India.” Then you learn about the future, a country with 50 quadrillion people. Seems like a big deal. Is this just [Pascalian reasoning,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging) where you name a prize so big that it overwhelms any potential discussion of how likely it is that you can really get the prize? MacAskill carefully avoids doing this explicitly, so much so that he (unconvincingly) denies being a utilitarian at all. Is he doing it implicitly? I think he would make an argument something like Gregory Lewis’ [Most Small Probabilities Aren’t Pascalian](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5y3vzEAXhGskBhtAD/most-small-probabilities-aren-t-pascalian). This isn’t about an 0.000001% chance of affecting 50 quadrillion people. It’s more like a 1% chance of affecting them. It’s not automatically Pascalian reasoning every time you’re dealing with a high-stakes situation! III. But how do you get a 1% chance of affecting the far future? MacAskill suggests three potential methods: progress, survival, and trajectory change. Progress is simple: suppose the current GDP growth rate is 2%/year. At that rate, the world ten thousand years from now will be only 10^86 times richer. But if you increase the growth rate to 3%, then it will be a whole 10^128 times richer! Okay, never mind, this is a stupid argument. There are only 10^67 atoms in our lightcone; even if we converted all of them into consumer goods, we couldn’t become 10^86 times richer. So MacAskill makes a different argument: it would be very bad if technological growth stagnated, and we could never become richer at all. There are a few reasons we might expect that to happen. Technological growth per person is [slowing down](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/), and [population growth is declining worldwide](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation). Sometimes growth builds on itself; when there is a lot of growth, people are in a good mood and stakeholders are willing to make sacrifices for the future, trusting that there’s much more where that came from. [When growth slows](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures), everyone becomes fiercely protective of what they have, and play zero-sum games with each other in ways not conducive to future growth. So one potential catastrophe is a vicious cycle of stagnation that slows growth for millennia. Since our current tech level is pretty conducive to world destruction (we have nukes and the ability to genetically engineer bioweapons, but nothing that can really defend against nukes or genetically-engineered bioweapons), staying at the current tech level for millennia is buying a lot of lottery tickets for world destruction. So one long-termist cause might be to avoid technological stagnation - as long as you’re sure you’re speeding up the good technologies (like defenses against nukes) and not the bad ones (like super-nukes). Which you never are. Survival is also simple. MacAskill introduces it with a riddle of Derek Parfit’s. Assuming there are 10 billion people in the world, consider the following outcomes: A. Nothing bad happens B. A nuclear war kills 9 billion people C. A slightly bigger nuclear war kills all 10 billion people, driving humanity extinct Clearly A is better than B is better than C. But which is bigger: the difference between A and B, or the difference between B and C? You might think A - B - after all, there’s a difference of 9 billion deaths, vs. a difference of only 1 billion deaths between B and C. But Parfit says it’s B - C, because this kills not only the extra 1 billion people, but also the 50 quadrillion people who will one day live in the far future. So preventing human extinction is really important. But it is hard to drive humans extinct. MacAskill goes over many different scenarios and shows how they will not kill all humans. Global warming could be very bad, but climate models show that even under the worst plausible scenarios, Greenland will still be fine. Nuclear war could be very bad, but nobody wants to nuke New Zealand, and climate patterns mostly protect it from nuclear winter. Superplagues could be bad, but countries will lock down and a few (eg New Zealand) might hold on long enough for everyone else to die out and the immediate threat of contagion to disappear. MacAskill admits he is kind of playing down bioweapons for pragmatic reasons; apparently al-Qaeda started a bioweapons program after reading scaremongering articles in the Western press about how dangerous bioweapons could be. (what about AI? MacAskill deals with it separately: he thinks in some sense an AI takeover wouldn’t count as extinction, since the AI still exists.) Suppose that some catastrophe “merely” kills 99% of humans. Could the rest survive and rebuild civilization? MacAskill thinks yes, partly because of the indomitable human spirit: > [Someone might guess that] even today, [Hiroshima] would be a nuclear wasteland…but nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the enormous loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, power was restored to some areas within a day, to 30% of homes within two weeks, and to all homes not destroyed by the blast within four months. There was a limited rail service running the day after the attack, there was a streetcar line running within three days, water pumps were working again within four days, and telecommunications were restored in some areas within a month. The Bank of Japan, just 380 metres from the hypocenter of the blast, reopened within just two days. …but also for good factual reasons. For example, it would be much easier to reinvent agriculture the second time around, because we would have seeds of our current highly-optimized crops, plus even if knowledgeable farmers didn’t survive we would at least know agriculture was possible. His biggest concern here is reindustrialization. The first Industrial Revolution relied on coal. But we have already exhausted most easy-to-mine surface coal deposits. Could we industrialize again without this resource? As any Minecraft player knows, charcoal is a passable substitute for coal (apparently Brazil’s steel industry runs on it!) But: > The problem is that it’s not clear whether we would be able to redevelop the efficient steam turbines and internal combustion engines needed to harness the energy from charcoal. In the Industrial Revolution, steam turbines were first used to pump out coal mines to extract more coal. As Lewis Dartnell says, “Steam engines were themselves employed at machine shops to construct yet more steam engines. It was only once steam engines were being built and operated that subsequent engineers were able to devise ways to increase their efficiency and shrink fuel demands…in other words, there was a positive feedback loop at the very core of the industrial revolution: the production of coal, iron, and steam engines were all mutually supportive. So rebuilding industrial civilization out of charcoal is iffy. The good news is that there are a few big remaining near-surface coal deposits. MacAskill suggests that although the main reason to stop mining coal is because of climate change, a second reason to stop mining coal is to leave those few remaining deposits alone in case our distant descendants need them. Also, we should tell them to get it right next time: there might be enough coal left to industrialize one more time, but that’s it. Trajectory change is the most complicated way of affecting the future. Can we change society for the better today, in some way that gets locked in such that it’s still better a thousand or a million years from now? This might not be impossible. For example, Mohammed asked Muslims not to eat pork, and they still follow this command thousands of years later. The US Constitution made certain design decisions that still affect America today. Confucianism won the philosophical squabbles in China around the birth of Christ, and its ethos still influences modern China. MacAskill frames this in terms of value malleability and value lock-in. There is a time of great malleability: maybe during the Constitutional Convention, if some delegate had given a slightly more elegant speech, they might have ditched the Senate or doubled the length of a presidential term or something. But after the Constitution was signed - and after it developed centuries of respect, and after tense battle lines got drawn up over every aspect of it - it became much harder to change the Constitution, to the point where almost nobody seriously expects this to work today. If another Chinese philosopher had fought a little harder in 100 BC, maybe his school would have beaten Confucius’ and the next 2000 years of Chinese history would have looked totally different. We might be living at a time of unusual value malleability. For one thing, this graph: …suggests this is not exactly the most normal time. Growth can’t go on like this forever; eventually we run into the not-enough-atoms-to-convert into-consumer-goods problem. So we are in an unusual few centuries of supergrowth between two many-millennia-long periods of stagnation. Maybe the norms we establish now will shape the character of the stagnant period? But also, we seem about to invent AI. It is hard to imagine the future not depending on AI in some way. If only dictators have AI, maybe they can use it to create perfect surveillance states that will never be overthrown. If everyone benefits from AI, maybe it will make dictatorships impossible. Or maybe the AIs themselves will rule us, and their benevolence level will depend on how well we design them. Objection: Mohammed, Washington, and Confucius shaped the future. But none of them could really see how their influence would ripple through time, and they might not be very happy with the civilizations they created. Do we have any examples of people who aimed for a certain positive change to the future, achieved it, and locked it in so hard that we expect it to continue even unto the ends of the galaxy? MacAskill thinks yes. His example is the abolition of slavery. The Greeks and Romans, for all their moral philosophy, never really considered this. Nor was there much abolitionist thinking in the New World before 1700. As far as anyone can tell, the first abolitionist was Benjamin Lay (1682 - 1759), a hunchbacked Quaker dwarf who lived in a cave. He convinced some of his fellow Quakers, the Quakers convinced some other Americans and British, and the British convinced the world. There’s a heated scholarly debate about whether the end of slavery was an inevitable consequence of the shift from feudalist to industrial-capitalist modes of production, or whether it was a contingent result of the efforts of abolitionist campaigners. MacAskill tentatively takes the contingent side. At the very least, the British campaigners weren’t just sitting back and letting History do its work: > At the time of abolition slavery was enormously profitable for the British. In the years leading up to abolition, British colonies produced more sugar than the rest of the world combined, and Britain consumed the most sugar of any country. When slavery was abolished, the shlef price of sugar increased by about 50 percent, costing the British public £21 million over seven years - about 5% of British expenditure at the time. Indeed, the slave trade was booming rather than declining: even though Britain had abolished its slave trade between 1807, more Africans were taken in the transatlantic slave trade between 1821 and 1830 than any other decade except the 1780s. The British government paid off British slave owners in order to pass the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which gradually freed the enslaved across most of the British Empire. This cost the British government £20 million, amounting to 40% of the Treasury’s annual expenditure at the time. To finance the payments, the British government took out a £15 million loan, which was not fully paid back until 2015. > > The economic interpretation of abolition also struggles to explain the activist approach that Britain took to the slave trade after 1807. Britain made treaties, and sometimes bribes, to pressure other European powers to end their involvement in the trade and used the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron to enforce those treaties. Britain had some economic incentive here to prevent their rivals from selling slave-produced goods at lower prices than they could. But the scale of their activism doesn’t seem worth it: from 1807 to 1867, enforcing abolition cost Britain almost 2% of its annual national income, several times what Britain spends today on foreign aid; political scientists Robert Pape and Chaim Kaufmann described this campaign as “the most expensive international moral effort in modern history”. Race-based slavery ended in the US in 1865 and in Brazil in 1888. Saudi Arabia ended its own form of slavery in 1962. Since then there has been some involuntary labor in prisons and gulags, but nothing like the system of forced labor that covered most of the world in the early 1800s. And although we may compare some modern institutions to slavery, it seems almost inconceivable that slavery as open and widespread as the 19th century norm could recur without a total change of everything in society. So do we credit abolitionists with locking in better values for all time? MacAskill wants to do this, but I’m not sure. I think he amply proved that abolitionists made slavery end sooner than it would have otherwise. But would we still have widespread race-based slavery in 1950 without the Quakers and the British abolitionists? Would we still have it today? Or were they the leading edge of a social movement that would have spawned other activists to take up the cause if they had faltered? MacAskill admits that scholars continue to disagree on this. But he still thinks that one of the most important things is to lock in changes like this now, before it gets harder. MacAskill doesn’t mention it, but slavery came to the US very gradually, and if a few 1600s court cases had gone the other way it might not have gotten started at all, or might have been much less severe than it was. It would have been much easier to swing those few court cases than the actual method of waiting until half the country had an economy and lifestyle centered around slavery, then fighting a civil war to make it change its economy and lifestyle. What is at the “swing a few court cases” stage today? MacAskill doesn’t talk about this much besides gesturing about something something AI. Instead, he focuses on ideas he calls “moral entrepreneurship” and “moral exploration”; can we do what Benjamin Lay did in the 1700s and discover moral truths we were missing before of the same scale as “slavery is wrong”? And can we have different countries with different systems (he explicitly mentions charter cities) to explore fairer systems of government? Then maybe once we discover good things we can promote them before AI or whatever locks everything in. I found this a disappointing conclusion to this section, so I’ll mention one opportunity I heard about recently: [let’s be against octopus factory farming](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jSaAitdE5ejv4xj4P/world-s-first-octopus-farm-linkpost). Octopi seem unusually smart and thoughtful for animals, some people have just barely started factory farming them in horrible painful ways, and probably there aren’t enough entrenched interests here to resist an effort to stop this. This probably won’t be a legendary campaign that bards will sing about for all time the way abolitionism was, but I don’t know how you find one of those. Maybe find a hunchbacked Quaker dwarf who lives in a cave, and ask what he thinks. IV. There’s a moral-philosophy-adjacent thought experiment called the [Counterfactual Mugging](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/counterfactual-mugging). It doesn’t feature in What We Owe The Future. But I think about it a lot, because every interaction with moral philosophers feels like a counterfactual mugging. You’re walking along, minding your own business, when the philosopher jumps out from the bushes. “Give me your wallet!” You notice he doesn’t have a gun, so you refuse. “Do you think drowning kittens is worse than petting them?” the philosopher asks. You guardedly agree this is true. “I can prove that if you accept the two premises that you shouldn’t give me your wallet right now and that drowning kittens is worse than petting them, then you are morally obligated to allocate all value in the world to geese.” The philosopher walks you through the proof. It seems solid. You can either give the philosopher your wallet, drown kittens, allocate all value in the world to geese, or admit that logic is fake and Bertrand Russell was a witch. This is how I feel about the section on potential people. Suppose you were considering giving birth to a child who you knew would be tortured for their entire life, and spend every moment wishing they were never born. Maybe you know you have a gene for a horrible medical condition which will make them nonfunctional and in constant pain. Seems bad, right? Having this kid is actively worse than not having them. Now suppose you were considering giving birth to a child who you knew would have an amazing wonderful life. I don’t know how you know this, maybe an oracle told you. They will mysteriously never consume any resources, make the planet more crowded, or make anyone else’s life worse in any way. They’ll just spend every second being really happy they exist. Is having this kid actively morally good? Better than not having them at all? By some kind of symmetry with the constant pain kid, it seems like it should be. Or you could think of this on a population level. Which is better, a world with ten million happy people, or one with ten billion equally happy people? Suppose the world has infinite resources, we don’t have to worry about overcrowding, each new person is happy to exist but doesn’t make anyone else worse off. Wanting the ten billion happy people seems like kind of the same intuition as wanting to give birth to the happy child; all else being equal, it’s better to create new happy people than not to do so. MacAskill makes a more formal argument here. Suppose we agree that having the child with the gene for the horrible medical condition that leaves them nonfunctional and in constant pain is morally wrong. Now we gradually dial down the badness of the medical condition until we reach a point where it’s exactly-morally-neutral to have the child (if you believe it’s always wrong to have a child who would have a medical condition, consider that I carry a gene for male-pattern baldness, my child will probably inherit it, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to have children). Having the child who will have this minorly-bad medical condition is exactly morally neutral. Is it better to have a healthy child than a child with a medical condition? Seems like yes! For example, if you have a vitamin deficiency during pregnancy, and your doctor tells you to correct it so your child doesn’t develop a medical, most people would correct the deficiency. Or if a woman abused recreational drugs during her pregnancy and this caused her child to have a medical condition, we would agree that is morally bad. So having a healthy child is better than having a child with a medical condition. But we already agreed that having the child with the mild medical condition is morally neutral. So it seems that having the healthy child must be morally good, better than not having a child at all. Now the mugging: if you agree that creating new happy people is better than not doing that, you can prove that a world full of lots of very poor, almost-suicidal people is better than one full of a smaller number of much richer, happier people. The proof: start with World A, full of 5 billion very happy people. Let’s call them happiness level 100, the happiest it is possible to be, where 0 is neutral happiness (you genuinely don’t care if you live or die), and -100 is maximum unhappiness (you strongly wish you were never born). Suppose you have the option to either keep World A or switch to World B, which has the same 5 billion happy people, plus another 5 billion people at happiness 80 (so slightly less happy, but still doing very well). These people aren’t taking any resources from the first group. Maybe they live on an entirely different planet or something. You can create them with no downside to any of the people who already exist. Do you keep World A or switch to World B? You switch to B, right? 5 billion extra quite happy people with no downside. Okay, now you can keep World B or switch to World C. World C has 10 billion people, all at happiness 95. So on average it’s better then World B (which has 10 billion people, average happiness 90). Sure, some people will be worse off. But you’re not any of these people. You’re just some distant god, choosing which worlds to exist. Also, none of these people deserve or earned their happiness in any way. They just blinked into existence with a certain happiness level. So it only seems fair to redistribute the happiness evenly. Plus doing that makes everyone happier on average. So sure, switch from World B to World C. So now we’ve gone from World A (5 billion people with happiness 100) to World C (10 billion people with happiness 95). You will not be surprised to hear we can repeat the process to go to 20 billion people with happiness 90, 40 billion with 85, and so on, all the way until we reach (let’s say) a trillion people with happiness 0.01. Remember, on our scale, 0 was completely neutral, neither enjoying nor hating life, not caring whether they live or die. So we have gone from a world of 10 billion extremely happy people to a trillion near-suicidal people, and every step seems logically valid and morally correct. This argument, popularly called the [Repugnant Conclusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox), seems to involve a sleight-of-hand: the philosopher convinces you to add some extra people, pointing out that it won’t make the existing people any worse. Then once the people exist, he says “Ha! Now that these people exist, you’re morally obligated to redistribute utility to help them.” But just because you know this is going to happen doesn’t make the argument fail. (in case you think this is irrelevant to the real world, I sometimes think about this during debates about immigration. Economists make a strong argument that if you let more people into the country, it will make them better off at no cost to you. But once the people are in the country, you have to change the national culture away from your culture/preferences towards their culture/preferences, or else you are an evil racist.) Can we solve this by saying that it’s not morally good to create new happy people unless their lives are above a certain quality threshold? No. In another mugging, MacAskill proves that if you accept this, then you must accept that it is sometimes better to create suffering people (ie people being tortured whose lives are actively worse than not existing at all) than happy people. I’ll let you read the book for the proof. Can we solve this by saying you can only create new people if they’re at least as happy as existing people - ie if they raise the average? No. This time the proof is easy: suppose there are five billion people in hell, leading an existence of constant excruciating suffering (happiness -100). Is it morally good to add five billion more people with slightly less constant excruciating suffering (happiness -90) to hell? No, this is obviously bad, even though it raises the average from -100 to -95. So raising the average isn’t quite what we’re after either. MacAskill concludes that there’s no solution besides agreeing to create as many people as possible even though they will all have happiness 0.001. He points out that happiness 0.001 might not be that bad. People seem to avoid suicide out of stubbornness or moral objections, so “the lowest threshold at which living is still slightly better than dying” doesn’t necessarily mean the level of depression we associate with most real-world suicides. It could still be a sort of okay life. Derek Parfit describes it as “listening to Muzak and [eating potatoes](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/29/potato-diet-community-trial-sign-up-now-lol/)”. He writes: > The Repugnant Conclusion is certainly unintuitive. Does that mean that we should automatically reject the total view? I don’t think so. Indeed, in what was an unusual move in philosophy, a public statement was recently published, cosigned by twenty-nine philosophers, stating that the fact that a theory of population ethics entails the Repugnant Conclusion shouldn’t be a decisive reason to reject that theory. I was one of the cosignatories. I hate to disagree with twenty-nine philosophers, but I have never found any of this convincing. Just don’t create new people! I agree it’s slightly awkward to have to say creating new happy people isn’t morally praiseworthy, but it’s only a minor deviation from my intuitions, and accepting any of these muggings is much worse. If I had to play the philosophy game, I would assert that it’s always bad to create new people whose lives are below zero, and neutral to slightly bad to create new people whose lives are positive but below average. This sort of implies that very poor people shouldn’t have kids, but I’m happy to shrug this off by saying it’s a very minor sin and the joy that the child brings the parents more than compensates for the harm against abstract utility. This series of commitments feels basically right to me and I think it prevents muggings. But I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms. If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity, I will just refuse to extend things to infinity. I can always just keep World A with its 5 billion extremely happy people! I like that one! When the friendly AI asks me if I want to switch from World A to something superficially better, I can ask it “tell me the truth, is this eventually going to result in my eyes being pecked out by seagulls?” and if it answers “yes, I have a series of twenty-eight switches, and each one is obviously better than the one before, and the twenty-eighth is this world except your eyes are getting pecked out by seagulls”, then I will just avoid the first switch. I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table - the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point - but I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I realize this is “anti-intellectual” and “defeating the entire point of philosophy”. If you want to complain, you can find me in World A, along with my 4,999,999,999 blissfully happy friends. V. These kinds of population ethics problems are just one chapter of What We Owe The Future (if you want the book-length treatment, read [Reasons and Persons](https://amzn.to/3wp4LZZ)), and don’t really affect the conclusion, which is… What is the conclusion? MacAskill wants you to be a long-termist, ie to direct your moral energy to helping the long-term future. He doesn’t say outright that the future deserves your energy more than the present, but taken to its logical conclusion the book suggests this possibility. If you agree, what should you do? Luckily, the last chapter of WWOTF is called “What To Do?” It admits that we can’t be sure how best to affect the future, and one of its suggestions is trying to learn more. Aside from that, he suggests preparing against existential catastrophes, fighting climate change and fossil fuel depletion (remember, we need that coal in the ground in case we need to rebuild civilization), figuring out what’s up with AI safety, and building robust international institutions that avoid war and enable good governance. How can we do this? MacAskill is nothing if not practical, so the middle section of the “What To Do” chapter is called “How To Act”: > [Along with charitable] donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children…But by far the most important decision you will make in terms of your lifetime impact is your choice of career. You can read more about MacAskill’s justifications for each of those claims in the book. What careers does he suggest? Complicated question, but the best place to start looking would be the altruistic career counseling organization he co-founded, [80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/). What should we think of all this? MacAskill is quick to say that he is not advocating that we sacrifice present needs in favor of future ones: ([source](https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/89677-future-people-count-pw-talks-with-william-macaskill-about-his-new-book.html)) This is good PR - certainly lots of people have tried to attack the book on the grounds that worrying about the future is insensitive when there’s so much suffering in the present, and this gracefully sidesteps those concerns. Part of me would have selfishly preferred that MacAskill attack these criticisms head-on. If you really believe future people matter, then caring about them at the expense of present people isn’t insensitive. Imagine someone responding to abolitionist literature with “It’s insensitive to worry about black people when there’s so much suffering within the white community.” This argument only makes sense if you accept that white people matter more - but the whole point of abolitionist arguments is that maybe that isn’t true. “It’s insensitive to worry about future people when there’s suffering in the present” only makes sense if you accept that present people get overwhelming priority over future ones, the point MacAskill just wrote a book arguing against. So these aren’t really criticisms of the book so much as total refusals to engage with it. MacAskill could have said so and repeated his arguments more forcefully instead of being so agreeable. But this is a selfish preference coming from the part of me that wants to see philosophers have interesting fights. Most of me agrees with MacAskill’s boring good-PR point: long-termism rarely gives different answers from near-termism. In fact, I wrote a post about this on the EA Forum recently, called [Long-Termism Vs. Existential Risk](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk): > AI alignment is a central example of a supposedly long-termist cause. > > But Ajeya Cotra's [Biological Anchors report](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines) estimates a 10% chance of transformative AI by 2031, and a 50% chance by 2052. Others (eg [Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works)) think it might happen even sooner. > > Let me rephrase this in a deliberately inflammatory way: if you're under ~50, unaligned AI might kill you and everyone you know. Not your great-great-(...)-great-grandchildren in the year 30,000 AD. Not even your children. You and everyone you know. As a pitch to get people to care about something, this is a pretty strong one. > > But right now, a lot of EA discussion about this goes through an argument that starts with "did you know you might want to assign your descendants in the year 30,000 AD exactly equal moral value to yourself? Did you know that maybe you should care about their problems exactly as much as you care about global warming and other problems happening today?" > > Regardless of whether these statements are true, or whether you could eventually convince someone of them, they're not the most efficient way to make people concerned about something which will also, in the short term, kill them and everyone they know. > > The same argument applies to other long-termist priorities, like biosecurity and nuclear weapons. Well-known ideas like "the hinge of history", "the most important century" and "the precipice" all point to the idea that existential risk is concentrated in the relatively near future - probably before 2100. > > The average biosecurity project being funded by Long-Term Future Fund or FTX Future Fund is aimed at preventing pandemics in the next 10 or 30 years. The average nuclear containment project is aimed at preventing nuclear wars in the next 10 to 30 years. One reason all of these projects are good is that they will prevent humanity from being wiped out, leading to a flourishing long-term future. But another reason they're good is that if there's a pandemic or nuclear war 10 or 30 years from now, it might kill you and everyone you know. [Eli Lifland replies](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rvvwCcixmEep4RSjg/prioritizing-x-risks-may-require-caring-about-future-people) that sometimes long-termism and near-termism make different predictions; you need long-termism to robustly prioritize x-risk related charities. I am not sure I agree; his near-termist analysis still finds that AI risk is most cost-effective; the only thing even close is animal welfare, which many people reject based on not caring about animals. I think marginal thinking and moral parliament concerns can get you most of the way to an ideal balance of charitable giving without long-termism (see [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rvvwCcixmEep4RSjg/prioritizing-x-risks-may-require-caring-about-future-people) for more), and that common-sense principles like “it would be extra bad if humanity went extinct” can get you the rest of the way. MacAskill must take Lifland’s side here. Even though long-termism and near-termism are often allied, he must think that there are some important questions where they disagree, questions simple enough that the average person might encounter them in their ordinary life. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written a book promoting long-termism, or launched a public relations blitz to burn long-termism into the collective consciousness. But I’m not sure what those questions are, and I don’t feel like this book really explained them to me. Do I have positive wishes for the long-term future anyway? That depends. Is it an honest question? Then yes, I hope we have a long and glorious future, free from suffering and full of happiness. Or is it some kind of trick where five steps later you will prove that I should let seagulls peck out my eyes? Then no, I’ll stick to doing things because I don’t want x-risks to kill me and everyone I know, sorry.	Scott Alexander	69594204	Book Review: What We Owe The Future	acx
# Open Thread 238 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Reminder that we are still [looking for organizers for this year’s Meetups Everywhere](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for), ie volunteer to host an ACX meetup in your city that will get signal-boosted on the blog. We seem to have had unusually few people apply this time around, so if you were on the fence, please [sign up](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehzo1uJvafl9SNYn0USxafV_MtrwhDJ96cHLx5-QQiXI_djQ/viewform).	Scott Alexander	69741124	Open Thread 238	acx
# Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. A year of no significance? It's not often a history book makes me laugh, but that did. Sure, many history books investigate the insignificant, but your typical author doesn't call your attention to it. This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on [The Scholar's Stage](https://scholars-stage.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations-a-reader-course/) (a blog which I found through some link on [ACX](https://astralcodexten.substack.com)/[SSC](https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) a while back.) A little backstory: in my younger days, I thought it might be fun and useful to learn the entire history of the world. To that end, I started with accounts of archaeology and prehistory, then the ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, and so on until I lost momentum somewhere around Tamerlane and the Black Death. Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war. Whatever the dates some particular tribal pissing match took place, whomever its participants were, it probably deserves to be little noted nor long remembered. It's only through story-telling that the actions of mortals become anything more than trivial data about primate behavior. And yet - once spun into a narrative, accounts of all-too-stereotypical gangs and their generic homicides can be transmuted into archetypes and national myths, inspiring poetry and heroism. History only becomes meaningful in the telling. But it's easy to tell too much - as Voltaire allegedly said, “the secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?” as the Duke of Gloucester reportedly observed, on receiving one of the later volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Like Edward Gibbon's monumental Decline and Fall..., Ray Huang’s 1587 also tells the tale of a slowly decaying empire: in this case, the Ming dynasty of China. Mercifully, Huang's book is much shorter than Gibbon's multi-volume epic. 1587 is just 200-some pages, including the appendix. So is it worth reading? Yeah, I'd say so. Many Westerners are only familiar with the Ming dynasty as the source of those famously [priceless antique vases](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PricelessMingVase) which are forever getting accidentally smashed for the sake of comedy. I suspect part of the reason Chinese history (and Asian history in general) is so widely neglected in the West is that Asian names can be difficult for Westerners to remember and pronounce accurately. It’s challenging to represent Chinese words in alphabetical form; the Wade-Giles and Pinyin approaches are the two main methods. This book, from 1981, uses the older Wade-Giles system. On the other hand, a nice benefit of this book's age is that it remains blessedly uncontaminated by any current “culture war” toxicity. Many of the main characters have Wikipedia pages under the newer Pinyin versions of their names, which I'll link. I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing). To modern sensibilities, Ming dynasty China was a lurid and savage place, where the gaudy veneer of an ancient and decadent civilization lent pomp and polish to underlying currents of unreconstructed barbarism. No doubt some of Robert E. Howard's depictions of his [Conan](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Conan-the-Barbarian-fictional-character) character adventuring and buccaneering and conquering in fictional exotic lands were inspired in part by his impression of the legendary dynasties of imperial China. But 1587 has no unambiguously heroic protagonist, nor any dramatic resolution: in some ways it truly was “a year of no significance.” The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion - so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates. Yet this is not some bodice-ripping work of historical fiction: it's well-sourced and vetted history, with plenty of primary source citations. The author, Ray Huang, does not fit the mold of the typical academic historian - his [personal history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Huang) is interesting in its own right. He was born in China in 1918, during that fleeting era between imperial and communist rule when China was, briefly, a republic. Huang first went to university to study electrical engineering, but during the World War II years he became an Army officer. He saw combat, recovered from a gunshot wound to the leg, and rose to the level of Major in an elite Chinese military unit known as the New First Army, which was aligned with U.S. forces. They battled Japanese troops in south-east Asia and, later, Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Huang graduated from the American Army Staff College in 1947, but after the victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan, Huang stayed in the U.S. and took up the study of Chinese history, obtaining a doctorate degree in 1964 (when he was 46). 1587 is his best-known and most widely acclaimed book, but he enjoyed a long and successful academic career and also contributed to Joseph Needham's opus Science and Civilisation in China. Huang's writing is clear, evocative, and psychologically insightful - the back cover of my paperback edition features several paragraphs of critical acclaim, including one from the American literary novelist John Updike. This is especially impressive given that Huang learned English as a second language. A charming idiosyncrasy of his style is how he refers to Ming dynasty China as “our Empire” - this drew me in, making me feel as if that world were somehow mine. Here's a telling example of his approach, where he's talking about the fancy outfits the Chinese emperors used to wear. He notes that, unlike European royalty: “Ming emperors wore no metal crowns”. > “The most formal hat worn by the sovereign was a [rectangular black mortarboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benkan), with the shorter edges facing front and rear. Dangling from each of the two edges were twelve strings of beads. The curtainlike beads in front of his eyes and behind the nape of his neck must have made the wearer uncomfortable, compelling him to remain solemn and steady and to move very deliberately.” This reminded me of a couple of current Chinese practices: how military officers sometimes place [pins](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/posture-pins-chinese-officers/) in the collars of soldiers' uniforms to correct their posture when they're ordered to stand at attention, and how [preschool students](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/) are “required to sit in their seats with their arms at their sides, and their feet flat on a line of tape on the ground ... not an easy task for three-year-olds.” This points toward an old and deep aspect of Chinese culture: the belief that stillness holds great power and should be cultivated. This is true whether you’re a soldier, a preschooler, or the emperor of China. The main man in this story is known as the [Wan-Li Emperor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanli_Emperor). His family name was Chu (Wade-Giles) or Zhu (in Pinyin). His personal name combined the characters for “joy” and “king.” Like most high-ranking individuals of his day, he had way too many other official names and titles - this book, to my relief, doesn’t go down that rabbithole. Our author sticks to calling him “Wan-li.” Wan-li was only eight when the early death of his father (at age 35) set him upon the throne of imperial China. He grew up in the Forbidden City, which he was forbidden to leave. > “The Forbidden City, an area of a quarter of a square mile, was covered with blocks of glaze-tiled palatial buildings and ceremonial halls and gates, marble terraces, and endless painted galleries.” For about 500 years the Forbidden City, surrounded by a moat and located inside the much larger city of Peking (Beijing), was the nucleus of the Chinese Empire. It had been created several generations earlier at the behest of the Ming dynasty’s third emperor (Wan-li was the 14th). This giant, rambling palace outlived the dynasty which created it, and went on to serve as the headquarters of the subsequent and final Ching (Qing) dynasty as well. There’s a film from 1987, The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, which was shot in the real Forbidden City and uses it to great effect as a set for the first half of the film. It won multiple Oscars for its depiction of the last Qing Emperor’s life (which, in several ways, was comparable to the life of Wan-li.) > “in becoming emperor, Wan-li lost much of his personal identity and had little private life. Even when he moved about inside the palace compound, he was accompanied by a large retinue led by eunuchs who cleared the path with whips.” The head of the vast imperial bureaucracy in those days was known as the Grand Secretary. There are two important Grand Secretaries in this story: the first is [Grand Secretary Chang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Juzheng) (Zhang), who served as head tutor for the young emperor and effectively ruled the land in Wan-li's name until Wan-li came of age. Grand Secretary Chang was strong-willed, and made serious efforts to improve and optimize the imperial government. Unfortunately for his historical reputation, he also made serious efforts to enrich himself by taking advantage of his privileged position, while most of his “improvements” - like strict enforcement of outdated tax collection mandates - proved unsustainable and ineffective. He undermined his claim to public-spirited high-mindedness with a generous amount of self-dealing, and vindictive persecution of anyone who crossed him - flogging was one option, and not the sexy kind. One autumn day, Grand Secretary Chang’s father died. According to Confucian tradition, Chang should have returned to his native district and taken 27 months of bereavement leave. Chang was a lot more interested in staying right next to the 15-year-old emperor and making sure his own interests were not compromised by two years of absence from the court. Wan-li asked him to stay, as a special “national security” type of exemption from the demands of Confucian filial piety. The imperial bureaucracy - the Civil Service - was outraged by this break with tradition. After asking the Emperor to reconsider, and being rebuffed, they began an organized campaign of submitting censorious memos, urging Wan-li with increasing insistence to reverse his decision and send Chang away to do what was right in the eyes of the ancestors. This campaign didn’t last long: > “The first two memorialists were beaten sixty strokes in front of the Meridian Gate with whipping clubs … the other two remonstrators were dealt twenty more strokes than the first two because of their bold arguments … The soldiers at the Silk Robe Guard always had a political sense of how exactly the beating should be administered, and in this case the wrath of the grand-secretary was carried out in full force. Thus the first dozen strokes had already ripped the skin of the victims; the successive blows simply kneaded human flesh with blood-soaked whipping clubs. One of the victims lost consciousness; it was a miracle that he survived. … After the beating the soldiers carried the offending memorialists away on canvas sheets and dumped them on the pavement outside the Imperial City. Their families were permitted to take them home.” The literary scholars of the Civil Service subsequently decided that this controversy wasn’t a hill they wanted to die on, and stopped remonstrating. And that’s where the soap opera really kicks in: Wan-li married his first wife, the [Empress Consort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xijie), when he was still 15, which allowed him to get out from under adult supervision a little bit. Soon he became something of a hedonistic teenage playboy: he began indulging in drinking parties with eunuchs and palace women. Eventually he got a little too carried away with his drunken shenanigans; there was a big showdown with mom. Soon after, the eunuchs who were perceived as bad influences got sent away, permanently. Wan-li toned down the drinking parties, but no one could stop him from having a good time with his ladies. > “The hundreds of palace women were the emperor's property; no relationship involving them with him was illicit, because any liaison could be legitimated by granting the lady in question the title of secondary wife. The Ruler of All Men was entitled to one empress, usually one principal consort, a number of associate consorts, and still more concubines...the throne must widen the possibility of producing male offspring to assure regular succession.” No doubt this arrangement sounds great if you're the Emperor. As a background for a certain range of sexual fantasies, it has potential: > “Those nymphs inside the Forbidden City became a frequent topic of erotic literature. They were likened to sculptured jade yet said to be freshly fragrant, appearing either as voluptuous as fully blossomed peach trees glowing in the morning sun, or as slender and delicate as jasmine vibrating in an evening breeze.” But, our author points out, the reality was rarely as hot as the fantasy, and it was actually a pretty sad life for most of the ladies. Honestly, this scenario almost makes the Forbidden City sound like some kind of insect colony - one breeding male: all the other thousands of males are servants with no genitals (castration in ancient China was thorough), and a hierarchy of hundreds of females, many of whom would never have sex or children. Wan-li eventually sired eight sons and ten daughters with eight different women. His first wife did not bear him a son, so she became a minor character; the two women who had the biggest impact on his story were [Lady Wang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Dowager_Wang_(Taichang)), the mother of his first son, and [Lady Cheng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Consort_Zheng) (Zheng), who became his favorite and was the mother of his third son (his second did not survive infancy). Wan-li decided he liked Lady Cheng best, and wanted his son with her to become the heir to the throne, rather than his (elder) son by Lady Wang. The imperial bureaucracy hated this idea: it went against tradition. They hated it even more than the breach of filial piety Grand-Secretary Chang had committed by not taking two years and three months of bereavement leave. The entire legitimacy and power of the bureaucracy rested on the legitimacy of Chinese tradition, and therefore its primary goal was to ensure adherence and allegiance to tradition. There was no real system of checks and balances in the government of imperial China - the Emperor could, and did, dispose of any particular official who became an irritant. But, realistically, he lacked the power to replace the entire government. If the scholar-bureaucrats were united against his opinion, he had a very limited ability to impose his will over their objections. And the writing of censorious memos regarding the inappropriate behavior of anyone and everyone, including the Emperor, was itself a longstanding tradition. This led to a standoff, where neither side would back down yet neither could unilaterally enforce its will. We'll get to the ramifications of that in a sec. But first, Grand Secretary Chang dies in 1582, and this becomes essential background for the events of the book’s titular year. Once Grand Secretary Chang was dead and buried, everyone he’d ever pissed off went out of their way to expose all the bad, amoral, improper, or even questionable things he'd ever done, and weaponized that information against his loyalists. Wan-li still had some fond memories of his childhood tutor, but as more and more details of Chang's self-aggrandizing behavior came to light, Wan-li began to regard him as a duplicitous schemer who had consistently put his own interests well above the Emperor's or anyone else's. Of course Chang was quickly replaced, by the other important Grand Secretary of this story: Grand Secretary Shen. Shen doesn’t have a Wikipedia page as of this writing, but he was kind of a big deal for a while - in 1587, Shen had been grand secretary for four years. Shen was regarded as gentler than his predecessor Chang, but our author assures us “There is little truth to the statement that he was nothing more than a good-natured gentleman.” Shen was good at navigating the bureaucracy. Experienced, diplomatic and tactful, he got things done within (and despite) the elaborate and etiquette-bound imperial system. His office was located in the Literary Depth Pavilion, which featured a statue of Confucius in the main hall, and libraries extending into the attic. His style of personnel management was much less draconian than his predecessor’s had been, so the bureaucracy warmed up to him pretty quickly - and so did the young Emperor, who even presented Shen with a specially commissioned jacket with the character for “felicity” embroidered on it, as a token of esteem. Shen had more mixed success in handling practical matters outside the realm of the literary bureaucracy. When the [Yellow River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River) burst its dikes in 1587, Shen did well overseeing the mitigation and rebuilding efforts, exerting his political influence to ensure that the best qualified people were chosen to lead the operation. On the other hand, also in 1587, Shen judged that a disagreement between a governor and a district director in China's northeastern province was a matter of no significance (like everything else that year) and ignored their dispute. This was a mistake. The governor and district director held opposite views on how to deal with a certain troublesome border chieftain named Nurhaci. The district director favored appeasement, while the governor wanted to crush Nurhaci with military force. Ignored by the central government and working at cross-purposes, their response to Nurhaci's growing dominion over other troublesome tribes in the area was feckless and irresolute. This eventually proved fatal to the Ming dynasty: [Nurhaci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurhaci) is the founder of the Manchu, who went on to defeat the Ming forces and establish China’s final dynasty: the Ching (Qing). At the time, Grand Secretary Shen and most of the top bureaucrats were more worried about Wan-li’s succession planning than any potential threats from outside the empire. > In 1587, the Year of the Pig: “the Wan-Li emperor was still only twenty-four years old; but he had been ruler for fifteen years. The time-span seemed even longer because of so many repetitious and tiring routines.... Alert observers could tell that the emperor was either tired or bored or both. He had chosen as essay topic for the last palace examination a theme related to the Taoist doctrine that good government could be maintained while the ruler did nothing." > > “[Wan-li] did not even publicly announce his intention of making his third son heir, although to others it was as clear as though it were written. As a result, no attempt was made to impeach him; no civil war broke out; there was no rebellion. Yet for well over a decade the sovereign continued to engage in this odd struggle of endurance with the civil officials.” > > “Civil officials…realized from past experience that at this point an unintentional gesture or speech, or even silence on their part, could many years later be seized upon by their enemies as evidence of treason … yet the danger also offered opportunities for the bold and daring to demonstrate their righteousness, with full knowledge that their audacity could very well lead them to future martyrdom…. They delivered the most provocative [memos] to the emperor and, when that was not enough, printed seditious pamphlets and circulated inflammatory handbills.” > > “Unless their suggestions were immediately adopted, [they] usually argued, the sovereign would surely sink into the vilest infamy, his ancestors would cry out in their graves, and the foundation of the state would crumble.” > > “block printing was in wide public use… anonymous pamphlets and pseudonymous literature appeared in Peking to stir up and intensify the controversy”. Grand Secretary Shen, true to form, tried to use tact and diplomacy to placate both sides of the controversy in order to resolve the situation amicably, but this time it didn’t work. His placating words to the Emperor were repeated to the civil officials, who interpreted them as a betrayal of their cause. As a result, Shen was forced offstage, left to compose his memoirs in retirement. Wan-li might have begun to notice some similarities between his civil servants and the strings of beads on his fanciest black hat at this point. His status as Emperor was subject to bafflingly extreme constraints, despite his nominally absolute authority. Wan-li was barely allowed to leave the Forbidden City - he managed to take only a handful of short trips outside of it in his entire life. > “Was the benefit of occupying the imperial throne worth so many restrictions? He had no say in deciding that either. He had become the Son of Heaven by birth, not choice.” This ironic powerlessness of a seemingly supreme monarch, more a pampered prisoner of the Forbidden City than the lord of everything under heaven, reminded me strongly of a major theme of The Golden Bough by James Frazer, a pioneering work in the anthropology of religion which has continually caused controversy since its first publication in 1890. It's no more “scientific” than comparable 19th-century theories from formerly valorized - and now generally discredited - authors like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, or Mary Baker Eddy. That said, Frazer never claimed his theories were anything more than speculative, and he wasn't wrong about everything. His accounts of widespread ancient belief in sacrificial god-kings seem relevant to Wan-li's story: > “in early society the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an incarnation of a deity; in consequence of which the course of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control, and he is held responsible for bad weather, failure of the crops, and similar calamities. > > The greatest care must, therefore, be taken both by and of him; and his whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his, voluntary or involuntary, may disarrange or upset the established order of nature.” Frazer cites several cross-cultural examples of rites performed by such god-kings to ensure the harvest; some of his sources appear legit, others not so much - but here's a clearly legitimate example from Huang's book: > “The symbolic value of the office of the monarchy was amply illustrated by the ritualistic farming performed by the emperor every spring in front of the Altar of Earth. Actors dressed up as deities of wind, clouds, thunder, and rain”. Wan-li’s part was to hold a whip in his left hand and guide a ceremonial plow, carved with a dragon and painted in gold, with his right. He was to lead a procession across the field three times, then retire to his tent to watch his courtiers complete the ceremony by seeding the ground. > “No sooner was the soil covered than actors in peasant clothing presented five principal grains to the emperor, simulating a good harvest.” For a related example from Japan, let’s consult the delightfully named [Engelbert Kaempfer](https://www.rct.uk/collection/1074485/the-history-of-japan-giving-an-account-of-the-ancient-and-present-state-and), a German physician who lived in Japan for several years in the 1690s. He wrote: > “those who sit on the throne, are looked upon as persons most holy in themselves ... they are obliged to take an uncommon care of their sacred persons, and to do such things, which, examined according to the customs of other nations, would be thought ridiculous and impertinent. [The Emperor of Japan] thinks that it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the ground with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go anywhere, he must be carried thither on men's shoulders.” The late rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard likewise once boasted “I don't walk! I get carried!” (On "[Reunited](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40a5UNO5T44)" from the second Wu-Tang Clan album.) There is, of course, no end to the similarities between Ol' Dirty Bastard and the emperors of Japan, not least of which is their arrogation of divine status to themselves - to wit, the imperial Japanese claim of direct genealogical descent from the goddess of the sun and Ol' Dirty Bastard's alternate noms-de-rap of Osiris and Big Baby Jesus. Our German friend Engelbert continues: > “In ancient times, [the Japanese emperor] was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquility in his empire”. > > “But it having been afterwards discovered that the imperial crown ... could preserve peace in the empire, it was thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and therefore the crown is at present placed on the throne for some hours every morning.” (Metonymy is rarely useful as a lifehack, but Japanese emperors agree that this one weird trick will save you several hours of sitting motionless on a throne.) In 1572, when Wan-li was 9, people around the world witnessed a supernova (now called [SN 1572](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1572)) which Huang describes as: > “the size of a saucer and orange in color … the heaven-sent portent made a strong impression on Wan-li. On the advice of Tutor Chang, he fully examined himself for bad thoughts, speech, and conduct. Since even the regularity of the universe depended upon the young emperor's character and wisdom, he had no choice but to be thrifty, diligent, sincere, and courteous on all occasions”. Frazer concludes: > “The idea that early kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for his subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of nature for his people's benefit. > > A king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of prohibitions and observances.... Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammeling his every act, annihilate his freedom and often render the very life, which it is their object to preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.” This is not a bad description of Wan-li’s situation. Huang asserts: > “In providing the best leadership to an empire such as ours, there was no substitute for ritualistic proceedings. The emperor did not have a formidable army at his command; he did not even have a large land base. He remained the Son of Heaven only because everybody believed that he was. This belief required the ritualistic exercises involving the sovereign and his chief ministers to be enacted with vigor and regularity … the many rounds of kowtowing reaffirmed imperial supremacy ... obviously a degree of make-believe was involved; but make-believe is not necessarily unreal.” I suppose something about the “socially constructed” nature of empire would be appropriate here - “socially constructed” meaning those aspects of reality which depend on human opinion, like money, or the law. As opposed to aspects of reality which are indifferent to human opinion, like gravity or chemical reactions. With the former, a little make-believe can go a surprisingly long way, and the fate of nations and god-kings may hang in the balance. But Wan-li did not want to spend his whole life re-enacting a tedious role which he had no say in choosing. He had been a gifted student, with a talent for calligraphy and an interest in reading newly printed popular literature. But as he grew more estranged from the bureaucracy he became less and less interested in the Four Classics of Taoism and Confucianism which were regarded as something akin to holy writ, and which comprised the entirety of his officially prescribed studies. He started “banging out sick,” claiming to suffer from various vague ailments which prevented him from showing up for most of the endless, ponderous rites and ceremonies and study sessions which were intended to take up most of his days. A different sort of man would have mustered all the imperial authority at his disposal and tried to take the reins of empire, carving out a new role for himself. But Wan-li’s temperament was more passive, and his upbringing had thoroughly indoctrinated him against any such revolutionary behavior. > “If the word of the eunuchs can be trusted, Lady Cheng was frequently unhappy about the emperor’s indecisiveness. In such instances she would shout at him, ‘You are an old lady!’” If Wan-li ever considered standing up for himself and forcefully asserting his prerogatives, maybe even attempting to reform or at least improve the imperial government, he didn’t really have a lot of role models. His grand-uncle [Cheng-Te](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhengde_Emperor) (Zheng-De) had been a bad-ass rebel emperor, who certainly defied the bureaucracy and did as he pleased, but his legacy was presented to Wan-li as a cautionary tale: > “Cheng-te had ascended the throne in 1505 when he was not yet 14 [He was] endowed with unusual physical courage and a great deal of energy and creative curiosity ... which he pursued with all the authority at his command”. > > “Cheng-te surrounded himself with “eunuchs, courtesans, Lamaist monks, and magicians from other lands ... His favorite pastimes were fishing and hunting. Once at least he was wounded by a tiger when he was learning to tame it”. > > “He loved to drink and play games with his subordinates. He could not care less if a charming companion was a prostitute, was married, or even pregnant." He took a great interest in the military, riding with his troops and even engaging in combat against the Mongols. But he left no heir when he died, after drunkenly falling into the Yellow River during a fishing expedition. The Civil Service bureaucrats, of course, had been scandalized to the core by this wild behavior, and redoubled their efforts to ensure that no future Ming emperor would behave with such berserk impropriety. For better or worse, none did. Eventually, the succession issue could be put off no longer: > “In the end Wan-li had to yield to public opinion, but grudgingly and most bitterly. When the eldest imperial son was finally designated his [successor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taichang_Emperor) and the third son, [Prince Fu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Changxun), sent off to a provincial home, the wound thus inflicted did not heal”. > > “The emperor derived a malicious satisfaction from leaving numerous high-ranking positions inside and outside the capital unfilled”. He ignored the bureaucrats' indignant memos, and their beloved tradition offered no guidance on how to deal with a ruler who ignored his traditional obligations yet “in doing so was literally following the Taoist doctrine of inaction.” The last time Wan-li ever ventured outside the Forbidden City was to visit his own tomb. Constructed during his lifetime, its interior bears comparison to the interiors of the pyramids of Egypt. (The exterior is less monumental.) Referred to superstitiously as the Mysterious Palace, > “the stone structure itself and its furnishings carried the imperial insignia of dragons and phoenixes, the bases of the stone furniture near the ground level were carved with designs of the lotus ... gold and silver utensils and porcelain water jars and wash basins gave the setting a sense of realism, only to be offset by the presence of wooden horses and servants carved in the size of toys.” In many respects, this description sounds a lot like the tombs of the pharaohs, especially those who were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Small wonder, since their lives were similar as well. The 1st-century BCE historian [Diodorus Siculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diodorus_Siculus), in his multi-volume epic The Library of History wrote: > “The life of the kings of Egypt was not like that of other monarchs who are irresponsible and may do just what they choose; on the contrary, everything was fixed for them by law, not only their official duties, but even the details of their daily life”. > > “For not only were the times appointed at which [the Pharaoh] should transact public business or sit in judgment; but the very hours for his walking and bathing and sleeping with his wife, and, in short, performing every act of life, were all settled. Custom enjoined a simple diet; the only flesh he might eat was veal and goose, and he might only drink a prescribed quantity of wine.” So how well did the rest of the government function, given that the ruler was not really calling the shots, most days? I think we’ll get a better answer to that question by first zooming forward a few millennia, from ancient Egypt to the U.S.A. In his famous book Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville warns against the dangers of overly centralized government administration, describing how the America he visited (in the early 1800s) enjoyed an extremely decentralized administration and - in a footnote - speculates that China (which he never visited) was pretty much the opposite: > “China appears to me to present the most perfect instance of that species of well-being which a completely central administration may furnish to the nations among which it exists. Travelers assure us that the Chinese have peace without happiness, industry without improvement, stability without strength, and public order without public morality. The condition of society is always tolerable, never excellent. I am convinced that, when China is opened to European observation, it will be found to contain the most perfect model of a central administration which exists in the universe.” Huang largely confirms this assessment, but with important caveats. He acknowledges it seems like a bad idea for the civil service of a vast empire to be run by academic bureaucrats who, in many cases, had never worked outside of the capital city, but explains: > “our empire was created to be controlled from the center by documents; field experience or the lack of it made very little difference. There were 1,100 counties within the realm, of which each magistrate was appointed by His Majesty the Emperor. Could any one sitting in the capital really control how these magistrates managed their districts? Of course not. The best he could do was to investigate their characters, and through personal evaluation at periodic intervals divide the magistrates into categories and earmark them for promotion and demotion ... the greater part of governmental business involved personnel management and was basically settled on paper according to general standards.” Each magistrate served a three-year term, sometimes in districts where the locals spoke dialects which he might not even understand. > “the best he could hope for was that the district would remain in reasonably good order and its tax quota be fulfilled. In discharging these responsibilities he actually implemented a kind of indirect rule: he must invite and inspire the support of the local gentry. This group ... being men of substance in rural communities, could be induced to make their influence prevail over the populace until taxes were paid on time”. So, despite its utter centralization and dependence on bureaucratic paperwork, the administration of imperial China usually allowed each district to continue practicing its local, traditional culture and sort out its own affairs under the guidance of local luminaries, while the imperial magistrates served as emissaries of a higher power, remaining largely aloof from day-to-day affairs. This was entirely in accordance with ancient Chinese political philosophy. A maxim from the Tao Te Ching (one of the foundational texts of Chinese civilization) states: “Govern a great country as you would cook a small fish.” The implication being: minimally, lightly. For the most part, this philosophy served China well over the centuries, and it’s probably part of the reason we even have centuries of Chinese history to consult. This is still pre-Enlightenment political thought, with entirely too much magical thinking, bureaucratic to a fault, and placing complete faith in a system which was neither readily adaptable nor responsive to changing circumstances. Yet any cultural system which survives for thousands of years must be doing something right, especially when compared to what everyone else was doing. I can't point to any particular insights in this book as specifically relevant to present-day China, because the things I don't understand about present-day China would fill several books. But I am sure that a person better informed than I am about Chinese current events could draw some thought-provoking parallels. 1587 does seem to me like an essential puzzle piece for anyone trying to get a deeper understanding of Chinese history. It emphasizes how people behaved when things were running true to form, instead of focusing on convulsive and dramatic changes, as history books tend to do. And it casts a glance toward the surprisingly important long-term effects of those seemingly ordinary events. I mean, it's interesting in its own right that China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, but the really unusual aspect of Chinese civilization is how much continuity there's been. Dynasties came and went, and certainly the last century or two have differed greatly from previous millennia, but in some respects it's as if the cultural milieu of the ancient pharaohs continued to thrive as a potent undercurrent of cultural force in modern Egypt. It is difficult to understand the culture of any civilized land without knowing something of its history, but this is especially true in China's case. In 1587, Europe was just on the verge of entering its Baroque era. “I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources,” said the famous Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. There's something of a baroque quality to the culture of the Ming dynasty as well. Huang provides several examples, describing scenes that illustrate the grandeur of empire. For example, in 1587, there were around two thousand civil servants working in the imperial capital. Huang reports: > “It was always a spectacular scene when they assembled in their service robes, rank 4b and above in red and rank 5a and below in blue. They all wore black lacquer-treated hats with wings protruding sideways. Their black boots had very thick soles, the sides of which were trimmed with white lacquer. Their ceremonial belts, more like loops dangling loosely from their waists but never drawn tight, were backed with jade, rhinoceros horn, and gold and silver pieces that added splendor to the sight of the assembly as they glittered in the sun, showing the grades of the wearers' ranks. > > The badge of rank itself was called the ‘mandarin square,’ a chest-piece embroidered with elegant birds, always in pairs. The top rank (1) was represented by two stately cranes soaring above clouds, the lowest rank (9) by a couple of earthbound quail pecking the grass.” The execution of prisoners of war was also done with theatrical ceremony: > “[The emperor] sat on the tower atop the Meridian Gate overlooking the granite-paved courtyard, flanked by general officers who held noble titles. Lined up next to them was a full battalion of imperial guards, soldiers of gigantic stature clad in shiny armor and helmets adorned with red tassels. Down below, while thousands of court officials and soldiers watched, the prisoners, in chains and red cloth with holes cut out for their necks, were forced to kneel on the stone pavement. Then the minister of justice came forward to read aloud a list of the crimes those prisoners had committed against humanity. Upon completion of the charges, he petitioned the emperor that the prisoners be executed in the marketplace. The reply from the throne - ‘Take them there; be it so ordered’ - could not have been heard by all present. The order, however, was repeated by the two nobles standing immediately next to the sovereign and then echoed in succession by four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two guardsmen, until it touched off a thundering shout of the same order by the entire battalion of soldiers”. And can I just note that Huang's chapter headings reminded me of Borges' short story titles from his collection A Universal History of Infamy? For example: * “The Implausible Imposter Tom Castro” vs. “Hai Jui the Eccentric Model Official” * “The Widow Ching - Pirate” vs. “The Living Ancestor” * “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell” vs. “Ch'i Chi-Kuang the Lonely General” (Spoiler alert: all three examples are Borges vs. Huang.) For all I know, Huang might have actually been influenced by Borges - A Universal History of Infamy was published in English translation in 1972, while Huang apparently completed his manuscript around [1976](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1587,_a_Year_of_No_Significance). If not a direct influence, the two authors still share a knack for the wry, dry turn of phrase and the one-chapter biography. The last three chapters of 1587 are profiles of three noteworthy men from that era, each of whom, in his distinctive way, vied to achieve greatness. Our author uses these brief biographies to double back and revisit the years leading up to 1587 from three different perspectives. He analyzes how, despite their best efforts, none of these hard-working, accomplished, and relatively famous individuals were able to steer the ruling culture away from its downward slide. Even though the relatively unremarkable events of the year 1587 did not amount to any great crisis, the tipping point had been reached: the fortunes of the Ming dynasty began to decline henceforth, and never recovered. The inertial momentum of the system, the difficulty of coordinating major changes, and the Wan-li Emperor's choice to act as a passive-aggressive obstacle to the functioning of the imperial bureaucracy conspired to render futile anyone's efforts toward progress or reform. One of the seemingly insignificant events of 1587 was the death of [Hai Jui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hai_Rui) (Rui), the censor-in-chief at Nanking (Nanjing). “Hai Jui's convictions and temperament dictated that he would be both a highly regarded and a lonely man.” Uncompromising and full of high principle, Hai's rigid moral outlook appears to have been sincere, and his tragedy consists of it not being enough. Hai Jui first made a name for himself as a county magistrate, in a county fairly far from the seat of imperial power, who was willing to stick his neck out and make a stand to prevent corrupt imperial officials from taking advantage of his local countrymen. > Huang, in a footnote, remarks: “In some respects, this circumstance resembles an aspect of the American Western frontier. When a gap occurred between the law and law enforcement, individuals tended to take the administration of justice into their own hands. In such an environment a person's rugged character was highly valued.” During his long (though sporadically interrupted) career as a Ming dynasty official, Hai attacked corruption every chance he got, and was honest to the point of tactlessness when condemning what he regarded as insufficiently moral behavior, whether on the part of his subordinates or his superiors. Early in his career, he offered some unsolicited, unwelcome, and not uncritical advice to Wan-li's grandfather, the Chia-ching (Jia-jing) Emperor. His reward was imprisonment and a death sentence. He only survived because Chia-ching dropped dead first - probably because he drank too many [alchemical potions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemical_elixir_poisoning) which were supposed to confer longevity but, ironically, contained mercury. After regaining his freedom and returning to the civil service, Hai spent considerable effort trying to rectify unjust land ownership customs which allowed the upper classes to take advantage of the peasantry. Hai was widely, if perhaps naively, admired for his intransigent devotion to his austere conception of virtue. He represented the idealistic side of the older generation when he died at 73, in 1587, the Year of the Pig. In some respects, he could be considered the polar opposite of the notoriously pragmatic Grand Secretary Chang, who had died a few years earlier. But our author points out: “Few had given thought to the fact that both men, in their distinctive ways, were seeking directions in which the empire could be led.” Ultimately, neither cynical pragmatism nor militant idealism proved sufficient to lead the Ming dynasty away from its gravity well of tradition. When the great Ming general [Ch'i Chi-Kuang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_Jiguang) (Qi Jiguang) died in January of 1588 it was still the 12th month of the Year of the Pig according to the Chinese lunar calendar. So his lonely death still counts as one of the events in our “year of no significance.” General Ch’i won his fame battling Japanese pirates in the wetlands of coastal southern China, and winning. He secured his fame by writing the New Treatise on Military Efficiency ([Jixiao Xinshu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jixiao_Xinshu)), which describes his military innovations and recommendations for the benefit of future generations. The “[Japanese pirates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wokou)” were not much like Captain Morgan or Jack Sparrow - they were really more like Vikings. Annual raiding parties would sail in from Japan, where they would set up armed bandit camps and raid the surrounding countryside. Often joined by disenfranchised or disgruntled locals, they posed a serious threat to public order all along the southeast coast, from Shanghai to the Taiwan Strait. General Ch’i’s book gives a lot of details about what he needed to do to whip the Chinese army into shape and vanquish the pirates: > “[He] settled the recruiting procedure, decided the pay scale … standardized the organization of combat formations, selected weapons, outlined the duties of individual soldiers and their officers, designed his own banners and coordinating signals, invented his own tactics and schemes of maneuver, prescribed military etiquette, and issued his own orders of court martial .. he even handed out a recipe for making field rations!” He also incentivized volunteer troops by offering “thirty ounces of silver for each enemy head cut off and turned in.” General Ch’i’s innovative tactics included incorporating early gunpowder weapons alongside swords and spears and cavalry. The most adaptable and successful of Ming generals, after his victories in southern China he was transferred to the north. Facing a very different type of hostile force - the Mongols - he decided to upgrade the Great Wall of China. General Ch’i was responsible for “the construction of castlelike watchtowers along the Great Wall, designed to house 30 to 50 soldiers.” Around 1200 of these three-story towers were built according to his directions. Having found a patron in Grand Secretary Chang, who appreciated Ch’i’s pragmatism and effectiveness, he fell out of favor after Chang's death. His wife left him and he died in poverty and uncelebrated, mainly because the Civil Service was suspicious of effective military power, viewing it as a potential threat, and seized on Chang’s posthumous disgrace as an excuse to get rid of anyone else associated with him whom they feared or disliked. The bureaucrats' determination to prevent any chance of a military coup, however, left the imperial defense forces weak and mismanaged, so Ch'i's lonely death in the Year of the Pig - seemingly of no significance - really represented the death of any hope for the Ming dynasty to survive the coming assault of the Manchu. The final chapter of 1587 profiles [Li Chi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zhi_(philosopher)) (Li Zhi) who is remembered as a philosopher like Socrates - at least in the sense that he killed himself due to persecution by the authorities. Li didn't drink hemlock: he took a straight razor to his own throat. But he could also qualify as an early prototype of the Hollywood guru, one of those people who floats around in the realm of celebrities, looking wise in a fashionable way and saying vaguely Buddhist things without actually practicing Buddhism. Li’s early career was full of poverty and misery, as he tried and largely failed to support a family while working as a low-level civil servant. At 53 he had a mid-life crisis, retired from the Civil Service, sent his wife away, shaved his head and went to live in a Buddhist temple. There he studied both Buddhism and Taoism, in an effort to find some solace in philosophy and spiritualism. Soon he began to write his own philosophical works, which gained favor among some well-to-do patrons. Before long, he had founded an independent chapel called the “Hall of Buddha in Fragrant Iris,” which was not officially part of any Buddhist sect. > “The main building consisted of two wings. There were also dormitories and guest houses. Built on a cliff overlooking a lake, Li’s own cottage was on a most imposing height behind the complex. Normally the ‘hall’ had more than forty monks under the direction of an abbot, who was also Li Chih’s friend. These monks introduced to the establishment their disciples, who could also have their own novices.” Although Li’s voluminous writings were all the rage with the well-off and philosophically inclined literary scholars of the day, his cult-like compound and nonconformist views got him in trouble with the conservative local gentry. They came to regard him as a lunatic who “stood for everything contrary to law and order and decency.” He was accused of promoting immorality, jailed, and sentenced to be banished to his remote province of origin. He killed himself in jail. Li had tried his best to spearhead an intellectual and spiritual renaissance, but the culture of the Ming dynasty was hostile to novelties of that sort. As for the Wan-li Emperor, after complaining of various vague ailments for many years he died peacefully enough - although rumor has it that he had become addicted to opium, which might explain some things. His last journey out of the imperial city was to rest forever in his monumental tomb. (Or maybe not forever - the [Emperor’s tomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dingling) was looted and desecrated by Chairman Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.) So what are the takeaways from this study of 1587, the Year of the Pig, a year of no significance? Well, it looks like even exemplary efforts by multiple talented individuals cannot be relied on to triumph over systemic inertia and entropy. Was there a missed opportunity to steer the Ming dynasty away from collapse? Wishing that Wan-li had been more like somebody else doesn’t really count, although it probably would’ve helped if he’d taken any sustained interest in truly becoming a great ruler. Maybe a coordinated, long-term effort by many people toward a definite goal would’ve done the trick, if they could have avoided looking like a conspiracy, and somehow gotten buy-in from both the Emperor and the Civil Service? Maybe in some alternate universe a Ming-era person discovers that lightning can be tamed like fire - would that have helped? I’m not aware of any experiments with electricity, though they did have gunpowder and printing presses. But all those sorts of things are about as likely to hasten a dynasty’s collapse as they are to bring about a renaissance. And besides, hereditary empires are inherently unstable: asking “what would have prevented the Ming dynasty from collapsing?” is kind of like asking “how do we prevent radioactive decay - what would extend the half-life of plutonium?” Another perspective: as dynasties go, the Ming were the final regression to the mean of classical Chinese civilization. Were they merely fighting a doomed rear-guard action, vainly attempting to undo the effects of the previous, catastrophically novel, dynasty of Mongols? Only to be overthrown by the subsequent - and final - dynasty of Manchurian hordes from the outlands of the northeast? Considering that it lasted for nearly three centuries, a better perspective would be that the Ming dynasty was a late flowering of classical Chinese civilization - and a surprisingly successful one, considering how hostile it was to international trade or exploration. A person from our era will no doubt detect a whiff of barbaric decadence in the customs of those days (foot-binding, eunuchs, people flogged nearly to death for infractions of etiquette). Similarly to their contemporaries in Europe (who were conducting inquisitions, slave-trading, and burning witches around the same time), the people of the Ming dynasty were still pre-modern in their ideals, and frequently brutal in their methods. They were, nevertheless, living in and contributing to one of the most advanced civilizations of that or any previous era. The extent to which we and future generations will find such legacies edifying is an open question. Yet, as Confucius said: > “Whenever I walk with others, they may serve as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.”	Scott Alexander	69435385	Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures (see original post [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures)) --- 1: [Maximum Limelihood Estimator](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8287212) writes: > I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical. I called this “a cyclic theory” to acknowledge my debt to Turchin, but you may notice that as written it doesn’t repeat. Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool. The cyclic aspect, if it exists, would involve the constant spawning of new subcultures that rise and fall on their own. So disco begets dance music, dance music has its own golden age and eventual souring, and then it begets something else. [The atheist movement begets the feminist movement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/) [begets the anti-racist movement](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture) begets and so on. What about the stronger claim - that no (non-calendar-based) cycles exist? I think this is clearly false if you allow cycles like the above - in which case the business cycle is one especially well-established example. But if you mean a cycle that follows a nice sine wave pattern and is pretty predictable, I have trouble thinking of good counterexamples. Except for cicada population! I think that’s genuinely cyclic! You can argue it ought to count as a calendar-based cycle, but then every cycle that lasted a specific amount of time would be calendar-based and Limelihood’s claim would be true by definition. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 2: People giving specific examples that either agree or disagree with the model: [Guy Downs](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8287383) (who I think should come up with an excuse to debate [Guy Standing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(economist))), writes: > Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model. > > If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were. [Medieval Cat](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8287836): > D&D definitely went through a couple of rounds like this. First the breakup of the original TSR: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSR,_Inc.#TSR's_demise> Then the decline of 3e and the edition wars: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Wizards_of_the_Coast> Currently 5e is at involution, having had an explosive growth phase driven by streaming and 80thies nostalgia. You can also observe this in RPG subcultures, e.g. the OSR. [Radu Florica](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures): > Seen this in a political movement. What was absolutely shocking is how fast it went through the stages once it got to success. It was basically a long grind of ~10 years to get legitimacy, a relatively short burst of success and very rapid expansion to become a national/parliamentary party (around one year)... and 6 months after the elections the energies already started focusing inwards, with everything blowing up and getting completely "taken over by sociopaths" before the 1 year mark. Romania, 2016/17, USR. > > Scott' description here is pretty spot on. What I can add is that strong and stable leadership might change the pattern, especially if it has some form of sanctity. May be why religious and ideological organizations thrive more than secular ones. There will always be pressure to go for status seeking inside the org, but if it's either hopeless (with strong leadership) or even better, hopeless and heretical, then you just put a lid on it and use the extra pressure to force expansion and object-level results. > > In my example above leadership turned out to be an unexpectedly weak point, and once the inward status race started, there wasn't much hope to do anything else. You could try to do good work, but without getting aligned with the right faction (or at least a faction), at the next power shuffle you'll end up just not getting an eligible spot, even while being literally the most active member of parliament in history (happened), or having great results but being replaced by a glorified intern in very fair internal elections (also happened). > > Trying to speculate and model what would have happened with strong enough leadership... and I still see problems. Even if the absolute top status level is not available, there is still pressure to turn inwards for the next few upper levels (I'm reminded of the quip "All politics is internal"). Leadership needs to be not just unassailable, but strong enough to bash heads and force either a clear process, or some form of Sanctity / alignment that makes too much internal focus something that Just Isn't Done. > > That's a huge advantage older orgs have over new: the power system is old and ossified enough, almost a bureaucracy. It's true, the best hope is "a position commensurate to your talent and diligence", which means on average you get less. But even if the management may be less competent than you, you get the guarantee that your peers won't be fighting you for status - they'll at most be competing with you, more or less fairly. > > The tragedy here is that how passionately people feel about the Cause is not helping at all, without also having a mechanism to turn this Belief into negentropy. The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards. [Tetragrammaton](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wko0i8/a_cyclic_theory_of_subcultures/ijq40ga/) writes: > I’ve seen this in the indie game subculture. There was definitely a point where I realized I was overwhelmed by the number of indie game conferences, documentaries, and websites. There was a whole meme about the “indiepocalypse” when the gold rush period suddenly ended. That said, indie games themselves are as healthy as ever! They’ve just not such a good economic bet as they’ve gotten closer to market equilibrium. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 3: [Erusian](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8287676) writes: > I think you missed a key dynamic. As the opportunities to break new grounddry up and it becomes harder to advance and there's more money/momentum the feedback loops break down. People start to be rewarded for conforming to the expectations of the current movement consensus. That's when you get Loyalists. Loyalists are the opposite of Heresiarchs and their followers. They not only dogmatically follow a pro-movement ethos but they actively purge and purity-spiral people who are not sufficiently devoted or who smell too much like Heresiarchs. > > In the early days you pushed things forward by improving the movement, having interesting ideas, offering actionable criticism and then executing, and so on. As that becomes harder (and you need to be a genius) you can instead get ahead by unswerving loyalty and attacking the heresiarchs, effectively reassuring people in power. And people who look kind of like heresiarchs which creates space by clearing out competition. > > This produces a more orthodox but less interesting kind of thought. It's easier to be a loyalist and it gives you a chance to create new virgin territory by invoking what amount to purity spirals. Yes, you might not be able to align AI as well as that guy. But you can find that time he said that maybe AI alignment wasn't the most important thing ever and he needs to be purged! (Whether this example happens I can't say. But you get the concept.) > > This hardens the organization, ossifies it. This can be good if it really has found the one true path. But usually it's actually a trap. One that's especially hard to detect for true believers. And a worse trap than the heresiarchs. > > Some of the heretics want to burn everything down but most of them are reformers who just want to make their own ideas dominant. But Loyalists force them out of the movement and the movement itself into increasingly rigid forms of thinking. In the process of making the movement pure it destroys its immune system. And then the question becomes: did the movement amass enough money and power in its earlier stages to maintain itself as a mature organization, driven more by momentum than by innovation? Or does this ossified shell die? 4: [Laura Creighton](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8287699) writes: > Something not mentioned is that when the people who are doing this cool new thing because this is a cool thing that I want to do for its own sake (and, incidentally, I might get some status from it, even though I don't care about such things very much, because I don't see any way to stop this) begin to be approached in numbers in the group by the people who are doing this cool new thing because they can get status from it, and are precisely drawn to it because it will generate status for them, and status is what they care about more than anything or most anything in the world) -- Gresham's law kicks in. > > Many of the cool people \leave\ because they cannot stand to be around people who \aren't\ in it for its own sake. > > I'm sick of starting cool groups, companies, etc which I have to leave when it stops being about the things I love and care about, done by people I like more than a little, and starts being about giving status to people I am at best indifferent to, and often dislike, and who often take a strong dislike to me because, for as long as I can hold out, I will try to flatten the status levels which cuts into their prestige. > > If you haven't looked on the creation of status as an undesirable outcome that needs limiting, you may not have ended up in a situation where the first person to drive you and other likeminded out of your group gets to keep all the chips. And that is one place where the psychopaths thrive. I guess I should have been more respectful to [David Chapman’s model](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths), because the most common criticism in the comments was “actually I think it’s more of [reinvents David Chapman’s model]. Fine. Good work David. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 5: [Anon](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8294319) writes: > This post is very rediscovering-monarchy-from-first-principles, so I approve. > > "The only thing I can think of, that can turn a young org's energies outwards, is an unassailable central figure. And it needs to be unassailable, not just powerful, because he/she's the lid that keeps the pressure up and outwards." This is the exact principle that pro-monarchist thinkers used to justify monarchy. I can't remember now if it was Burke or Carlyle or someone else who said on the occasion of the murder of Louis XVI that the revolutionaries had not just killed the king's person but the entire structure of legitimacy, inculcated through ages, and that the French people would now be wholly ungovernable since every man would think he could wear the golden hat and begin to scheme against the guy wearing it right now, who after all was no different from himself, a former baker or cobbler or something. Assailable, if you like. I had used the example of Planned Parenthood, which has a board of directors and strong institutional tradition so you can’t just waltz in and take it over. It sounds like the difference between this and what Anon’s proposing is that you can found your own pro-choice organization and (if it’s good enough) displace Planned Parenthood as the center of the pro-choice movement. I think this system - exit over voice, market selection, whatever you want to call it - is usually an improvement on pure authoritarianism. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 6: [AvalancheGenesis](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8288777) writes: > Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of \_\_those\_\_ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now. My rationalist timeline: * Precycle: 2007 - 2010 * Growth: 2010 - 2016 * Involution: 2017 - 2020 * Postcycle: Since 2020 Now things are pretty stable, partly because we put enough distance between ourselves and our growth phase that we can start to get a little hipster cool again, and partly because effective altruism is the Hot New Thing that everyone is supposed to have an opinion on. This is the usual pattern of exciting talked-about movements spawning successor movements that then get to be exciting and talked-about in turn, while the original movement gets to go back to being normal people with a common interest again. By the way, in the past week, effective altruism has gotten long, glowing profiles in [the New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism), the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-will-macaskill.html), [Vox](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/8/23150496/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-dustin-moskovitz-billionaire-philanthropy-crytocurrency), the [cover of TIME Magazine](https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=_&linkId=176640018), shoutouts from [Elon Musk](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1554335028313718784) and [Andrew Yang](https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1557728842659246081), podcast interviews with [Tyler Cowen](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill/) and [Tim Ferriss](https://tim.blog/2022/08/02/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/), and criticism from [Freddie deBoer](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-has-a-novelty). Enjoy it while it lasts! \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 7: [MT](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8293757) writes: > A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart. The germ of this idea was my feeling that I’ve been in movements where it starts out feeling like everyone can’t stop gushing about how great we are, and then later there’s another phase where criticism reigns and everyone feels slightly embarrassed to be involved. This doesn’t feel tautological to me, although it might become trivial if you allow enough selection bias (some movement where this hasn’t happened “isn’t the kind of movement this happens to”). I could prove this by making nontrivial predictions about which movements are going to get less camaraderie and more internecine struggle in the future. Four years ago I would have said “new left socialism”, and I think I did endorse [Robby Soave’s article to that effect](https://reason.com/2018/06/28/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-socialism-dsa/) at the time, but I think new left socialism is well into involution or even postcycle now. Last year I would have said YIMBYism, but I’m not up-to-date on it and maybe it’s already transitioned too. The only movement I see that’s still clearly high on “we are so great and such good friends with each other” is [postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT](https://jerseyjohn.substack.com/p/who-are-the-crazy-ones-on-tpot), so sure, I expect things to get worse for them (sorry for this potentially self-fulfilling prophecy). (I’m nervous about saying EA because they still have more money than they can spend in a reasonable amount of time; as long as that situation continues they won’t be exactly resource-scarce, and the people with the purse-strings will have a natural advantage as “elites”.) I’m actually surprised how few uncomplicated happy growth spurt movements I can think of now, compared to how many I can think of that seem to have passed through that stage. I think this is a combination of: * This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century). * Exciting new movements are exciting partly insofar as they’re hidden gems, and I’m not cool enough to know about them. The ones I do know about make no sense to me, which probably means they’re successfully keeping uncool people like me out. * Some movements deliberately resist legibility as a defense mechanism; see eg Freddie deBoer’s [Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed To Use For The Sweeping Social And Political Changes You Demand](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what). Does anyone else know groups in this phase now? \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 8: Nate [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures/comment/8375554): > What was the original movement for which the emergence and fragmentation of the intellectual dark web was the involution? Why should they be involution? The NYT piece [Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html) is a great example of what it looks like when a movement is starting its growth phase. Newspapers write articles about how edgy and cool you are and how the establishment is afraid of your growing power. The couple of people who joined the movement out of genuine conviction when it was unpopular or made them look weird (eg Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein) get catapulted to superstardom. IDW seemed like an unusually short period of time before everyone turned on each other and it became cringe, maybe because nothing united them besides being heterodox and there’s no reason for adherents of different heterodoxies to like or agree with each other. So there were a brief couple of months when people were excited about having a powerful mutual rallying flag against The Man, and then they turned on each other. There’s also another thing I didn’t get to in the original post about something like attack surface. When a movement is small, outsiders mostly don’t bother coming up with good criticisms, because nobody cares and it feels like punching down. In early Growth phase, the movement is still confined to its natural base and has a buzz of excitement around it and nobody wants to criticize it then either. But as it gets bigger, it becomes a well-known important topic (cf. all those news articles about EA), it starts feeling actually threatening to people (eg one vegetarian is a cute eccentric weirdo, but if 50% of people are vegetarian then you start feeling judged for not being one, and maybe people start taking meat off the menu), plus it’s in Involution phase so insiders are cooperating with outside critics. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ 9: [FarTheThrow](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wko0i8/a_cyclic_theory_of_subcultures/ijpgq6f/) writes: > I'm always so confused when I read analysis like this that is built almost entirely around status. Maybe I'm just too much of a hermit to understand, but it all just seems like a very weird/alien way of viewing things that is pretty divorced from what I experience in my life. I'm trying to create a mental model of how this is supposed to work and the best I can come up with is something like "hey this cool movement I joined seemed great but I expected to have gained... 30 status... points and I've only gained 23! I better go start a fight with someone so I can take their status points!" Like, I'm confused how I'm supposed to map that to something I've ever experienced, let alone have it be the primary dominating factor in all these various social dynamics. > > It also feels a bit non-falsifiable in practice, because I rarely see any behavior that can't have a status explanation attached even when there are simpler, more straightforward explanations. For a meta example: with status theory you could assert that sure I say I'm making this post because I'm confused by this concept and its application and what to hear feedback that will help me understand it better, but really I'm actually just mining for status points by being a sophisticated contrarian. But what predictions about my behavior can you actually make with that statement? If, for example, I don't engage in the responses you could say "See! [/u/FarTheThrow](https://www.reddit.com/u/FarTheThrow) has already gotten all the status they were going to get from this post, since they don't actually care about understanding the concept, they didn't bother engaging further!" And if I do engage in the responses, you could say "See! Yet more status mining, trying to look like a sophisticate who engages in rational discourse!" Worrying about status doesn’t feel like worrying about status, and usually it’s not even helpful to think about it on the status level. It’s like nutrients. Most non-sociopaths don’t go about trying to “obtain nutrients”, they just happen to eat foods, and some of those foods are healthier and tastier than others… Being in a Growth phase subculture feels like “my contributions are appreciated”, “people respond to my comments”, “my feedback is taken seriously”, “there are lots of interesting projects I can work on”, “I feel accepted socially”, “I tend to get the positions I apply for”, “I make friends easily”, “it’s easy for me to make progress on tasks I put my mind to”, et cetera. Being in an Involution phase subculture feels like the opposite. There are intimidatingly-high barriers for entry, and the only advice people will give you is “lurk moar”. Everyone else is better at the thing than you are, and you have no compensatory advantages. You’re not sure how to break into social networks or get invited to things, and although there might be formal programs to help (eg internships), you cannot get any. “Status” is an abstraction that covers all of this stuff. Like all abstractions, it’s less useful than just describing the thing you are abstracting over in careful detail, but like all abstractions, you might not feel like doing that and then the abstraction is helpful [Kaj Sotala](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wko0i8/a_cyclic_theory_of_subcultures/ijqcn06/) writes: > These descriptions resonated with me, in that I can recognize in them the shape of - say - the nature of Finnish anime fandom in the early and mid-00s, as well as a bunch of other subcultures I've had some familiarity with. And I think that people in those subcultures were motivated by that kind of "forward and upward" work. > > I wouldn't characterize that in terms of status, though. I'd say the relevant needs were more about things like a sense of belonging, being seen and appreciated (which is meaningfully different from wanting status since it doesn't require you to be above anyone else), doing something that feels meaningful, and connecting with like-minded people. And because the scene was still small, there were easy opportunities to do that kind of a thing - if there's no existing convention or online forum yet, creating one feels like a meaningful contribution that lets you connect with others. > > And once things became more institutionalized and everyone started taking it for granted that yeah of course there are forums and conventions, some of that excitement faded. While others, having connected with enough like-minded people and now being older with less time available, gradually started participating less. (I'm kind of suggesting that the scene has declined from its prime but I don't really know - maybe the younger folks are keeping it alive and it's actually bigger than ever, I'm one of those oldies who has basically withdrawn and has no idea of what's going on anymore.) > > But then, as pursuing the kinds of needs that I described also often correlates with getting status and they're kind of like wanting status if you squint, these kinds of analyses tend to lump them all together with status. This is a definitional dispute and I should know better than to get involved in definition disputes, but I can’t help myself: I feel like “it’s not status - it’s just a sense of belonging, being appreciated, and connecting with people” is like saying “it’s not language - it’s just letters, words, and sentences.” I guess Kaj is using status in a strict sense and I am using it in a loose sense. Or maybe Kaj is talking about going from neutral status to high status (where you start to feel like a special bigshot) and I am including going from negative status to neutral status (where you start to feel accepted and part of the group). Imagine if the word “money” had a connotation of “thing you use to buy luxury goods so that poor people are jealous of you”. Then people would tell economists “You’re so cynical in thinking that labor markets are about money - a lot of people just want to pay their monthly rent and provide food for their families”. Normally in a situation like this I would use a different word, but I don’t know if there’s a good snappy replacement. Accepting suggestions!	Scott Alexander	68682708	Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures	acx
# Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference *Followup to: [Why Do Test Scores Plateau](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/13/why-do-test-scores-plateau/); [Ritalin Works But School Isn’t Worth Paying Attention To](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt)* ## Why Do Skills Plateau? Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, [do their best work in their late 30s](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/23/when-you-will-most-likely-hit-your-creative-peak-according-to-science/). Isn’t this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but surely nothing so dire that it cancels out twenty extra years! A natural objection is that maybe they’ve maxed out their writing ability; further practice won’t help. But this can’t be true; most 35 year old writers aren’t Shakespeare or Dickens, so higher tiers of ability must be possible. But you can’t get there just by practicing more. If acheivement is a function of talent and practice, at some point returns on practice decrease near zero. The same is true for doctors. Young doctors (under 40) [have slightly better cure rates](http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j1797) than older doctors (eg 40-49). The linked study doesn’t go any younger (eg under 35, under 30…). However, [Goodwin et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5801052/) find that only first-year doctors suffer from inexperience; by a doctor’s second year, she’s doing about as well as she ever will. Why? Wouldn’t you expect someone who’s practiced medicine for twenty years to be better than someone who’s only done it for two? We find the same phenomenon in formal education; on [a standardized test of book learning for student doctors](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/13/why-do-test-scores-plateau/), there’s a big increase the first year of training, a smaller increase the second year, and by year 4-5 the increase is basically indistinguishable from zero (even though some doctors remain better than others). And [here I talk about](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt) a slightly different phenomenon: ADHD children given Ritalin study harder and better, but haven’t learned any more vocabulary words at the end of a course (even though they haven’t learned all the vocabulary). After a lot of looking through the psychological literature, I’ve found two hypotheses which, combined, mostly satisfy my curiosity. ## The Decay Hypothesis The first explanation is a “dynamic equilibrium of forgetting”. Suppose that you forget any fact you haven’t reviewed in X amount of time (X might be shorter or longer depending on your intelligence/memory/talent). And suppose that an average doctor sees 5 diseases ~weekly, another 5 diseases ~monthly, and another 5 diseases ~yearly. A bad doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a week, a mediocre doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a month, and a great doctor might forget anything she sees less than once a year. So the bad doctor will end up knowing about 5 diseases, the mediocre doctor 10, and the great doctor 15. They will master these diseases quickly, and no matter how long they continue practicing medicine, they will never get better. This has to be some of the story. People have investigated this hypothesis, and there are well-defined curves for how long people will remember things after different numbers of repetitions; this is the principle behind spaced repetition systems like Anki or SuperMemo. Sample forgetting curve, source [here](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alteration-of-the-forgetting-curve-through-repetition-according-to-Ebbinghaus-1885-and_fig3_261952026). Still, some things don’t feel like Decay. The curve above suggests you should remember things for longer each time you review them, eventually remembering them the whole rest of your life. But if this were true, doctors would gradually add to their stock of forever-knowledge and get better with time. Meanwhile, I still remember a wildly uneven set of facts from my high school history classes, even though I’ve rarely reviewed any of them since then. Something else must be going on. ## The Interference Hypothesis An acquaintance relates that, using flashcards, he can learn twenty words of some language (I forget which, let’s say Spanish) per day. If he studies more than twenty, too bad, he’ll only remember twenty. But if he studies two language (let’s say Spanish and Chinese), he can learn twenty Spanish vocab words plus twenty Chinese vocab words. The cap is per language, not absolute! This suggests an interference hypothesis: once there are too many similar things in memory, they all kind of blend together and it’s hard to learn new things in the same space. It might still be easy to learn some other topic, though. However fast you can comfortably learn Spanish, you can take a karate class at the same time and learn karate and that won’t interfere. Something like this feels intuitively true to me. I find remembering the difference between gold and silver easier than remembering the difference between yttrium and ytterbium. In fact, I remember the basics of inorganic chemistry, and the basics of organic chemistry, but not the details of either. Why do I even remember the basics? Why not forget all of it? Why is getting an introductory understanding of twenty fields easier than getting a masterly understanding of one? Wikipedia has [a good summary of experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory) showing that memory inteference is a real phenomenon, but I can’t tell if their page is treating it as a curiosity or as the fundamental explanation for why we can’t keep learning a field forever and eventually become as gods by the time we’re 50 or 60. But I think it’s a big part of that. This feels more convincing after learning about neural nets. The ability of neural nets to consider finely-grained concepts depends on their parameter count; the more parameters, the more distinctions they can draw. A common problem is “catastrophic forgetting”, where too high a learning rate causes a net to overfit to “remember” the most recent example, making it less good at remembering previous examples. Human memory seems to lack this failure mode, but maybe its ordinary forgetting is a tamer subspecies of the same problem. Also, neural networks sure do show interference. I wrote a little bit about this at [A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design), where for example any picture with a reindeer in it became a Christmas-y picture of Santa: In this model, a bad doctor can only remember five diseases before she starts getting confused about which disease had which symptom; a good doctor might be able to handle ten, and a great doctor fifteen. And all the doctors could then learn Spanish or karate without it affecting their medical knowledge at all. ## Is That All? These two hypotheses leave me much less puzzled by skill plateaus, but don’t entirely explain all patterns of remembering and forgetting. There seems to be something like an interestingness effect - I will never forget where I was when I heard about 9-11, but I very much forget where I was on 9-12, 9-13, etc. The decay hypothesis doesn’t explain this. Does interference? Maybe - it could be that 9-12, 9-13, etc all blend together and give me no obvious retrieval cues, whereas 9-11 was unique and so un-interfere-with-able. If devastating terrorist attacks happened once a month, each as bad as 9-11, probably I wouldn’t remember it. But there are weird edge cases. I remember having a Baby’s First Hebrew Word Book as a child. It was mostly useful words like “cow” and “tree”, but for some reason “Master of Ceremonies” was in there also. I remember being angry that they were wasting my time with such a stupid word, and exerting deliberate effort not to learn it. Guess which one Hebrew word from that book I still remember? Is that because its uselessness set it apart and prevented anything else from interfering with it? What about mnemonic devices? In the [Dominic System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_system), you remember long numbers by associating each digit with a letter - for example, 1 is always A, 2 is always B, and so on. 314159 becomes CADAEI. Then you convert it to people with initials - Chester Arthur, a District Attorney, Elizabeth I (I never claimed to be good at initial → people conversion). Then you form subject-verb-object sentences, treating the middle person as an action, ie “Chester Arthur prosecutes Elizabeth I”. Presumably the image of Chester Arthur suing Elizabeth I is easier to remember than the digits 314159, and if you forget the digits then you can unpack the sentence until you get them again. Does this work because there are fewer things similar to this image, to interfere with it? Actually, does it work at all? If you remember that, and then you remember some other number with the image of Chuck Norris shooting a rocket at Marie Curie, at some point do you start forgetting whether it was Chuck Norris or Elizabeth I who was shooting the rocket? Is there some way to exploit the interference hypothesis to remember things better? Suppose you were teaching a friend Spanish, and she was struggling to learn more than 20 words per day. Could you ask her to learn a second language, but secretly it’s just more Spanish words, and at the end you tell her she was learning extra Spanish all along? Has the conspiracy already gotten there before me, and that’s what “Portuguese” is? Finally, I conflated two things in the previous section: a limit on how much you can learn total (eg the doctor who practices for many years) and a limit on how much you can learn per day (eg twenty words of Spanish vocabulary a day). I have no evidence for the latter except the testimony of one acquaintance, and maybe the corroborating evidence from the Ritalin study. Still, if there’s a maximum amount you can learn per day (or, more likely, a diminishing returns curve) that sounds useful to know, doesn’t it? Psych undergrads asking me for study ideas, here’s your chance!	Scott Alexander	67202524	Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference	acx
# Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers There are ACX-affiliated 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 at least once 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/A5syGWpV1C59g4xf9). 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. I'll publicize your meetup on the blog, and people will either get in touch with you, or just show up at the relevant place/time. You should show up at the relevant place/time with a sign saying "ACX Meetup" or some other rallying flag, but you don't necessarily need to have any plans or discussion topics or ability to control the conversation. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. I also recommend collecting people’s names/emails — the best way to do this is to have people scan a QR code or follow a [bitly](https://bitly.com/) link, to either fill out a Google Form or add themselves to an existing mailing list / group chat / etc. I used to recommend just pen and paper for this, but it turns out reading people’s handwriting is hard. 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 would 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. Note that 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, and then there was no meetup in their city and they were sad. 2. How will people hear about the meetup? You give me the information, and on August 24 (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. 3. When should I plan the meetup for? Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 24, please choose sometime after that. 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 September or early October would be best. If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend since a lot of people will be away. If you’re in a college town, maybe wait until school starts. 4. How many people should I expect? The last time we tried this, meetups ranged from 1 person to 200 people. 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/1x8qBfv-z2gm3_P6AS69TwpvCcbdmhC2HXxkTJOa5UbE/edit#gid=0) (2019 data [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmRNJVvnRNJ-jDVGQj1fI-eCuibn1PdipMxqC3nK-KQ/edit#gid=0)). 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. 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, or by using color-coded stickers * 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”). 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 PERMANENT MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own. 9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups? I did this the past two times and it was a lot of fun, but it also pretty tiring. I'll probably do a much smaller tour this year - right now my plan is just Bay Area, LA, and maybe Orange County or San Diego. I'll get in touch with the people involved in those cities and sort it out, and give everyone an update around 8/24 when I post the final list of cities and people. Meetups Czar Mingyuan is hoping to visit some meetups as well; she’ll be in Western Europe in September, so if you volunteer to host something around there, she might get in contact with you. Again, [you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://forms.gle/A5syGWpV1C59g4xf9). Everyone else, just wait until 8/24 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.	mingyuan	68757115	Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers	acx
# Mantic Monday 8/15/22 ## The Passing Of PredictIt In 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research purposes only. [Their no-action letter](https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/idc/groups/public/@lrlettergeneral/documents/letter/14-130.pdf) placed strict limits on Victoria’s project: * The market would be run by the university and not-for profit. It would charge only enough fees to cover operations. * Questions would be limited to 5,000 traders each, who could bet up to $850 per question. They would be on politics and economics only. * They would do the usual know-your-customer process and take steps to avoid their traders try to meddle in world events. Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria’s market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site. On August 4, the CFTC [reversed itself](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi94o-hycD5AhX0SzABHVDnCskQFnoECBAQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cftc.gov%2Fcsl%2F22-08%2Fdownload&usg=AOvVaw1zMZGar57zmC-aMAe6X3Nn), saying the PredictIt had “not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter” and that it had to shut down by February. There was no explanation of how it might not be in compliance with the terms of the letter. PredictIt has clearly stuck to the 5,000 traders and $850 investment limits, and AFAIK no one has accused them of meddling in world events. Victoria University did hire a private company, Aristotle Inc, to run operations, which seems against the “not for profit” clause. But this happened in 2015, and the relationship between PredictIt and Aristotle hasn’t changed since then. Also, [supposedly](https://politicalpredictionmarkets.com/is-predictit-legal/) PredictIt has been “in regular communication” with the CFTC throughout its lifespan to make sure they were on the right side of the law; if CFTC was angry about something they did in 2015, why wouldn’t they have told them before now? So what’s going on? Twitter user @tnim\_ posted a claim that his lawsuit was responsible: This doesn’t make a lot of sense - if a judge rules in someone’s favor in a lawsuit, it should look like a court order, and it would probably involve PredictIt paying damages or something. How would a lawsuit over an unfair banning make CFTC shut the whole market down? [Chris from Karlstack](https://karlstack.substack.com/p/a-textbook-case-of-regulatory-capture) notes that this user “has a bad reputation as a troll” and hasn’t provided any evidence to substantiate his claims. But then what is going on? Most people I’ve talked to suspect Kalshi, a big for-profit prediction market [funded with $30 million](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210217005285/en/Kalshi-Raises-30-Million-in-Series-A-Funding-Led-by-Sequoia) from VC firm Sequoia Capital. Their edge (which they boast about openly) is their close relationship with the CFTC - for example, their [head of regulatory strategy](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-26/kalshi-s-stock-market-of-the-world-let-s-you-bet-on-anything) is a former CFTC official, a [former CFTC commissioner is on their board of directors](https://kalshi.com/blog/former-cftc-commissioner-brian-quintenz-joins-our-board), etc. Kalshi’s legality is both their biggest strength and their biggest weakness. It’s a weakness because they have to submit a lot of paperwork to the CFTC every time they want to open a new market, let the CFTC spend weeks or months debating its social utility, and sometimes get refused; as a result of this and other regulatory hurdles, they’re usually months behind, and much less interesting than, other prediction markets (for example, they still don’t have any questions about the Ukraine war). On the other hand, they can operate free from regulatory harassment. But operating free from regulatory harassment isn’t actually an advantage if the CFTC never harasses other prediction markets - which was its policy up until about a year ago. You can see why Kalshi - which had spent a big chunk of its $30 million lobbying the CFTC for approval - was kind of annoyed that they were doing neither better nor worse than illegal crypto prediction markets. Or PredictIt, run by Victoria University on a no-action letter. So earlier last year, when the CFTC unexpectedly moved against the previously-tolerated illegal crypto site Polymarket, people suspected Kalshi’s lobbying. Now that they’re moving against PredictIt too, people suspect the same. Chris from Karlstack has what he considers a “smoking gun”: last month, Kalshi [filed documents with the CFTC](https://kalshi-public-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/regulatory/notices/CONGRESS%20for%20posting.pdf) proposing to move into the “who will win elections” market, which PredictIt previously dominated. It’s incredibly suspicious that the CFTC closed down the premier election-focused prediction market just two weeks after the company everyone accuses them of being in the pocket of tried to move into the election-predicting space. The CEO of Kalshi has issued something that might charitably be called a denial: But the community isn’t buying it: …and is pretty upset. I am also upset. If someone from Kalshi wants to swear, in so many words, “We promise we put no effort into convincing CFTC to quash PredictIt”, I will believe them (although I would still suspect the CFTC was following a thought process like “now that Kalshi exists it would be embarrassing to let less-regulated markets exist alongside it”). Until then, I think cui bono remains the right question. Also, isn’t Kalshi the apocalypse-avatar of Vishnu who’s supposed to kill everybody and purify the world for the next era? Seems concerning. Where does the prediction market community go from here? They’re in a depressing position - Kalshi stands accused of killing a lot of things they loved, and it would be tempting to boycott them forever and then dance on their grave once their VC money runs out. But if they successfully turn themselves into the only game in town, then the choice is to get on board with Kalshi or give up on prediction markets completely. How vengeful are we feeling? The community consensus so far seems to be to try to avoid Kalshi as long as it can. There are some good real-money prediction markets open to non-Americans: [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/), [Futuur](https://futuur.com/), [Hedgehog](https://amm.hedgehog.markets/restricted), and [Insight Prediction](https://insightprediction.com/), although Americans will find visits prohibited nationally, and I would never recommend violating precepts negligently. You could also try play-money markets like [Manifold](https://manifold.markets/home), or market-adjacent forecasting sites like [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/). Finally, there’s [a claim that](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/09/no-future-regulator-orders-political-betting-market-to-shut-down-in-u-s-00050238) Aristotle, the for-profit company involved with PredictIt, might try to move into the fully-regulated-prediction-market space and compete with Kalshi. I’m posting this as an encouragement for you to click on it and bet, not as a final word about the probability - there are only four bets so far! This might actually be a good move; Kalshi had to spend lots of blood and sweat and money getting the CFTC to approve a prediction market, but now that there’s a precedent it’ll be easier for the next entrant. And the Kalshi-haters might support a competitor out of pure spite. This would be almost unfair: Kalshi would have done all the hard work, get forced into unethical business practices to make back the money it sacrificed, and then someone else could free-ride with a spotless reputation. Anyway, I think the most fitting epitaph for PredictIt is this: Source: [Insight Prediction](https://insightprediction.com/m/18505/will-predictit-survive) …members of the community it created, betting on its chances, using one of the many descendant sites it inspired. You can’t kill an idea. ## Hedgehog Markets Wait, isn’t the hedgehog the bad one? Isn’t that why the 538 mascot is the fox? [Hedgehog Markets](https://hedgehog.markets/) is a crypto betting site using USDC and Solana. Most of its markets are about sports. I’m featuring them here because they are, as far as I know, the first group to do something I’ve been waiting for a long time - allow users to create real-money prediction markets. What’s the catch? Offer not open to US citizens - a vexing, problematic negation. And you need to have a Solana wallet, own crypto, and know how to use it. And there’s not a lot of volume so far. But otherwise, no catch. This is just a really good new thing. Think of it as Manifold Markets, but with real money (and 10x harder to use). This is what they’ve got so far. Click on image to go to page. Hedgehog also hosts “no loss competitions”, where you lend them your crypto and make a bet. They invest the crypto, the event happens, the winner gets the interest, but everyone gets all their money back in the end. Unless wherever they invested the crypto was a scam. But come on, what are the odds that that happens a 205,558th time? I still think the hedgehog was supposed to be the bad one. ## The Other Salem Trials The Salem Center at the University of Texas Austin, in conjunction with Richard Hanania’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology will be [giving a cushy paid academic fellowship](https://www.cspicenter.com/p/introducing-the-salemcspi-forecasting) to the winner of their Manifold-based prediction market tournament. In case you’re confused like I was: UT Austin is not University of Austin, the new Intellectual Dark Web college. It’s a >100-year-old public university whose alumni include Jeb Bush, Michael Dell, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. The rule is: you sign up for their special tournament and get $1000 special Salem dollars (not Manifold’s normal Mana currency). You can invest them however you want in [the 33 prediction markets on their site](https://salemcenter.manifold.markets/home) (mostly on US politics and world affairs). You have to invest in at least a few different markets, so you can’t just bet everything on black and hope you get lucky. The five people with the most money in July 2023 are finalists for the fellowship, which might go to the overall prediction market winner, or to another one of the five finalists who excels on more traditional job market criteria. The fellowship itself “will pay $25,000 and not require teaching or in-person residency. Rather, it will provide an academic job and financial support for a researcher to do whatever they want with their time, in order to advance their career or work on other projects.” There will also be lesser prizes for runners-up. Hanania writes: > Unlike a typical fellowship, you will not apply to this one by sending us letters of recommendation and a CV listing all of your publications and awards, and then relying on our subjective judgements about other people’s subjective judgments about your work. Rather, you will participate in a forecasting tournament on economics and social and political issues. At the end of the process, we will interview the top five finalists and decide among them. There will be a presumption towards hiring the best forecaster, but that presumption can be overcome based on how close the runner ups are and other criteria including any previous writing and business success. That’s it. You can be a high school dropout, and if you can predict what’s going to happen better than PhDs in their field, we’ll gladly make you a finalist for the job. You don’t need to share our politics, our social values, or our idea of what a scholar should look or act like. …though again, as far as I can tell this is only about who makes it to the finalist round, and then to some degree the usual criteria will start creeping in again. Aside from this being an admirable way to choose a finalist, it’s also created a really excellent prediction market. I love Manifold as a company but I’m sometimes skeptical of what I see there - there are too many really low-liquidity markets, too many sources of extra play money, too many stupid “the probability on this market will be under 49% on August 31” troll questions, too little desperation keeping people on their toes. The Salem subtournament solves all those problems: This is just a lot of really smart people making lots and lots of bets on serious questions, and it makes me optimistic that Manifold’s flaws are shallow and its potential is high. Kudos to everyone involved - and if you want to participate, go to [this page](https://salemcenter.manifold.markets/home). ## This Week In The Markets Chance of a war with China by 2050 up from 30% in April to 55% now. What’s changed? This seems underpriced, unless people expect whatever group manages the list to disqualify AI songs, or some kind of civilization-wide agreement that they don’t count. There’s already [mediocre AI-produced music](https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/), and nothing stopping it from getting better with really simple scaling. Given that most songs are already composed by nameless corporate composers and not the pop stars themselves, I don’t think there will be any resistance to this. This is an interesting question, I don’t know if I have any opinion on the price. Metaculus is really bullish on longevity, see also [this question](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1002/any-progress-in-human-lifespan-enhancement-by-2100/), which gives a 97% chance that at least a hundred people will make it to 120 by 2100 (or some other possible resolution triggers I think are stricter). Since only one person has previously made it to 120 in all of recorded history, this suggests some serious anti-aging progress. But the comments don’t seem to be well-thought-out, and some of the ones that are center around technological singularities. Meanwhile, on Manifold: I’m kind of confused what’s going on here. Does someone keep throwing in money to push it up to 70-90%, and then other people keep buying it back down? Also, I wouldn’t have naively expected that, with $34,455 already invested, an extra $100 would almost double the chance, from 14% to 24%. Probably I should poke around at their algorithm some more until this makes sense to me. Rob Wiblin has been posting some interesting markets on AI and EA. By the way, I’m impressed that this market has upwards of $4000 bet - I wasn’t seeing very many high-volume markets on Manifold for a while and was getting worried, but now even non-exciting markets often have enough money to be basically sane. From Insight: You know a prediction market has really made it when its insane questions about Donald Trump start getting close to zero. Insight has almost made it. From [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/market-group/who-will-win-the-US-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination) and [PredictIt](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7053/Who-will-win-the-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination): This is pretty bizarre: Polymarket says Trump is much more likely to get the GOP nomination than DeSantis, but PredictIt said the opposite. Polymarket’s been at this level for a while, so it’s not just a week ago vs. now. Metaculus is [closer to Polymarket](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11370/2024-republican-nominee-for-us-prez/), Manifold is [in between](https://manifold.markets/dglid/who-will-be-the-2024-republican-pre). I’m confused nobody is closing this gap; maybe I’m missing something. ## Short Links: 1: Nostalgebraist’s [criticisms of Metaculus](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/nostalgebraist/692246981744214016?source=share). They mostly boil down to “there’s no barrier to entry or self-correction mechanism, so if mostly stupid people join, it will just be a poll of stupid people’s opinions”. So far it’s just being used by prediction market nerds, who are hopefully smart, but its accuracy is based on luck (and an self-serving assumption that prediction market nerds are indeed smart) instead of cool institutional design. I somewhat agree with this, which is why I prefer real markets (IF THE GOVERNMENT WOULD EVER LET US MAKE THEM), but I think Metaculus’ defense would be that their aggregation method lets them weight the guesses of people with good track records more highly. I don’t know how strong this effect is, but if there were ever an influx of stupid people, they could hopefully measure its effect on their accuracy and then strengthen the weighting until it reached the optimum level (up to totally disregarding the opinions of anyone without a track record). 2: Metaculus is hiring programmers, analysts, and some leadership positions, read [here](https://apply.workable.com/metaculus/?lng=en) for more information. 3: Eli Lifland’s [forecasting retrospective](https://www.foxy-scout.com/retro/), 2020-2022. Lifland has won some tournaments and is generally considered a top forecaster, his advice is worth reading. 4: Prediction market manipulation looms larger in people’s imagination than in reality, but there have been a couple of attempts recently. Here’s a thread [detailing two of them](https://twitter.com/Domahhhh/status/1555575884475662336): one based on spamming Rotten Tomatoes with reviews to manipulate a movie’s score, the other based on creating a web presence for a fake labor union to manipulate a question about strikes. 5: Jacob Steinhardt [describes the results of his AI forecasting contest last year](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/). Short version: AI is progressing faster than forecasters expected, safety is going slower. Uh oh.	Scott Alexander	68294083	Mantic Monday 8/15/22	acx
# Open Thread 237 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Asterisk is an upcoming effective altruist magazine currently headquartered in my spare bedroom. My friend Clara is editor and the first issue will feature articles by me, Kelsey Piper, and other people you might know. Go to [asteriskmag.com](http://asteriskmag.com/) to check it out and sign up for the mailing list. 2: I’m still interested in testing some prompts on one of the bigger post-DALLE2 image models (PARTI? Imagen?) in order to resolve a bet. Please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) if you can help.	Scott Alexander	68680633	Open Thread 237	acx
# Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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. This contains spoilers for the Dune series.* - SA] — > The memory of sand’s gold sheen > The worm, the man, the Arakeen > The beast, the wise undying king > His long and gentle wrath > His voice trapped under golden swells > Like screams wrung from uncounted bells > divided god within a hell > His pain a golden path > > - From The Collected Songs of The Scattering,* author unknown. ## The Setting As God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels. The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad’ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You’ve Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire. Centuries of time have seen him evolve into a hybrid of a human man and a full-grown sandworm, and the resultant power and pseudo-immortality have allowed him to extend his father’s dominance of the known universe from a period of decades to an era spanning the better part of four millennia. The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing. The members of the retreating troupe also belong to Leto, although they may not acknowledge or even suspect it. The nature of his ownership of them is in many ways similar to his sovereignty over the wolves that guard the forbidden forest around his citadel; they too are to some extent beings of his creation and design. If this description has made you expect an action-filled novel, dispel those hopes. This is a book about the nature of leadership as practiced over periods of time that defy normal concepts of mortality. As a story, it doesn’t amount to much. As a picture of a fully-imagined empire at a particular point in time and a description of an unusual method of rulership, it’s something more. This is the least readable of the Dune books, but also the most meaningful. It’s a book that meditates on the loneliness of true superiority, of the ennui of true invulnerability. It is a book that ponders humanity as brought to heel at the side of a benevolent and less-than-human mind with greater-than-human capabilities. ## Hydraulic Despotism As was the case in the nearly two-Christianities-ago day of Leto’s father, control of the spice resources of the planet Arakis amounts to de facto control of the universe; it’s the unobtainium does-everything-you-need resource the dune universe runs off. The book likens this to Hydraulic Despotism, where control of an all-important resource (generally water) allows for control of everything downstream of and reliant on that resource. Leto’s grasp of the resource that grants this near-universal control is unshakably strong compared to his father’s. He has driven the sandworm to extinction; he is all that remains of the species. What spice remains in the universe exists only in stockpiles he created over the course of his rule. From those stockpiles he ekes out poisoned riches; a dose of spice essence to create a Bene Gesserit reverend mother here and a supply just great enough to enable the spacing guild to allow such travel as Leto approves there only serve to reinforce the universe’s reliance on Leto’s largess. Leto’s prescience, his nigh invulnerability, and his unrivaled levels of experience both personal and inherited [1] allow him to use this control to its utmost while never being much in danger of losing it; any assassination attempt would have to be of a magnitude sufficient to threaten Shai-Hulud, and Leto (for the most part) stays a safe distance from large bodies of water. The book is thus a 400-page contemplation on the nature of power as exerted by a mind created by humans which has nonetheless surpassed them. It’s the story of an entity that seizes control and pursues paths and goals that seem right to it, but that are not necessarily in concert with the will of humanity as a whole. Though likely unintended by Herbert — whose fear of mechanical thought took on a different flavor — it is impossible to fully ignore the echoes of AI risk throughout the novel. In reviewing the book for a 2020’s audience it’s necessary to return to that well again and again, to share dreams of humanity in chains, destroyed or kept in comfort by an entity with powers that exceed our own. ## The characters #### Leto, the god-king Leto II functions as both a person and a sort of societal force in the book, and this description only concerns his person. While connected, his function as a mind that emerged from humanity and controls it is distinct from Herbert’s personification of him as a man. In the sense that he can be understood as human, Leto is a man on the brink of a mental collapse that never quite comes; the isolation brought on by being both in a position of untouchable power and a not-quite-human shell wear away at even the strongest of wills, it seems. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and Leto has worn it for 3500 years. This loneliness synergizes with Leto’s immense boredom, an ennui enhanced by experience and near-omniscience. Very little is new to him and virtually no one in the universe can serve as a companion to him. This makes him vulnerable not only to the psychological instability his loneliness encourages but also to anything that could possibly satisfy that lack; he would (and does) tolerate large amounts of risk to try and fill these gaps. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Leto is his firm, unshakeable belief that he is doing the right thing. In Herbert’s universe, the rightness of his actions is not just opinion but instead verifiable fact, at least in the sense that Leto himself can verify them to his satisfaction. This means that there is nothing Leto will not do if he perceives it as necessary; there is no cruelty he would not enact to push forward his golden path. But he is a mind that emerged from humanity and sees things humanity cannot itself see. His good deeds are not understood, and he works quasi-endlessly for what he considers to be the ultimate good while bearing the burden of the knowledge that he is viewed as nothing more or less than a dictator, a personification of the restriction under which humanity itself chafes. #### The Duncan Idaho In the second and third books of the series, Duncan Idaho returned to life (and death) in the service of the Atreides. In the Duniverse, both your mind and your cells have memory, each Duncan clone carries the memories of the original. Through the same mechanism of ancestral/cellular memory, Leto has seen Duncan’s sacrifices through two generations of eyes in addition to his own. Faced with this loyalty, a sense of personal debt and the ability to order unlimited clones, Leto shrugged his shoulders and decided to always have a Duncan around to shoot the shit with. From what we gather, the Duncans themselves always have very mixed feelings about this and tend to go slightly crazy with doubts related to how each of their predecessors met their end. Duncan himself (or, at least, this iteration of himself) has misgivings about the totality of Leto’s control that clash with his absolute loyalty to the surname he serves: > ”You’ve taken something away from us,” he said. “I can feel it. Those women… Moneo…” > > Us against you, Leto thought. The Duncans always choose the human side. Duncan is also faced with the reality any legendary swordsman faces 3500 years into a focused human-improvement breeding program faces: he’s slightly obsolete. People (read: women) generally like him and a giant worm-man loves him, but he seems to feel he lacks a clear purpose. He is a man who has always been useful wallowing in sudden, shocking impotence. This combined with other frustrations lends his character a tone of someone casting about for something significant to do; he is almost from the first waiting on a match that can light his fuse and force him into meaningful action of any kind. #### Siona Remember those people running from the wolves at the onset of the novel? They were led by Siona in a successful effort to steal some intel from Leto’s own backyard. Siona is a rebel; she detests Leto and Leto’s rule. She will do anything to make even small progress towards hurting him, including sacrificing the lives of her friends, which was the eventual outcome of everyone who followed along on her lupine 5k theft-run. She is unpleasant to most people, most of the time. Here is the nicest thing she says in the book, spoken directly after she kind-of-sort-of kidnaps Duncan Idaho to try to hurt his feelings: > “It would not offend me to be your friend,” she said. It might sound as if she’s a bad character, but like most of the other major players she is more representative of a facet of humanity than she is a fully fleshed human being. She is humanity, developed, advanced and unconquered. She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication. #### Hwi Noree You might occasionally hear someone talk about Ernest Hemingway not being able to write women - that they exist purely for the male characters in his book. They have not met Hwi Noree, a character who is literally designed to like a particular housebound rationalist utilitarian and who has no other characteristics whatsoever. I’d like to write a whole bunch of insightful things about the character, but there isn’t anything to delve into. She’s from IX, a planet that builds technology that can mostly block Leto’s psychic powers, and was designed in a joint effort involving both the techy Ixians and the genetic meddling of the Tleilaxu. And designed she was, for one purpose and one purpose only: Being attractive to Leto. The book describes her as “the epitome of good”, but “good” in this sense seems to be being from the start completely and unjustifiably committed to Leto; from her first day on the job as the Ixian ambassador to the god-emperor, she ruthlessly sells out her bosses and tells Leto everything he wants to know in just the subservient way he likes to hear it. Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider Herbert’s description of Hwi after Leto contemplates the difficulties of worm/human romantic relationships, becomes frustrated, and sends her away: > She left quietly, but Leto could see that Hwi, too, was tortured. There was no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity that Leto had sacrificed. She knew they would have been friends, lovers, companions in an ultimate sharing between the sexes. At this point, she has known Leto for approximately five minutes. Besides being very nice to people who haven’t earned it from her (this is almost entirely aimed at Leto, but comes up in one other way later) she has essentially no personality traits. As a plot device, she exists only to be tempting to Leto, to be something he wants enough to compromise his primary objectives. Herbert dug deep and tried to figure out what the most appealing woman possible would be, and came up with a personification of subservience and unearned affection so blatant it makes love interests from harem anime look like Susan B. Anthony in comparison. Lacking any kind of a personality or desires of her own, Hwi Noree exists almost entirely as a desirable object - a particularly shiny apple would have done just as well in her place. #### Moneo If Duncan Idaho represents the “mongrel strength” of the wild, primitive human as Leto claims, Moneo is a fully domesticated purebred. He is a direct line descendent of the Atreides, and thus a result of 35 centuries of Leto’s behavioral and genetic design. In a way also similar to the purebred, he is high-strung. He spends the greater part of the book being really, really nervous any time he’s around Leto, for whom he serves as a right-hand man. As Leto’s most senior employee, he knows as much about Leto as anyone can. He has read his history, sees his present and works to make his wishes reality. But for all that close association, he doesn’t appear to understand Leto very well; where Leto seems to respect strength and a level of rebellion and pushback, Moneo is consistently passive and cowardly. Where he serves Leto’s goals, the impression given to the reader is that he has been browbeaten into accepting them as correct. As a possible result of this, Leto doesn’t appear to actually like Moneo; despite his usefulness, Leto spends most of his time talking to him in a way that resembles a bully verbally abusing someone he’s incredibly tired of. If he’s wrong in his actions, Leto is at least not wrong in his target; Moneo really does suck. To the extent he cares about anything or shows even a scrap of bravery, it is in his desire to protect Siona. If Duncan represents all that’s worth saving in humanity’s past, Siona represents humanity’s potential to transcend, and Nayla represents the balance of humanity’s nobility against its flaws, Moneo represents a sort of voluntary spiritual death in the face of large systems. His decisions are cool and mathematical, intended to maximize his performance within a system he dislikes but doesn’t dare to change. ## The Golden Path To talk in detail about Leto’s goals, it’s necessary to talk generally about his fears. Those fears are for the most part robotic in nature. What alien life exists in the Herbert universe is broadly man-made, and the greatest historic risk humanity has faced was the crisis that drove the prohibitions of the Butlerian Jihad. The Jihad is barely explained in the books, but seems to have involved a crisis of artificial intelligence; man rose up against the machine and won out, but the victory was either so costly or uncertain as to drive a universal ban on machines that imitate the complexity of human thought. Leto’s ability to peer into the future does not tell him the specifics of the next danger that might threaten humanity, but he does know that it’s threatened, nonetheless: > “Nothing is ever separated from its source,” he said. “Seeing futures is a vision of a continuum in which all things take shape like bubbles forming beneath a waterfall. You see them and then they vanish into the stream. If the stream ends, it is as though the bubbles never were. That stream is my Golden Path and I saw it end." Imagine Leto as a very big Big Yud (Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalism’s original AI doom-sayer); he’s convinced that unless serious, committed action is taken the only future humanity can look forward to is paper-clip-based. > “The Ixians do not recognize that machine-makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine. This is ultimate sterility. Machines always fail… given time. And when these machines failed there would be nothing left, no life at all.” Understanding Leto-as-Yud is necessary to understand the threat Leto is responding to, but is a sub-par way of understanding Leto himself. The better way is to look at Leto’s function as an all-powerful force both holding the hazards of malicious AI at bay while at the same working to mitigate those same hazards. To put it another way, Leto might be organic and have a different distribution of strengths, but he functions as a sort of anti-AI AI, working a centuries-long gameplan to hedge against humanity’s impending doom. In the short term, his methods for doing this are pretty simple; he simply doesn’t allow people to build computers. His long-term plans on the other hand don’t involve shielding us so much as they involve teaching us to protect ourselves and making us capable of the same. #### The Breeding and Culling of the Incalculable The first aspect of Leto’s work is to build a human that can threaten an AI in the same way we are threatened by AI today. Leto’s plans first involve developing something that mitigates his biggest advantage - that is, a strain of human that bypasses his clairvoyance. He finds this in Siona, who “fades from his sight”; if he can’t see her, then neither can other forms of oracle. Though Leto spends the better part of 3500 years doing this, time is not the most vital aspect of his plan. The Bene Gesserit spent over 10,000 years on their breeding program, but focused on power alone; they succeeded in the form of Paul, but quickly lost control of their creation. Nor does the difference lie in creativity. The Teilaxu are short-term genetic engineers who exert a great deal of control in their alterations. In doing so they create wonders, but also bend humanity in unnatural and inhuman directions. They are universally hated, a sort of society-sized uncanny valley reviled by all. The Ixians put their faith in technology, speeding towards instead of away from humanity’s demise. All three of these forces seek their own narrow goals while ignoring the broader needs of humanity. The Bene Gesserit got a messiah who immediately turned against them. The Teilaxu are mules who only vaguely resemble humans, and the Ixians are only kept from creating an immediate AI disaster through external controls exerted upon them. Leto succeeds in helping humanity where others fail, not because of the time he spends and not even because of his resources; in the Dune universe, both could be duplicated by any sufficiently dedicated group of people. Leto creates no super-soldiers besides those that might have occurred naturally, given time. He creates no traits, instead only encouraging and curating traits that push humanity towards long-term viability. He keeps his power separate from his goals and thus keeps his goals pure. The man-who-walks-as-a-worm thus protects humanity while actively encouraging it to grow. In doing so he creates something that will one day not need him, and that is also capable of destroying him. The book does not say so directly, but the fact that both of those are really one single goal is key. An AI that was created accidentally may one day be destroyed accidentally, either by another AI or developing into an insane version of itself. Only by cultivating humanity itself into AI-destroying viability can it create safety. #### Stored Mechanical Energy and the Scattering Travel is restricted in Leto’s empire. While ornithopters and spacecraft still exist, he limits their uses entirely to official travel of the sort necessary to make the empire run. The vast majority of people are planet-bound and mostly restricted to such travel as they can accomplish on foot. They are trapped in place in a society he engineered to be banal and boring. The goal (which is possible in Leto’s world, if not ours) is to encourage a kind of genetic yearning, a desire to travel and settle that is ingrained in humanity at a cellular level. Leto pushes for the accumulated voices of thousands of ancestors to scream “go west, my son” in unison, too loud to ignore. In the Dune universe, ancestral memories are a factual truth; this is how genetics work there.To build the desire, all you need is time - but the desire to do something and the wherewithal are two very different things. Early in the novel, Leto makes an off-hand mention that some forces in the universe are terrified he will die away from water. When a sandworm dies, it breaks apart into sandtrout, which encapsulate environmental water until they’re surrounded by desert. Only when the environment is absolutely arid do they combine to create their adult sandworm forms. The lifecycle of a sandworm is long, and TGEoD’s supply of spice is entirely contained within Leto’s horde; he carefully rations that supply to keep his empire functional. Leto expects that the remaining spice will be quickly exhausted after his death and for a period perhaps measured in centuries humanity will be trapped, unable to travel, starving, and creating harsh survival-of-the-fittest environments on all inhabited planets. This great culling is intended to take the genetic advantage Leto has given and hone it to a razor’s edge. After a time, the re-emergence of the sandworm should reintroduce the spice to a population of untrackable super-warriors. Only by doing this does Leto believe he can scatter an ultra-tough humanity far enough through the universe that the machines will never catch them all, and that they will have a fighting chance even if they do. ## The Plot (Such as it is) “Yes, yes,” you are likely saying. “But what of the plot?”. And in asking you’ve stumbled onto the major problem with the novel: it doesn’t have one, really. Or at least not much of one. Herbert’s books all have a theme. Dune is about teaching the reader about the untapped power of the desert, while Dune Messiah seeks to show them that power in action. Children of Dune is a warning that success can make you soft - since the harshness of the desert is what brings you power in this universe, bringing it under your control domesticates it and cuts into the very power base you rely on. When Paul Atreides blinks in the face of an overwhelming fate and is usurped by a younger, more vital generation, it’s no surprise. TGEoD is only a slight departure from these themes, instead asking what would happen if the harshness and strength of the desert were concentrated in a single mind. Genetic development has always been a tale written by hardship, a story about how life rises to greatness only when facing and overcoming great problems. (For the record, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune are about sexing uppity women into submission and discovering a literal secret clan of space Jews, respectively. They are not necessarily required Dune reading, but if you are specifically looking for late-career-author-weirdness, they are excellent.) Because TGEoD is mostly about describing the end-point of a millennia-long exploitation of desert power, it is better understood as a book of sci-fi political philosophy than a story. But, to the extent there is a story at all, it is as follows: While Siona is busy running from wolves, Leto is killing one of his Duncan Idahos; the replacement Idaho is arguably the main character of both TGEoD and the rest of the series. The Idaho is brought in and shown the wonders of the future by Leto, and is momentarily convinced to be a faithful and committed servant of the God-Emperor. Despite Idaho having misgivings about some of Leto’s tactics, everything is momentarily fine. This order is upset by Hwi Noree, who is immediately loved by Leto and who (again, weirdly) loves him back. After two short meetings, they decide to get married. But as you might expect, the kind of person who will get married after two coffee dates is not always the most reliable; after noticing that Duncan Idaho is sort of needy, she has one-time pity sex with him. This does not result in a love triangle; Duncan now loves Hwi, but she explains to Leto that she acknowledges that he has Mua’Dibs on her and leaves Idaho in the lurch. Meanwhile, Leto is busy kidnapping Siona, taking her to the desert and forcing her into a situation where she has to drink the spice essence he secretes to survive. Leto does this to force out her latent Atreides psychic powers, which shows her the golden path. In the past, this tactic has resulted in various people realizing the necessity of Leto’s actions and joining his team. Siona, however, is not convinced. Duncan’s recently bruised ego makes him easy to recruit to her cause, and between her prescience and his rock-climbing skills (read the book, it’s weird) they manage to do the impossible, assassinating the god-emperor and shattering his 3500-year-rule. He passes over control of his spice-hoard to them, and they proceed to have a thousand children to seed the universe with a strain of human immune to prescient search. Hwi Noree dies and, as a reader, you will find it nearly impossible to care. ## This Review is Kind of About AI So, why write a review on a 40-year-old sci-fi novel that nobody likes? If there is an orthodox strategy to winning an ACX book review contest, it’s probably something like “Review a non-fiction book about the connection between Tanzanite mining and the re-emergence of Georgist Monarchalism” and not so much “Scattered musings on the least popular Frank Herbert novel”. Why bother? First, I think it’s an interesting example of prescience on Herbert’s part. Thirty years before you had heard of Bayes, Herbert had tapped into an assumption that seemed so clear to him he didn’t realize he should spend more time explaining it to you: that any development of AI or AI-like programs would logically (if not actually) eventually result in an AI that held views so profoundly counter to the needs of humanity that it would wipe us out in pursuit of them. Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981. Second, there is always some value in anything that makes us think about the unpopular part of a problem. As is the case in any movement that addresses a potential hazard, eventually the prominent voices in the field are incentivized to focus on the sexy, sexy risk and not the boring, boring solutions. And thus you see much more “eventually nanomachines will fly through space at just under the speed of light, converting everything they see to AI”. They talk about the singularity, but less about potential solutions. Let’s assume that both Herbert and Yud are correct and that an all-powerful AI is a given, that it’s coming like a freight train with little we can do to stop at least some form of it from becoming reality. If that’s the case, it’s arguably that the only possible solution that presents a potential “good ending” for humanity is not finding ways to avoid an all-powerful AI but instead moving as quickly as possible towards the correct version of the same. TGEoD does not map perfectly onto reality. But to the extent it maps at all, it argues that the AI we build must be both protective and powerful; we have to allow it to accrue sufficient strength to prevent malicious AIs from gaining a foothold. We might be able to do that, or we might not. But if AI is inevitable then the dominance of a specific AI is likely; our best bet comes in promoting the correct one, not in the futility of trying to avoid the wrong program for the rest of eternity. If we can attain a perfect protective AI, we can be happy while still acknowledging that we are at best its pets; the very concepts we are talking about demand that we acknowledge the AI in this hypothetical is superior to us. Therein lies the secondary risk of AI; by creating an AI that coddles us, we run the risk of never advancing as a race again. As Dune points out, soft environments tend to weaken rather than reinforce. How much better would it then be if we could create an AI that restricts all other AI’s, but only as a secondary goal necessary to reach its primary objective of identifying what it is that makes humans human and amplifying those traits in a positive direction until we (as a still identifiably human race) can stand against AI’s on equal footing. I am not an AI expert. I’m not sure if any of this is possible even without the theoretical framework of AI risk. But I do know people, at least a bit, and I know that the reflex to run from danger is often stronger than the impulse to run towards safety. If all-powerful AI is inevitable, then running away from the wrong AI is merely delaying our eventual fatal mistake. Running towards the correct AI is necessary. As Leto says: > Run Faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps, but it’s never enough. You must also run. ## Endnotes 1: Leto’s family, the Atreides(es?) are basically magic; the Bene Gesserit were essentially witches who could draw on the ancestral memories of women in their ancestral line, and they bred this ability into Paul, Leto’s father. As a bonus, they can also draw on male ancestor’s memories, as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future and know what’s going on in the present. If this seems like cheating, it is; Leto is not only 3500 years old, but also has the combined leadership/political experience of every member of his family line at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. Did I mention he’s also mentat and can do computer-level mental calculations? He can also do mind control with his voice, and roll into you to kill you like Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s like Frank Herbert was worried you’d mistake him for the Reasonably Tough Emperor of Dune and over-corrected in the other direction.	Scott Alexander	68422934	Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune	acx
# Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything? There’s a popular saying among religious apologists: > Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of [GK Chesterton](https://www.azquotes.com/quote/936826) or [CS Lewis](https://www.azquotes.com/quote/893254), neither of whom [actually said it](https://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/). If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote. Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories? [This Economist article](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/27/what-drives-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-a-lack-of-religion-or-too-much) examined the question and concluded the opposite. See especially this graph: “White evangelicals” are more likely to believe most measured conspiracy theories, and churchgoers were more likely to believe in QAnon in particular. There’s an obvious confounder here: the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad. QAnon, illegal votes, and COVID microchips are inherently right wing conspiracy theories; vaccines/autism has probably become right-coded post-COVID. Only the moon landing seems politically neutral, and it’s hard to tell if there’s a real difference on that one. So this just tells us that white evangelical church-goers are further right than other people, which we already know. These data still deflate some more extreme claims about religion being absolutely protective against conspiracy theories. But I was interested in seeing how people of different faiths related to politically neutral conspiracies. Here’s Pew on [who believes in UFOs](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/28/religious-americans-less-likely-to-believe-intelligent-life-exists-on-other-planets/): The two most skeptical groups are . . . evangelicals and atheists. Quite the [Baptists and Bootleggers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists) alliance. Here’s [belief in Bigfoot by religion and worship attendance](https://www.thearda.com/quickstats/qs_43_p.asp) I would ignore the Absolutely category, which is too small to have a good sample size, and look at who says “Absolutely Not” vs. weaker versions (in theory some groups could be open-minded and less likely to take strong positions on either side, but it doesn’t look like that happens here). People of “none” religion are less likely than any religion [except Jews](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) to believe in Bigfoot. Somehow at the same time, the less often you go to church, the more likely to believe in Bigfoot you are. And here’s [astrology](https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2022/04/26/one-four-americans-say-they-believe-astrology): One out of four people with postgraduate degrees believes in astrology?! We find a similar pattern. Agnostics and people with “no particular religion” are more likely than Protestants to believe in astrology, but outright atheists are much less likely. I would have liked to look into JFK and 9/11 conspiracies, but I couldn’t find great data. There is [a Zogby poll](https://www.upi.com/Archives/2004/08/30/Half-NY-believes-Bush-knew-about-911poll/3071093838400/) which says 47% of evangelicals believed Bush knew about 9/11, but different sources give the base rate as either 41% or 49%, which makes it hard to tell if evangelicals are higher or lower. Overall I think these results support the fake Chesterton/Lewis quote, but in a weird and unexpected way. Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The conspiracy believers were usually somewhere in the middle: either weakly religious people who never went to church, or vague agnostics. One possible explanation is that people with any coherent worldview are smarter or at least more intellectual than people who don’t care. I don’t think this can fully explain these results: although following the logical implications of Christian belief would make you go to church a lot, I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected. Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology. But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more? Maybe there’s not a single explanation. Maybe the religious people don’t believe it because it sounds too much like consorting with demons, and the atheists don’t believe it because they’re already pre-selected for skepticism and not believing in things? I don’t know. Still, if someone tells you that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything, please politely correct them that this is only true until the point where they 100% accept scientific materialist atheism, at which point they go back to mostly not being that gullible again. Some speculate that there are even more peaks and valleys, an ever-changing landscape stretching out into infinity.	Scott Alexander	64396629	Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything?	acx
# A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures David Chapman’s [Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement. I find Peter Turchin’s [theories of civilizational cycles](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/) oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure: ## Phase 1: Precycle People start a movement around a weird thing, with no hope of payoff, for sheer love of the thing. They don’t care how many people join, except that maybe they enjoy having more people to talk to about their hobby. There might be fights, but they are nerd fights about technical aspects of the thing. Nobody expects to gain serious status. ## Phase 2: Growth The zeitgeist changes. The thing catches on. Because it’s so new, there is a vast frontier, waiting to be explored. Anyone willing to work hard can go to some virgin tract of ideaspace and start mining it for status. The returns on talent are high. During this phase, the movement grows in three ways. Forward: People do more of the thing, better. If it’s an artistic movement, they make more art. If it’s an intellectual movement, they discover new things and explore new arguments. If it’s a political movement, they get better-organized and more powerful. Anyone with even a little talent can participate and create something genuinely new. Their work will probably be appreciated within the movement. It might even be appreciated by outsiders, as an example of an exciting new trend. Upward: People build infrastructure for the movement. They start newsletters. They hold conferences or conventions. They found organizations. Everything is so new, and growing so fast, that even a little talent is enough to succeed. Even if you aren’t an artist yourself, you can still join the art movement, start an art-related newsletter, be the first newsletter to accurately cover the new art form, and make it into the inner circle of the movement, with only a little effort. Outward: All subcultures are, in a sense, status Ponzi schemes. Google’s first employee became their Director of Technology and made $900 million. Jesus’s first follower became the Bishop of Rome; one in every thousand people alive is named after him. The first few people to make websites in 1995, blogs in 2005, or YouTube channels in 2015 got outsized followings that they were able to leverage into higher status later on. The first few people to get on board the New Atheist, woke, alt-right, dirtbag left, and intellectual dark web movements all had easy opportunities to become famous; the next few thousand at least had the chance to be well-connected veterans. Other times the Ponzi is even simpler. In karate, the white belts respect the yellow belts, the yellow belts the green belts, and so on up to the black belts, the instructor, and the World Master Of Your Particular Karate Style Who Lives In A Temple Somewhere In Asia. If you stay around long enough, you gain skills and progress through the ranks. The main selling point is skill at martial arts, but the added bonus is that once you invest enough time, you gain status. You especially gain status compared to people who come after you (eg the people who are white belts when you’re a black belt) but you also gain status in regular society insofar as everyone thinks it’s impressive to be a karate black belt. And how cool other people think it is will depend on the popularity of karate and whether the average person they encounter is more vs. less advanced than you are. In a normal karate class, status gain is too slow to be worth worrying about. But in a rapidly growing subculture, people catch on fast. This is the secret behind the first two modes of growth. Status within a subculture is zero-sum. You can’t make everyone high-status at the same time. But you can have everyone at time T reasonably expect to be high status at time T+1, after a bunch of new people have joined and the older generation has become Wise Elders and Founding Heroes. In growth-phase subculture - let’s say one that doubles in size every six months - your status is always improving. And not just because you’re growing older and more experienced, but also because your projects are paying off. Suppose there’s a new art movement of three people. One of them draws the paintings, one writes the manifesto, and one hosts the art shows Ten years later, when the movement has ten thousand people, the first person is a famous pioneering painter, the second person is a public intellectual with a best-selling book, and the third person owns a chain of galleries. The key to this phase is that no member of the movement has an incentive to compete with any other member. There’s so much open frontier that it would be stupid to waste time backstabbing someone else instead of going off and grabbing the free status lying all around you. ## Phase 3: Involution Thanks [to the Chinese](https://twitter.com/stevehouf/status/1551608048808083457) for teaching me this lovely word, which I think works better than Turchin’s term “stagflation” in this context. The movement has picked the low-hanging fruit of their object-level goals. Artistic movements have created enough works that it’s hard not to seem derivative. Intellectual movements have explored most of the implications of their ideas. Political movements have absorbed their natural base and are facing organized opposition. It’s still possible to do object-level work, but unless you’re a hard-working genius, someone will have beaten you to most good ideas. And the movement already has most of the infrastructure it needs. Want to hold a conference? There are already five top-notch conferences about the movement; unless you’re a hard-working genius, yours will never be as good. Want to start a newsletter? Maybe instead you should beg for an internship at one of the ten newsletters that already compete for readers - too bad a thousand other people are begging equally hard for that same position. In other situations, everyone would lower their expectations and be fine. But the subculture is used to being a status Ponzi scheme. This is the stage where the last tier joins the pyramid, realizes that there won’t be a tier below them, and feels betrayed. During this phase, a talented status-hungry young person who joins the movement is likely to expect status but not get it. The frontier is closed; there’s no virgin territory to go homesteading in. The only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight. Sometimes these fights are object-level: the movement’s art is ugly, its intellectual arguments are false, its politics are unjust. But along with the object level disagreements, there are always accusations that accurately reflect status-famine, ones like “the leaders of this movement are insular and undemocratic” or “the elites don’t listen to criticism”. These accusations may or may not be true. But during the Growth phase, nobody makes them, even when they are true; during the Involution phase, people always make them, even when they aren’t. Someone with very novel and interesting criticism might start an entirely new subculture based on their ideas; their complaints might suggest a new research direction with unexplored vistas and plenty of free energy. But more likely, they’ll have more minor criticism, and end up vying for the same pool of resources and subcultural energy, only wanting it to be their pool rather than other people’s. This person is now a counterelite (or as they used to call it, a heresiarch). The average counterelite probably won’t take over the movement. But they can win small victories. They can start a group of True Movementarians, opposed to the corrupt members of the regular movement. Then they can have a True Movementarian conference, a True Movementarian newsletter, etc. This maybe solves the status famine for one more generation. But the wider effect is fragmentation. During Involution phase, many counterelites are trying to slice off adherents and resources at the same time. Some people even become meta-counter-elites, complaining that the counterelites themselves have strayed from the true principles, etc. The actual elites realize their status is also precarious, and some of them side with the counterelites in order to get a new base, bringing the conflicts to the highest levels. The overall tone of the movement becomes darker. Ordinary rank-and-file members hear so much criticism of the movement that it’s hard for them to stay optimistic about it. They stop talking about it as The Amazing Movement That Will Change Everything, and become defensive: “I’m not, like, one of those members of the movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.” ## Phase 4: Postcycle At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore. The people who want easy status stop joining, and the movement stabilizes in a low-growth state. One way for this to happen is institutionalization. A movement rises. It founds some groups to promote its agenda. The fires of excitement die down, and the groups remain. Feminism is no longer as big a deal as it once was, but we still have NOW and Planned Parenthood. These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job. You expect to work hard, and at best get a position commensurate to your talent and diligence. It’s not really worth criticizing the leadership, because everything happens through formal governance structures which are hard to affect. Most people who want to be feminists have already decided to support Planned Parenthood and not you. And you cannot take over Planned Parenthood unless you win over their Board of Directors, which you won’t. (I don’t usually think of karate as an “institution” in the same sense as NOW, but it has strong defenses against criticism and counterelites; you can’t just walk in and argue that you should be the black belt and the master should defer to you) Other times, the movement just becomes so uncool for so long that it returns to Phase 1. There aren’t a lot of stained glass artisans or Thomist philosophers anymore. But I expect that being a stained glass artisan or Thomist philosopher is an okay job. You might not make much money, but you can have fun exploring your chosen medium in a nerdy way. ## No Sociopaths Required This would be a reasonable point to describe how the subcultures I’ve seen or participated in have followed this scheme, but I’m reluctant to do so - it feels too much like airing dirty laundry. But maybe you will find these graphs helpful. Taken from [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture). But many of them followed a pattern of starting with incredible positive energy. Like telling a new person about them would blow that person’s mind. Everyone felt united in realizing what a good thing they’d got. Then they gradually drifted apart, scandals came out, insiders started absorbing and repeating the outside criticism that had previously seemed so ridiculous, and eventually it reached the point where lots of people were embarrassed to identify with the subculture at all, or did so as explicit meta-contrarianism. I couldn’t resist including this, but I don’t think EA is actually in full Involution yet. Yet unlike Chapman, I never felt like there was any influx of sociopaths. Sometimes I found myself on opposite sides of battle lines from some of the earliest and most valued members of the movement. But I never doubted they were honest; I hope they didn’t doubt me either. I think during the Involution phase, each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths (ie all the other factions). After all, everything used to be so nice and friendly, and now it’s full of people attacking each other for personal gain. But this doesn’t require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people. Just more desperate.	Scott Alexander	67112750	A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures	acx
# Why Not Slow AI Progress? ## The Broader Fossil Fuel Community Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader “fossil fuel community”. Exxon and Shell would be “fossil fuel capabilities”; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be “fossil fuel safety” - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron. This is how AI safety works now. AI capabilities - the work of researching bigger and better AI - is poorly differentiated from AI safety - the work of preventing AI from becoming dangerous. Two of the biggest AI safety teams are at DeepMind and OpenAI, ie the two biggest AI capabilities companies. Some labs straddle the line between capabilities and safety research. Probably the people at DeepMind and OpenAI think this makes sense. Building AIs and aligning AIs could be complementary goals, like building airplanes and preventing the airplanes from crashing. It sounds superficially plausible. But a lot of people in AI safety believe that unaligned AI could end the world, that we don’t know how to align AI yet, and that our best chance is to delay superintelligent AI until we do know. Actively working on advancing AI seems like the opposite of that plan. So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies. Nothing violent or illegal - doing violent illegal things is the best way to lose 100% of your support immediately. But maybe glare a little at your friend who goes into AI capabilities research, instead of getting excited about how cool their new project is. Or agitate for government regulation of AI - either because you trust the government to regulate wisely, or because you at least expect them to come up with burdensome rules that hamstring the industry. While there are salient examples of government regulatory failure, some regulations - like the EU’s ban on GMO or the US restrictions on nuclear power - have effectively stopped their respective industries. This is the most common question I get on AI safety posts: why isn’t the rationalist / EA / AI safety movement doing this more? It’s a great question, and it’s one that the movement asks itself a lot - see eg [What An Actually Pessimistic AI Containment Strategy Looks Like](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kipMvuaK3NALvFHc9/what-an-actually-pessimistic-containment-strategy-looks-like) and [Slowing Down AI Progress Is An Underexplored Alignment Strategy](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6LNvQYyNQpDQmnnux/slowing-down-ai-progress-is-an-underexplored-alignment). Still, most people aren’t doing this. Why not? ## No, We Will Not Stop Hitting Ourselves First, a history lesson: the best AI capabilities companies got started by AI safety proponents, for AI safety related reasons. DeepMind was co-founded by Shane Legg, a very early AI safety proponent who did his 2007 PhD thesis on superintelligence …and by Demis Hassabis, who has [said things like](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SbAgRYo8tkHwhd9Qx/deepmind-the-podcast-excerpts-on-agi#_Avengers_assembled__for_AI_Safety__Pause_AI_development_to_prove_things_mathematically): > Potentially. I always imagine that as we got closer to [superintelligence] , the best thing to do might be to pause the pushing of the performance of these systems so that you can analyze down to minute detail exactly and maybe even prove things mathematically about the system so that you know the limits and otherwise of the systems that you're building. At that point I think all the world's greatest minds should probably be thinking about this problem. So that was what I would be advocating to you know the Terence Tao’s of this world, the best mathematicians. Actually I've even talked to him about this—I know you're working on the Riemann hypothesis or something which is the best thing in mathematics but actually this is more pressing. Speculatively, DeepMind hoped to get all the AI talent in one place, led by safety-conscious people, so that they could double-check things at their leisure instead of everyone racing against each other to be first. I don’t know if these high ideals still hold any power; corporate parent Google has been busy [stripping them of autonomy](https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-failedto-win-ai-autonomy-from-parent-11621592951). OpenAI is the company behind GPT-3 and DALL-E. The media announced them as [Elon Musk Just Founded A New Company To Make Sure Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Destroy The World](https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-artificial-intelligence-chaired-by-elon-musk-and-sam-altman-2015-12). The same article quotes co-founder and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as saying that “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies”. OpenAI’s public statement on its own foundation said: > It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly. But they can’t use the “trying to avoid a race” argument - their creation probably started a race (against DeepMind). So what were they thinking? I still haven’t fully figured this out, but here’s Altman’s own explanation: Toby Ord (here standing in for the broader existential-risk-quantifying community) [has estimated](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/) the risk of extinction-level asteroid impacts as 0.0001% per century, and the risk of extinction from building AI too fast as 10%. So as written, this argument isn’t very good. But you could revise it to be about metaphorical “asteroids” like superplagues or nuclear war. Altman has also expressed concern about AI causing inequality, for example if rich people use it to replace all labor and reap all the gains for themselves. OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit in a way that protected against that, so maybe he thought that made it preferable to DeepMind. (As for Musk, I don’t think we need any explanation deeper than his usual pattern of doing cool-sounding things on impulse, then regretting them at leisure.) Anthropic was founded when some OpenAI safety researchers struck out on their own to create what they billed as an even-more-safety-conscious alternative. Again, the headline was [Anthropic Raises $580 Million For AI Safety And Research](https://www.ns-businesshub.com/technology/anthropic-ai-safety-research-series-b-round/) (and most of that came from rationalists and effective altruists convinced by their safety-conscious pitch). Again, their announcement included reassuring language - their president said that “We’re focusing on ensuring Anthropic has the culture and governance to continue to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems as we scale.” Clued-in people disagree about whether Anthropic has already pivoted to [building the Torment Nexus](https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=en), but it’s probably only a matter of time. Why this history lesson? Partly to highlight the depth of the AI alignment people’s involvement here. It’s not just that they’re not fighting AI companies, it’s that they keep creating them and leading investment in them. But also… ## We Need To Talk About Race The AI policy people’s big fear is a “race dynamic”. Many profit-seeking companies (or power-seeking governments) compete to be first to reach AGI. Although they might invest in some basic safety measures necessary to make AIs work at all, they would have little time to worry about longer-term or more theoretical concerns. Much more pleasant to contemplate is a single team establishing a clear lead. They could study safety at their own pace, and wouldn’t have to deploy anything until they were confident it would work. This would be a boon not only for existential-risk-prevention, but for algorithmic fairness, transparent decision-making, etc. So it would be nice if the leading teams stayed leading. Suppose that the alignment community, without thinking it over too closely, started a climate-change-style campaign to shame AI capabilities companies. This would disproportionately harm the companies most capable of feeling shame. Right now, that’s DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic - the companies that have AI safety as part of their culture, cross-pollinate with AI safety proponents, and take our arguments seriously. If all these places slowed down - either because their leadership saw the light, or because their employees grumbled and quit - that would hand the technological lead to the people just behind them - like Facebook and Salesforce - who care less about safety. So which would we prefer? OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040? Or Facebook gets superintelligence in 2044? If OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040, they’ll probably be willing to try whatever half-baked alignment measures researchers have figured out by then, even if that adds time and expense. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg [says that](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-doomsday-ai-predictions-are-irresponsible.html) AI will be fine and that warning people about existential risk is “irresponsible”. (of course, 2040 and 2044 are made-up numbers. Maybe the real numbers are 2030 vs. 2060, and those extra thirty years would mean an alignment technology revolution so comprehensive that even skeptics would pay attention…) ## Xi-Risks Maybe we need to think bigger. Might we be able to get the government to regulate AI so heavily that it slows down all research? Sometime before AI becomes an existential risk, things will get really crazy, and there might be a growing constituency for doing something, So maybe alignment proponents could join a coalition to slow AI. We would have to wrangle algorithmic fairness proponents, anti-tech conservatives, organized labor, and anti-surveillance civil libertarians into the same tent, but “politics makes strange bedfellows”. As far as I know [these people](https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/) aren’t part of our conspiracy, and have reached this level of stylishness and correctness entirely on their own. (h/t [80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-policy-guide/)) Or: what if we got the companies themselves on board? Big Pharma has a symbiotic relationship with the FDA; the biggest corporations hire lobbyists and giant legal departments, then use the government to crush less-savvy startup competitors. Regulations that boiled down to “only these three big tech companies can research AGI, and they have to do it really slowly and carefully” would satisfy the alignment community and delight the three big tech companies. As a sort-of-libertarian, I hate this; as a sort-of-utilitarian, if that’s what it takes then I will swallow my pride and go along. Or: what about limits on something other than research? AIs need lots of training data (in some cases, the entire Internet). Whenever I post an article here, it’s going into some dataset that will one day help an AI write better toothpaste ads. What if I don’t want it to do that? Privacy advocates are already asking tough questions about data ownership; these kinds of rules could slow AI research without having to attack companies directly. As a sort of libertarian, I hate blah blah blah same story. Or what about standards? Government-backed institutions like NIST and IEEE play a role in standardizing tech in ways that sometimes actually help the tech sector advance more productively in unison, e.g., [cryptography standards](https://www.nist.gov/cryptography) and [wifi standards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11). Sometimes standards set by one government have caught on and become international defaults. So safety standards might be an area where government backing could actually speed up the deployment of actually-safe-and-useful AI products. The biggest problem is China. US regulations don’t affect China. China says that AI leadership is a cornerstone of their national security - both as a massive boon to their surveillance state, and because it would boost their national pride if they could beat America in something so cutting-edge. So the real question is: which would we prefer? OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040? Or Facebook gets superintelligence in 2044? Or China gets superintelligence in 2048? Might we be able to strike an agreement with China on AI, much as countries have previously made arms control or climate change agreements? This is . . . not technically prevented by the laws of physics, but it sounds really hard. When I bring this challenge up with AI policy people, they ask “Harder than the technical AI alignment problem?” Okay, fine, you win this one. ## Cooperate / Defect? Another way to think about this question is: right now there’s a sort of alliance between the capabilities companies and the alignment community. Should we keep it, or turn against them when they least expect? The argument for keeping: the capabilities companies have been very nice to us. Many have AI safety teams. These aren’t just window-dressing. They do good work. The companies fund them well and give them access to the latest models, because the companies like AI safety. If AI safety declares war on AI capabilities, maybe we lose all these things. But also: AI safety needs AI researchers. Most AI researchers who aren’t already in AI safety are undergrads, or grad students, or academics, or on open-source projects. Right now these people are neutral-to-positive about safety. If we declared war on AI companies - tried as hard as possible to prevent AI research - that might tank our reputation among AI researchers, who generally like AI research. What if they started thinking of us the way that Texas oilmen think of environmentalists - as a hostile faction trying to destroy their way of life? Maybe we could still convert a few to safety research, but we would be facing stronger headwinds. And also: maybe the companies will work with us on stopgap solutions. I know one team trying to get everyone to agree to a common safety policy around publishing potentially dangerous results. The companies are hearing them out. If we need regulation, and want to go the “company-approved regulatory capture” route, we can work with the companies to help draft it. Demis Hassabis sometimes says that he might slow DeepMind down once they get close to superintelligence; maybe other friendly companies can be convinced to work with him on that. Demis Hassabis is also the [former world champion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis#Games) of the game Diplomacy, which means that trying to backstab him would be like trying to out-shoot Steph Curry. The argument for betraying: pretty slim, actually. We would damage the companies closest to us, have a harder time damaging companies further away, and lose all of the advantages above. ## The Plan Is To Come Up With A Plan There’s a growing field called AI policy, typified by eg the Oxford-based [Center For The Governance Of AI](https://www.governance.ai/), working on plans for these questions. Some of the people involved are great, and many are brilliant academics or hard-working civil servants. But whenever I ask them what the plan is, they say things like “I think somebody else is working on the plan,” or “Maybe the plan is a secret.” They have a really tough job, there are lots of reasons to be tight-lipped, and I respect everything they do - but I don’t get the sense that this is a field with many breakthroughs to show. Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic and used to be Head of Policy at OpenAI. His perspective is somewhat different than mine, but he is very knowledgeable and I recommend his thread (which you can read by clicking on the tweet above). No, there are not 1,602 spicy takes in the thread. The fact that an AI policy leader didn’t consider that his plan would become unworkable in an extreme scenario is probably a metaphor for something. But if this interests you, you can read [80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy](https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-policy-guide/) and maybe get involved. If you ever figure out the plan, let me know. Until then, we’re all just happy members of the Broader Fossil Fuel Community.	Scott Alexander	64440194	Why Not Slow AI Progress?	acx
# Open Thread 236 1: Lots of people have asked for my thoughts on [CFTC shutting down PredictIt](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8567-22). I’ll write something on this next Monday, but for now I tentatively agree the conclusions of [this Karlstack article](https://karlstack.substack.com/p/a-textbook-case-of-regulatory-capture). Short version: the guy on Twitter claiming responsibility is probably a troll; more likely this is Kalshi/Sequoia Capital weaponizing the CFTC to shut down competitors and get a monopoly. PredictIt’s parent group has a link to contact your member of Congress and other relevant officials [here](https://predictit.ac360.aristotleactioncenter.com/#/searchForMe), but the website doesn’t work very well and I doubt the political campaign will work much better. 2: Comments of the week: John Schilling [tries to calculate](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8113890) the cost of building Neom, and comes up with an optimistic estimate of $4 trillion (compared to its $0.5-1 trillion budget). But he uses the cost of WTC1 as a base; this is unfair because it’s one of the costliest skyscrapers ever. If we use the similarly-sized Princess Tower in Dubai, one of the cheapest, we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale, and ??? afterwards (potentially much less because they can mass produce, or potentially much more because they exhaust the global concrete market). But the $1 trillion Neom budget also has to cover the Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry, the giant ski resort, etc, so it’s still a long shot. Also, Reader [talks about his experience](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8112867) working in one of the companies that designed Neom. And Honourary [notes that](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8118263) the Saudis are big investors in hyperloops, and a working hyperloop could make good on Neom’s otherwise-hyperbolic transportation claims. Maybe one way to think about Neom is as the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops, in the same way that Levittown was the first city designed from the ground up around cars. This makes me update very slightly towards plausibility - but it’s still based around combining ~5 things that have never been tried before, and hoping none of them goes wrong or exceeds projected costs. 3: Michael Trazzi has [a YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/TheInsideView) where he interviews people about AI (including alignment). Pretty high context, but if you know the basics it’s a good way to keep abreast of the latest developments. I especially recommend [the episode with Connor Leahy](https://www.youtube.com/c/TheInsideView).	Scott Alexander	67643762	Open Thread 236	acx
# Your Book Review: Exhaustion [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] I. Imagine you find yourself, over the course of a few weeks or months, becoming steadily more tired. You’re not doing any more work or other activities than you usually do, but nonetheless you find that you are able to do less and less before running out of energy. You start to pick and choose your battles – do I really feel up to this gym session? Do I really need to go to this work function? – and little by little your world begins to shrink. The sense of exhaustion becomes more pervasive, and occurs from when you wake up until you go to sleep. Any exertion leads to you paying for it in a general worsening of exhaustion and malaise that makes you question whether the activity was worth it. Eventually, you learn your lesson and withdraw from even the most basic activities – sometimes you don’t get out of bed, have trouble feeding yourself, and find your thinking has become clouded and sluggish ( a phenomenon sometimes called ‘brain fog’). Sleep becomes difficult, activities become less enjoyable, and you find that you are restless and anxious despite spending almost all your time attempting to rest. As Anna Schaffner explains it in Exhaustion: A History, you will find yourself in good company. The book has testimony from Charles Darwin, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann, amongst others, giving accounts of their chronic pathological exhaustion. While exhaustion and tiredness are universal after we’ve exerted ourselves, and resolves with rest, Schaffner is concerned here with chronic, pathological fatigue and weariness. This type of exhaustion isn’t just tiredness; aside from the ‘brain fog’ already mentioned, people describe hypersensitivity to light and noise, mood changes, diffuse or changing aches and pains, or fluctuating neurological or bowel symptoms. When the exhaustion is prominent and other easily-diagnosed conditions are excluded, individuals today will receive a diagnosis of something that is variously called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disorder ([SEID](https://www.nap.edu/download/19012)); or whatever unsatisfactory name is currently in fashion. As Schaffner does, I will use Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/CFS in this review, more because of its ubiquity and that it is agnostic to potential causes of the condition (SEID is the more recent term, but it’s too early to say whether it is going to catch on). I read this book to try to make sense of CFS and its related conditions, and the book in my opinion begins to come together as it moves into the modern conceptions of exhaustion, but it is important to first follow Schaffner as she traces the explanatory models used in science and culture throughout Western history – there are only passing mentions in the book about Eastern conceptions of this condition, although it seems as though it is [almost as common](https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-020-02269-0#Tab1) in Asian countries as in the West, where versions of neurasthenia are still diagnosed in China (shenjing shuairou; 神经衰弱) and Japan (shinkeisuijaku; 神経衰弱) and elsewhere. II. Schaffner’s book opens with an account of Pope Benedict XVI’s renunciation of his office in 2013. She dwells on his broken and hunched figure, his self-description of his weariness and moral injury (the Church, then and now, plagued by financial and sexual abuse scandals), and his stated desire to retire and play the piano: > It costs the old man all his energy to perform the next task. He clears his throat and, slowly, like an ancient turtle, raises his head. He spreads his arms and blesses the crowd. Then, in a grating, broken voice, he begins to say his farewells… He spoke of the burden of an office too heavy for him; he said the world was changing and doing so at a pace with which he could not keep up. While this pronouncement was shocking, it was not completely unprecedented. His words and demeanour reflected a previous papal renunciation, that of Celestine V in 1294; this Pope had left the job after only around five months, citing physical and mental exhaustion, and much of the language the two pontiffs used was remarkably similar (although in Celestine’s case, there is some concern that his successor Boniface VIII was [nudging him towards the door](https://library.law.yale.edu/news/papal-resignations-case-celestine-v)). And it becomes apparent through Schaffner’s selection of religious works, medical texts, novels and poetry, that throughout history the way people describe their malaise has been remarkably consistent (inasmuch as such a wide range of phenomena lumped into the same basket can be consistent). The things that have changed over the course of history, she argues, are the explanations we give for the phenomenon – who or what is to blame and how we construct a narrative both for the development of exhaustion, but also hopefully how recovery might occur. She opens her account with Galen’s humoral theory, where exhaustion was linked closely with melancholia, that famous over-production of black bile. I won’t detail Galen’s theories here; instead, I’ll point you towards last year’s ACX review contest entry of [On the Natural Faculties](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties?s=r). But it is worth noting here that many of the symptoms Galen describes are familiar to us – I described some of them earlier, but there are prominent features of not only what we would now call CFS but also what we have now carved off into the related concept of depression. The link between CFS and psychological distress is fraught with controversy, and we’ll deal with it more later on. After dispensing with the humours, Schaffner moves on to the moralistic/religious development of acedia, the forerunner of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. It was first described by early Christian writers in monasteries such as John Cassian (circa 425CE), who described monks becoming agitated, unable to relax, but also anergic and unable to attend to their usual devotions or tasks until: > ...worn out by the spirit of accidie, as by some strong battering ram, [the victim] either learns to sink into slumber, or, driven out from the confinement of its cell, accustoms itself to seek for consolation under these attacks in visiting some brother, only to be afterwards weakened the more by this remedy which it seeks for the present. So here we see one of the first accounts of one of the hallmark symptoms of CFS, what we now call post-exertional malaise. You do something to break the monotony of rest, but after exerting yourself you feel significantly worse. Occurring as it did in monastic orders, the explanation for acedia was moral in nature – it was due to weak willpower or a moral defect. Schaffner, quoting Thomas Aquinas: > Apathy [acedia] is a sort of depression which stops us doing anything, a weariness with work, a torpor of spirit which delays getting down to anything good. Spiritual goods are real goods, and taking no joy in them is bad in itself; and it is bad in its effects if it so depresses a man as to keep him back from good works. Acedia then is doubly wrong. Sadness as such merits neither praise nor blame; what we praise is a controlled sadness at evil, what we blame is sadness that is either uncontrolled or is sad about good. …which is something that might reasonably be referred to today as victim-blaming. As for the cures, increased focus on work and preventing idle time was felt to be the remedy, something that was felt to be both practically and spiritually a good path to follow out of the malaise. Schaffner then takes the short intellectual journey from sin to sexuality via a slightly weird but interesting digression into vampires. Those retiring women who are pale and lack energy aren’t simply tired: their life force is being sucked out of them! While interesting, and giving her a chance to shoehorn in some examples of what I presume was part of her previous book on sexology and perversion in the 19th century (which I haven’t read, but now kind of want to), it doesn’t really add much to the overall picture we are concerned with here. Besides, around this period however the major concern was more earthly; sins such as masturbation (Aquinas famously ranked this quite highly amongst the sexual sins) had now become terrifying causes of mental and physical turmoil in tracts such as [Onania: or, the heinous sin of self-pollution and all its frightful consequences (in both sexes) considered with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/pdf/b20442348) (1756). People began to attribute a number of symptoms of exhaustion to the practice, which was felt to be exploding in popularity (sorry) due to the excess of leisure time and the availability of printed smut. Tissot, the author of a later screed on masturbation, enumerates a number of frightening outcomes: > … loss of life energy, weakness and exhaustion, but also convulsions, sleeplessness, paleness, pimples, consumption, diarrhoea, the weakening of intellectual powers, bad digestion, vomiting, anguish, paralysis, spasms, melancholy, catalepsy, epilepsy, imbecility, loss of sensation, disorders of the urinary system and even death. This is particularly pronounced in men, for whom the loss of seminal fluid is allegedly forty times more damaging to vital energy than losing an equivalent amount of blood. Semen-accounting practices aside, the main point is that here we begin to find the tying together of Galen’s humoral imbalances with the idea of a loss of vital energy that cannot be easily replaced. In Schaffner’s account, as technology moved on into the industrial era, we start to see new ideas from science being put into service to explain exhaustion, and many of these theories concerned the expenditure or transfer of finite amounts of energy and a subsequent rest state or energy deficit: that is, we begin to use things up and can’t replenish them. These ideas included the thermodynamic idea of entropy, discoveries in the electrical nature of nerve conduction, and the ideas of genetic and mental degeneration. This led to the development in the 19th century of a new, vaguely defined illness known as neurasthenia. It was, in the conception of the time, an illness of overworked and played out nerves due to their overstimulation at the hands of industrialisation and modern society. A neat rhetorical trick was employed by physicians at the time, who claimed that sensitive and creative people doing brain work were more susceptible than those in the working classes. This is an important change, as it begins the move away from the moralistic conception of exhaustion and produces a blame-free, stigma-free conception of an illness which has a tendency to strike the special and the smart. It is no coincidence that many of the writers and thinkers I mentioned earlier that suffered from exhaustion (James, Woolf, Mann, Wilde et al) are all concentrated in this era – they all were diagnosed with neurasthenia. As Darwin announces and elaborates on the theory of evolution, more attention is paid to the idea of inherited weaknesses in nerves, culminating in cultural accounts like Huysmans’s [Á rebours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_rebours) [(](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_rebours)[Against Nature)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_rebours), which described the final, exhausted, idle throes of generations of inbreeding in the person of a decadent, hypersensitive and exhausted noble recluse. If you’re a doctor in this period, the other benefit of the reformulation of exhaustion into neurasthenia is that it manifests in those who are rich enough to pay your fee, and simultaneously makes the physician indispensable. So, we begin to see in the writings of physicians, psychiatrists and novelists the two opposing views of how this condition is to be best treated. On one side, we have rest; the other, activity. Improvised rest cures were followed by Darwin (who could only intermittently attend to work on the Beagle and had regular daily periods of repose at home throughout his life, interspersed with hydrotherapy at various spas), with more prescriptive programmes followed by Virginia Woolf, who followed a ‘rest cure’ for women designed by an American physician named Silas Mitchell. The rest cure was premised on unambiguous misogyny: the idea that women were overstimulated by moving outside the home and doing things that they were unsuited for, like thinking and writing, were wearing out their nerves and depleting their blood of nutrients. Thus, the home (and bed)-bound, low-stimulus, rest cure, that also focused on rapid weight gain (“to gain in fat is nearly always to gain in blood”). On the other hand, we have the exhortation to activity, which as we’ve seen has been a suggestion from at least the days of monks with acedia, but is now in the West explicitly linked with the co-called Protestant work ethic, with work and its resultant energy and meaning being thought of as a necessary good (Max Weber, the sociologist who coined the term, was also diagnosed with neurasthenia – it seems a wonder anything intellectual got done during this period). There’s a gender bias here; while women had the rest cure, men diagnosed in the late 19th Century might be prescribed a “[West Cure](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/01/go-rest)” where they might, in Mitchell’s words, “engage in a sturdy contest with Nature” by spending time with cowboys and sleeping rough – something [Billy Crystal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4k7AK6oK9U) also found helpful. III. The twentieth century was an era of rapid advances in Western medicine, particularly in virology and immunology. New vaccinations for illnesses were developed, antibiotics and antivirals became available, surgical techniques and safety advanced, the fatal childhood illness of diabetes was turned into a chronic adult illness by insulin, cancers were cured, and medicine discovered the randomised control trial and began lambasting all other health disciplines for not upholding the fine traditions of evidence-based medicine that they had only just invented. At the same time, there was an increasing recognition of, and alarm about, the environmental effects of industrialisation – toxic chemicals, greenhouse gases, nuclear and other electromagnetic radiation, noise, antibiotics and hormones in our food, genetic modification of crops, and many others. So it is not surprising that, just as contemporary theology, culture or science has been harnessed into previous explanations of exhaustion and its related symptoms, new explanations have been developed that lean on the anxieties of our times. The major differences in the more modern conception of exhaustion is the way affected individuals seek out biomedical explanations, but do so in the face of a medical establishment that looks at these explanations as incomplete or wrong. Schaffner gives a reasonable accounting of the way CFS was characterised – post-polio fatigue being noticed in the 1950s, the discovery of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) in the 1960s and the initial thoughts that EBV was a robust cause of CFS, the subsequent discovery that about [95% of the population has had EBV](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09049-x) so this explanation couldn’t be complete, followed by classification of the syndrome settling into a cause-agnostic set of symptoms. This, however, didn’t stop [the fighting](https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1559.short). Essentially the conflict lines up between three rough groups. The first is the patient advocacy groups, who are made up of a group of sufferers of the condition and (some of) of their carers and family, who firmly believe that there is an undiscovered viral or autoimmune condition that not only caused their condition but continued to exert its effects in their ongoing symptoms. It’s not simply that they had an infection and are now deconditioned or slow to recover; it’s that the condition was never properly diagnosed, is continuing to account for their ongoing exhaustion, and could people please stop referring them to psychiatrists. This group is heterogeneous but on the whole prefers names for the condition that imply an ongoing disease process, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis. Opposite them are a mix of (some of) the sufferer’s frustrated partners, carers and family members who have difficulty with living with someone who has chronic disability. This can include the individual’s doctor, who sometimes deals with chronicity [poorly](https://explosm.net/comics/rob-cough). The fringes of this group start muttering darkly about mass psychogenic illnesses and fads, access to insurance and compensation, and prefer to use the term chronic fatigue syndrome but with audible air quotes. You may think this is strawmanning the anti-CFS group, but Schaffner has the medical/psychiatric historian Edward Shorter to set us straight: > The Saga of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome represents a kind of cautionary tale for those doctors who lose sight of the scientific underpinning of medicine, and for those patients who lose their good sense in the media-spawned ‘disease of the month’ clamor that poisons the doctor-patient relationship… A whole subculture of chronic fatigue has arisen in which those patients too tired to walk give each other hints about how to handle a wheelchair and exchange notes about how to secure disability payments from the Government or from their insurance companies. The medical consensus about CFS is different from both of these extremes, with the current conception being that there are a number of different pathways into the condition. Some of them are likely triggered by the immunological response to viral infections, with COVID being the most recent example of one of these (hence ‘Long COVID’). But, because not everyone who gets COVID/EBV/whatever develops this syndrome, something else needs to be going on. That something, in the case of COVID, could be a [particular immunological profile](https://kirby.unsw.edu.au/news/what-causes-long-covid-symptoms-clues-under-microscope) leading to some ongoing inflammatory response, but this hasn’t been established for other viruses. Not to mention that when people actually try to characterise whatever this immunological response might be, the state of the evidence appears to be ‘[cytokines, natural killer cells, T-calls something something’](https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/about/possible-causes.html). And those who get CFS also often have many of the same risk factors we find predisposing to mental illness – childhood trauma, or pre-existing anxiety or depression. This might make people vulnerable to developing some maladaptive thoughts about their convalescence that can in turn lead to longer-lasting deficits. CFS researcher Simon Wesseley: > We suggest that agents such as EBV or viral meningitis can lead to the experience of abnormal symptoms, such as fatigue, malaise and myalgia. However, the transition from symptoms to disability may be more closely linked to cognitive and behavioural factors. Hence interventions such as CBT designed to reduce disability and counteract maladaptive coping strategies ought to be more effective in reducing disability than symptoms. The evidence so far supports this model – many patients do show considerable improvements in disability and everyday functioning, but are not rendered symptom-free by cognitive or behavioural interventions. Wesseley is right about the evidence: there is some evidence for [CBT](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001027.pub2/full?highlightAbstract=fatigue%7Cfatigu%7Cchronic) and [graded exercise](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD003200.pub8/full?highlightAbstract=fatigue%7Cfatigu%7Cchronic), with Wesseley himself providing one study into the latter – a study that led to him getting [death threats](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/aug/21/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-myalgic-encephalomyelitis) from patient groups. Why the death threats? The sense of intense anger and distress at the mere whiff of a non-biological component of the explanation, or a non-biological treatment, is due in part to the long process people go through to get to a diagnosis. CFS is a condition that assumes the trappings of biomedical Western medicine, but suffers from the inconvenient lack of concrete blood and X-ray results that would convince biomedically-minded doctors to take it seriously. Sufferers describe going from doctor to doctor, receiving greater or lesser doses of Shorter-style hostility or incomprehension, sometimes only coming across the diagnosis online. Having been told, explicitly or implicitly, that “it’s all in your head”, the natural response is to kick as hard as possible in the other direction. Psychiatrists are adept at answering the question “Is it real, or is it all in my head?” with “Yes”. Unfortunately, much of our folk psychology is more Cartesian than this, and the idea that only biomedical symptoms are real is well entrenched with a large chunk of the population, including many doctors. And, as Schaffner points out, if you’re not fighting your attitudes towards disease and your depression, you’re fighting modernity and an unchangeable immune system, and in that fight you’re always going to feel overmatched. IV. One of Schaffer’s main points is that, despite the shift in narratives about how we explain exhaustion to ourselves, each age has the tendency to link it both to sociocultural critiques of current society (as compared to a mythologised more natural, simpler age) and to utilise the latest explanatory models current in culture or science at the time. Thus, in medieval times we get acedia, the sign of a more sinful and corrupt decline in Christian practice; from the late Baroque period and on into the Victorian era there are a lot of discussions about sexual practices being the culprit in this new age of licentiousness; in the late 19th century we find neurasthenia due to the idea of nervous energy being prematurely used up by a combination of the demands of an industrialised world and the degeneration of dissolute bloodlines; or more recently a mystery virus, modern toxin or immunological disorder that relies on the edifice of scientific medicine to diagnose, an edifice that is populated by a group of clinicians and researchers who are largely sceptical of (or even hostile to) this explanation. But what is chronic fatigue syndrome really? Schaffner’s view is that it’s the newest explanation for an age-old set of linked experiences that people have suffered and written about for thousands of years. I agree with this as far as it goes, but this doesn’t mean that current conceptions of the condition are equivalent to those seen in the past – our advancing knowledge of the immunology, virology and the links between mind and body should count for something, otherwise we are just telling new stories about illness that are objectively worse because they don’t even have any sexy vampires. But it is clear that people make different meanings of their suffering, and focus on different things when they report it. Classical melancholic depression, for instance, also features lack of energy, appetite and sensory changes alongside the low mood and feelings of guilt and suicidality. Are we simply seeing an artificial divide between people with prominent fatigue who receive or cling to a biological explanation (CFS sufferers) vs people who receive or cling to a psychological explanation (depression sufferers)? Shorter would have us think so, and has thrown in some accusations of malingering in the CFS group for good measure. But most psychiatrists would still class melancholia and CFS as two different conditions. And to complicate things further there is likely to be overlap, as chronic disability makes you depressed, and severe depression leads to you becoming physically deconditioned. There is some hint, though, that CFS is something that is a subset of a wider group of other contested disorders, separated only by the explanation that sufferers prefer. When people have similar sets of non-specific symptoms, and they attribute them to [electromagnetic sensitivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity), [Chronic Lyme Disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease) occurring in countries with and without Borrelia-carrying ticks(but also, [sexism](https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/the-science-isnt-settled-on-chronic-lyme.html)), [household chemicals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_chemical_sensitivity), or [Communist death rays](https://slate.com/technology/2022/02/havana-syndrome-health-weapon-functional-neurological-disorder.html), then you have to conclude that there is a lot we don’t know about human energy and its lack. Would I recommend this book? Yes - it covers a lot of ground, including several aspects I’ve barely touched on here as I raced towards a discussion of modern CFS. Schaffner riffs on some other culprits including Saturn and other astrological bodies, exhaustion as a critique of capitalism in literary works, and includes a discussion of modern workplace burnout (which is what the ‘special and smart person’ humblebrag elements of neurasthenia appear to have evolved into). The book isn’t perfect – some of her literary examples seem a bit stretched (there’s an extended discussion of Jason and the Argonauts which conflates despair and exhaustion, as well as an off-base interpretation of Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia), there’s a chapter-long engagement with Freud’s idea of the death drive that seems to only tangentially touch on exhaustion, and she relies on some oversimplified psychiatric models of depression ([not as simple as serotonin deficiency](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471964/)). Her conclusion manages to weave in Pope Francis, because apparently when you start a book with a Pope you need to finish with one, but also touches on the idea of exhaustion of natural resources, climate change and the vagaries of capitalism to create an idea that maybe, after a succession of periods in which everyone thought their age was the most draining, perhaps we are indeed the ones with the best reasons to be exhausted.	Scott Alexander	67331648	Your Book Review: Exhaustion	acx
# Absurdity Bias, Neom Edition Alexandros M [expresses concern](https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1554756886057979904) about my post [on Neom](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122). My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that’s absurd! But [isn’t the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/absurdity-heuristic)? Didn’t lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don’t I specifically believe in things many people have found self-evidently absurd (eg the multiverse, AI risk)? Shouldn’t I be more careful about “this sounds silly to me, so I’m going to make fun of it”? Can I convince you to [read the sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/)? There are some real underappreciated classics. (excerpt edited to remove examples that someone would misinterpret and start a flame war over) Here’s a possible argument why not: everything has to bottom out in absurdity arguments at some level or another. Suppose I carefully calculated that, with modern construction techniques, building Neom would cost 10x more than its allotted budget. This argument contains an implied premise: “and the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else”. How do we know the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else? The argument itself doesn’t prove this; it’s just left as too absurd to need justification. Suppose I did want to address this objection. For example, I carefully researched existing construction projects in Saudi Arabia, checked how cheap they were, calculated how much they could cut costs using every trick available to them, and found it was less than 10x? My argument still contains the implied premise “there’s no Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world”. But this is another absurdity heuristic - I have no argument beyond that such a conspiracy would be absurd. I might eventually be able to come up with an argument supporting this, but that argument, too, would have implied premises depending on absurdity arguments. So how far down this chain should I go? One plausible answer is “just stop at the first level where your interlocutors accept your absurdity argument”. Anyone here think Neom’s a good idea? No? Even Alexandros agrees it probably won’t work. So maybe this is the right level of absurdity. If I was pitching my post towards people who mostly thought Neom was a good idea, then I might try showing that it would cost 10x more than its expected budget, and see whether they agreed with me that Saudis being able to construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else was absurd. If they did agree with me, then I’ve hit the right level of argument. And if they agree with me right away, before I make any careful calculations, then it was fine for me to just point to it and gesture “That’s absurd!” I think this is basically the right answer for communications questions, like how to structure a blog post. When I criticize communicators for relying on the absurdity heuristic too much, it’s because they’re claiming to adjudicate a question with people on both sides, but then retreating to absurdity instead. When I was young a friend recommended me a pseudoscience book on ESP, with lots of pseudoscientific studies proving ESP was real. I looked for skeptical rebuttals, and they were all “Ha ha! ESP? That’s absurd, you morons!” These people were just clogging up Google search results that could have been giving me real arguments. But if nobody has ever heard of Neom, and I expect my readers to immediately agree that Neom is absurd, then it’s fine (in a post describing Neom rather than debating it) to stop at the first level. (I do worry that it might be creating an echo chamber; people start out thinking Neom is a bad idea for the obvious reasons, then read my post and think “and ACX also thinks it’s a bad idea” is [additional evidence](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work); I think my obligation here is to not exaggerate the amount of thought that went into my assessment, which I hope I didn’t.) But the absurdity bias isn’t just about communication. What about when I’m thinking things through in my head, alone? I’m still going to be asking questions like “is Neom possible?” and having to decide what level of argument to stop at. To put it another way: which of your assumptions do you accept vs. question? Question none of your assumptions, and you’re a closed-minded bigot. Question all of your assumptions, and you get stuck in an [infinite regress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles). The only way to escape (outside of a formal system with official axioms) is to just trust your own intuitive judgment at some point. So maybe you should just start out doing that. Except that some people seem to actually be doing something wrong. The guy who hears about evolution and says “I know that monkeys can’t turn into humans, this is so absurd that I don’t even have to think about the question any further” is doing something wrong. How do you avoid being that guy? Some people try to dodge the question and say that all rationality is basically a social process. Maybe on my own, I will naturally stop at whatever level seems self-evident to me. Then other people might challenge me, and I can reassess. But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are. It’s like answering a child’s question about how to do a math problem with “ask a grown-up”. A coward’s way out! Eliezer Yudkowsky gives his answer [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P792Z4QA9dzcLdKkE/absurdity-heuristic-absurdity-bias): > I can think of three major circumstances where the [useful] absurdity heuristic gives rise to a [bad] absurdity bias: > > The first case is when we have [information about underlying laws which should override surface reasoning](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/io/is_molecular_nanotechnology_scientific/). If you know why most objects fall, and you can calculate how fast they fall, then your calculation that a helium balloon should rise at such-and-such a rate, ought to strictly override the absurdity of an object falling upward. If you can do deep calculations, you have no need for qualitative surface reasoning. But we may find it hard to attend to mere calculations in the face of surface absurdity, until we see the balloon rise. > > (In 1913, Lee de Forest was accused of [fraud](http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.html#loc038) for selling stock in an impossible endeavor, the Radio Telephone Company: "De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public...has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company...") > > The second case is a generalization of the first - attending to surface absurdity in the face of abstract information that ought to override it. If people cannot accept that [studies show that marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/medicine_as_sca.html), because it seems absurd - violating the surface rule that "medicine cures" - then I would call this "absurdity bias". There are many reasons that people may fail to attend to abstract information or integrate it incorrectly. I think it worth distinguishing cases where the failure arises from absurdity detectors going off. > > The third case is when the absurdity heuristic simply doesn't work - the process is not stable in its surface properties over the range of extrapolation - and yet people use it anyway. [The future is usually "absurd"](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/) - it is unstable in its surface rules over fifty-year intervals. > > This doesn't mean that anything can happen. Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been "absurd" by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one - to the best of our knowledge - violated the [law of conservation of energy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy), which was known in 1850. Reality is not up for grabs; it works by rules even more precise than the ones we believe in instinctively. > > The point is not that you can say anything you like about the future and no one can contradict you; but, rather, that the particular practice of crying "Absurd!" has historically been an extremely poor heuristic for predicting the future. Over the last few centuries, the absurdity heuristic has done worse than maximum entropy - ruled out the actual outcomes as being [far too absurd to be considered](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/). You would have been better off saying "I don't know". This is all true as far as it goes, but it’s still just rules for the rare situations when your intuitive judgments of absurdity are contradicted by clear facts that someone else is handing you on a silver platter. But how do you, pondering a question on your own, know when to stop because a line of argument strikes you as absurd, vs. to stick around and gather more facts and see whether your first impressions were accurate? I don’t have a great answer here, but here are some parts of a mediocre answer: * [Calibration training](https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/10/16/practice-making-accurate-predictions-with-our-new-tool). Make predictions so you know how often you’re right vs. wrong about things. If the things you say only have a 1% chance of happening happen a third of the time, you know you’re stopping too soon when you make absurdity arguments. * Do the social epistemology thing, regardless of whether or not it’s a coward’s way out. Honestly, someone who is able to re-examine their absurdity heuristics after someone else they trust asks them to and hands them the facts on a silver platter - is still doing better than 99.9% of people in the world. * Maybe, every so often, do a deep dive into fact-checking something, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s true. Maybe if everybody does this, then someone will (by coincidence) catch the false absurdities, and then the social epistemology thing can work. * Examine why a belief has even come to your attention in the first place. If you inexplicably decide to investigate the possibility that a random number between one and a million will come up as 282,058, then you can dismiss it with little thought, because you had no reason to believe it in the first place. The only reason “Neom is possible” deserves scrutiny is because the Saudi government claims that it is; in order to dismiss it as absurd, I need to explain why the Saudi government would waste $500 billion on an obviously absurd idea. This is easy: their king is a megalomaniac, plus people are afraid to voice dissent. I admit this process is pretty much the same thing as [Bulverism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism) and [bias arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), which I hate and which always fail. Too bad, there is no royal road. Sometimes there isn’t even a muddy goat path.	Scott Alexander	67070724	Absurdity Bias, Neom Edition	acx
# Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries So I hear there’s an underpopulation crisis now. I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false. The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don’t think it’s at the top of any list of things to worry about. ### 1: Declining Birth Rates Won’t Drive Humans Extinct, Come On Not only are we not going to go extinct because of underpopulation, population is going to continue to rise for the next 80 years. Although growth rate may hit zero a little after 2100, it will be centuries before the human population gets any lower than it is today - if it ever does. This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century. ### 2: Immigrant-Friendly Countries Will Keep Growing Here are [Our World In Data’s projections](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/future-population-projections-by-country?time=2020..latest) for US and UK populations: United States United Kingdom The US will grow from about 330 million people today to about 430 million in 2100; the UK from about 60 million to 80 million. Most of this growth will be immigration. Some of these immigrants will come from sub-Saharan Africa, others from countries whose populations are themselves declining (sorry, other countries). ### 3: Countries With Low Immigration Will Shrink, But Mostly Slowly Brazil, Japan, and Germany Brazil will go from 210 million today to 190 million in 2100. Germany will go from 80 million to 70 million. Japan will go from 125 million to 70 million. India and China India will go from 1.3 billion today, to a peak of 1.8 billion in 2060, before declining back to 1.6 billion in 2100. China will go from 1.4 billion today to 800 million in 2100. Aside from Japan and China, these are relatively gentle drops even over the course of a century. ### 4: Big Relative Drops Still Imply High Absolute Populations But Japan and China will drop a lot. By 2100, there will only be 800 million Chinese and 70 million Japanese. Still: in the early 1900s, America and Europe were gripped by fear of “the Yellow Peril”: what if innumerable hordes of Orientals overran the West using their limitless numbers? Chinese and Japanese people were likened to swarms of insects, or flocks of birds: so numerous that it was incomprehensible and almost obscene. At the time, there were about 500 million Chinese and 50 million Japanese. Found [here](https://twitter.com/yuanyi_z/status/1549528454152044545), captioned “I just acquired a copy of the Harvard admissions manual”. East Asia will probably be hit worst by underpopulation, with low birth rates and little immigration. But by 2100, there will still be 50% more East Asians than there were in 1920, when everyone was terrified of how many East Asians there were. Honestly, 800 million Chinese people still seems like a lot. The same is true in the West. The number of native-born white Americans is predicted to fall from 200 million to 140 million by 2100, a 30% decrease. But 140 million native-born white Americans is about as many as there were in 1965, when native-born white American Paul Ehrlich wrote Population Bomb, claiming that current populations were unsustainable and the world would collapse soon. On the way up, people were able to look at same these numbers and see them as terrifyingly high. Is there some objective standard by which we should look at them and instead find them worryingly low? ### 5: Concerns About “Underpopulation” Make More Sense As Being About Demographic Shift In high-immigration countries, declining birth rates will cause changing ethnic demographics, as native populations shrink and immigrant populations increase. I understand why people don’t want to talk about the issue this way, because if you say demographic shift is a problem, people will call you a racist conspiracy theorist. I don’t think it’s racist to care about ethnic demographic shift - I think Japan as it currently exists is not completely interchangeable with a Japan made of 1/3 ethnic Japanese people and 2/3 ethnic Kenyans. But that’s probably not a discussion people can have openly given today’s climate. So I appreciate the reasons why people would want to say things about “underpopulation” and “human extinction” instead. But technically these things are false. In low-immigration countries, ethnic demographics won’t shift, but age demographics will: since each generation is smaller than the last, there will be more old people than young people. See Section 6 below for more. ### 6. Age Pyramid Concerns Are Real, But Not Compatible With Technological Unemployment Concerns As birth rates rise, you have many hard-working young people supporting a small number of retirees. As they fall, you have fewer young people and more older people who need support. This either burdens the young, or requires cuts in support for the elderly. And yeah, to some degree this will happen. I think it will look less like an apocalypse and more like increasing effective retirement ages, but that will suck. On the other hand, this is basically a complaint about a shortage of labor. And I notice it’s weird to be worried both that the future will be racked by labor shortages, and that we’ll suffer from technological unemployment and need to worry about universal basic income. You really have to choose one or the other. I’m pretty worried about technological unemployment myself. Another way of saying “labor shortage” is “the value of labor relative to capital goes up”. Workers will be able to expect high salaries and good working conditions. Labor shortages are also periods of intense innovation for labor-saving devices (some historians blame the Industrial Revolution on unusually high wages in the England of the time). ### 7: Dysgenics Is Real But Pretty Slow Another potential demographic shift in both types of country is shift among social classes / levels of educational attainment: In general, educated people reproduce less than uneducated people (although this picks up slightly at the doctorate level). The claim isn’t that fewer people will have PhDs in the future: colleges will certainly solve that by increasing access to education and/or dumbing down requirements. It’s a dysgenic argument where we assume at any given time the people with higher degrees have on average higher genetic intelligence levels. If they’re reproducing less, the genetic intelligence level of the population will decrease. There is some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell [the people who claim it isn’t](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4914190/) have no good refutation for the common sense argument that it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense, and [have measured the effect in Iceland](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1612113114), an isolated population that it’s easy to measure genetic effects in. It seems to be a decline of about 0.3 IQ points per decade. If the American rate is close to the Icelandic one, this implies that the average US IQ in 2100 will be 97.5 by current standards, unless we get more mileage out of the Flynn Effect, in which case it might be higher (although the environmental Flynn Effect and genetic dysgenic effects seem to hit slightly different skills). I think societies are [probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/book-review-hive-mind/), so I’m not excited about this, but I don’t expect it to directly be apocalyptic. ### 8. Innovation Concerns Are Real But Probably Overwhelmed By Other Factors The more people are innovating and researching things, the faster technology advances, and the more the economy grows (I wrote a bit about this [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/)). As population growth slows, we should expect technological and economic growth to slow too. But this can’t be the whole story. After all, consider the century 1820 - 1920. It gave us the steamship, the railroad, the automobile, the factory, mass production, electricity, refrigeration, radio, the airplane, etc, etc, etc, with a population only about 10 - 20% as high as today. The effective innovating population - the number of educated people living in countries on the technological frontier - was probably an even smaller proportion. About half of these innovations came from Britain, a country with about 0.3% the current world population. So the solution is clear - just give everyone the same scientific productivity as 19th century British people, and we can cut the population by a factor of 300 without consequence! I’m joking, of course. What it actually means is that science is slowing down. I write about this phenomenon - amply described and categorized by various economists and other thinkers - [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/) - in the context of a paper finding that the number of researchers has increased by about 10x since the early 1900s, but science seems to be moving only at the same rate, or maybe even a little slower. (there might be an exception for fields of science that couldn’t have existed in the 19th and early 20th century - [see here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models?s=w) for more) My current model is that there are two trends - a trend for low-hanging fruit to get picked and science to become harder over time, and a counterbalancing trend for population increases and number of researchers per X people to increase. The studies cited there suggest that you need about a 10x researcher population increase per century to compensate for the low-hanging fruit effect - or, alternately, that absent any population increases, science will go about 10x slower each century. I’m sure this number itself isn’t the full story and it’s probably way off anyway, but I think we should expect something like this to be true. This makes me think that declining population in educated countries on the order of 30% or so isn’t that interesting in terms of innovation rate. Other factors are going to overwhelm this effect. I guess it’s still true that if innovation is destined to be only 10% of its current level in 2100, then a 30% population decline could lower that to 7%. I find it hard to worry about such a small difference, but maybe that’s a flaw in me and not in the territory. ### 9. In The Short-To-Medium Run, We’re All Dead Maybe all these arguments sound half-hearted? Like I’m conceding too much ground? Like I should still be worrying about underpopulation more than I do? Or that even if I’m right that things won’t degenerate too far by 2100, we should be thinking forward to 2200 or 2300? Fine. My real argument is that 2100 is not a real year. You make a mistake by thinking about it at all. The term “technological singularity” gets overused, but the original definition is “a point where things change so profoundly that it’s not worth speculating about what happens afterwards”. If we don’t die of something else first, there will probably be a technological singularity before 2100. The way things are looking now, it will probably involve AI somehow. If by some miracle that doesn’t happen, we’ll get one involving human genetic engineering for intelligence. I think there’s maybe a 5-10% chance we somehow manage to miss both of those entirely, but I’m not spending too many of my brain cycles worrying about this weird sliver of probability space. Metaculus predicts Artificial General Intelligence (by their specific definition, which you can [check here](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-system-is-devised/)) in 2029, and superintelligence (see definition [here](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9062/time-from-weak-agi-to-superintelligence/)) 41 months (ie 3.5 years) after that. This is why I even though I love predictions, I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the “predict what the world will be like in 2050!” contest that was going around this part of the blogosphere recently. Even 2050 is starting not to seem like a very real year. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s even odds it happens, I would just feel silly predicting something like “US politics will center around this set of issues” and then 2050 comes along and things are more like “the cloud of microscopic death robots that used to be our solar system has expanded as far as Sirius B”. Even if these trends don’t reach singularity level, they probably reach “big enough that it’s not worth speculating about underpopulation” level. Like, a 2.5 point decline in IQ could be pretty bad. But if we can’t genetic engineer superbabies with arbitrary IQs by 2100, we have failed so overwhelmingly as a civilization that we deserve whatever kind of terrible discourse our idiot grandchildren inflict on us. From Metaculus ([source](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8515/by-2050-genetic-engineering-to-raise-iq/)) And are we seriously expecting First World countries to be worrying about labor shortages by 2100? DALL-E: “A futuristic hobo looking for work in the year 2100” So to steal a turn of phrase from Andrew Ng, in this kind of situation, worrying about underpopulation in 2100 is like worrying about underpopulation on Mars. It’s too far in the future to be worth thinking about. ### Appendix: The Amish Inversion Suppose that there is a 2100 - and even a 2200, 2300, etc. What happens if we extend current trends? Answer: the Amish take over the world. The Amish have about seven children per family. Their population doubles every twenty years. This has been very consistent; the Amish never change. Relatively few Amish “defect” to regular modern society. As regular American birth rates get lower, the percent of the American population who are Amish rises. The Daily Caller has an article on how the [Amish [Are] Projected To Overtake Current US Population In 215 Years If Growth Rates Continue](https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/31/amish-population-america-growth-rates/). It predicts Amish-non-Amish parity around 2250: But in fact, the Amish will not quite be a majority of Americans in 2250, because Orthodox Jews have only-slightly-slower growth rates. ([source](https://forward.com/news/402663/orthodox-will-dominate-american-jewry-in-coming-decades-as-population/)) Assume that regular US population stabilizes at 430 million in 2100. By 2250, the population is 430 million regulars, 450 million Amish, and 100 million Orthodox Jews, for a total of about a billion people. Even this isn’t quite right, because a lot of Orthodox Jews do leave Orthodoxy, so along with those 100 million devout Orthodox there will probably be a few dozen million extra Reform Jews with a confused relationship to religion and lots of emotional baggage. It’ll be a great time for the rationalist community.	Scott Alexander	57093748	Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries	acx
# Model City Monday 8/1/22 ## Neom Neom Neom Suppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad. There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway’s solution is to invest the oil money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income. Dubai’s solution is to use the oil money to build a really impressive city, then hope that rich people (tourists, emigres, and multinational companies seeking regional hubs) will relocate there, and then they can tax those rich people. The Norwegian solution has a lot to recommend it. It’s a lot more certain: getting steady returns on capital is a solved problem in a way that development economics isn’t. And it scales better: there are a pretty limited number of rich people willing to move to new desert cities, and multinational companies only need one regional hub per region. Still, for a certain type of oil sheikh, building the world’s biggest everything has a certain unquantifiable charm. Bloomberg View has a new article on [the progress of Neom](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabia/?srnd=premium&sref=htOHjx5Y) (h/t [Marginal Revolution](https://marginalrevolution.com/page/2)), Saudi Arabia’s answer to Dubai. I hesitate to include Neom in this newsletter. It’s not really a charter city, but very much a project of the Saudi government. It is in no sense utopian or libertarian; in fact, it advertises itself as a new level of surveillance in an already-totalitarian state. Most of all, it doesn’t. make. sense. This is an insane, utterly impossible project that the Saudi government is somehow barrelling full-speed-ahead on. Take the Line: You really want to watch this video. I had read a few other articles on Neom, thought I understood what level of craziness we were talking about here - but no, this is much, much crazier. I didn’t understand the full scale until they gave their proposed dimensions: a structure 500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, and (wait for it) 170 km long. 500 meters is about the height of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the US. 170 km is about the east-west length of the Republic of Ireland. So the Saudis are going to build something . . . as tall as the World Trade Center . . . and . . . as long as . . . Ireland? That’s their plan? Yes, says the video, that is their plan. Is this just some crazy attempt to build hype, like when Elon Musk says the next Tesla definitely will have full-self-driving ability? I don’t think so. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is obsessed with Neom and very vain; I don’t think he would deliberately promise impossible things knowing that he will be embarrassed later when they don’t work out (and he says it will be done by 2030, so we’ll know the results relatively soon). Also, the government has earmarked $500 billion to $1 trillion for the project - around the GDP of Sweden - which sounds kind of like being serious. Also, they’ve already started on important Saudi construction preliminaries, like [murdering the people who previously lived in the area](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tribal-activist-reportedly-killed-protesting-saudi-neom-megacity-project). Also, they’ve already set up on-site camps for the construction workers ([source](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabia/?srnd=premium&sref=htOHjx5Y)): This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-used urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. So what is going on? After describing Neom project leader Nadhmi Al-Nasr… > Former employees say one of the chief sources of aggravation is Al-Nasr, whom they describe as having a volcanic temper. Several recall him openly berating subordinates, sometimes issuing threats unlike anything they’d experienced in their careers. In one particularly tense moment, after two e-sports companies canceled partnerships with Neom, citing human-rights concerns, Al-Nasr said he’d pull out a gun and start shooting if he wasn’t told who was to blame, according to two witnesses to the exchange. Al-Nasr disputes these accounts. “Not anyone can stand the pressure of the demands of the day, and there are people who leave because it’s more demanding than anything they have done before,” he says. …the Bloomberg article offers some tantalizing clues: > Among the misdeeds most likely to anger Al-Nasr, the former employees say, was failing to spend enough money. Three of them described Al-Nasr keeping a diagram showing which department heads were disbursing less than their budgets allowed, which the ex-staff half-seriously referred to as a “wall of shame.” Maybe if you demand grander and grander plans, and have a reputation for killing anyone who opposes you, then eventually you get a really grand plan and nobody has the guts to tell you that it’s impossible. But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed. There are reasons most cities aren’t designed as 200 meter wide, 170 km long lines; this maximizes the distance between any two points! The Saudis say they will solve this with a high-speed train, but all public transit is inherently limited in speed by the need to stop at a bunch of stations along the way. The video says that you’ll be able to go from one end of Neom to the other in 20 minutes, which suggests a 500 km/hour or 300 mile/hour train line. There are some maglevs which are almost that fast, but this only works if everyone is going nonstop from the exact westernmost point in Neom to the exact easternmost point. If you want people to only have to walk a kilometer or so to their destination, you’ll need 85 stops along the way. You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains, but you’re never going to compensate for the fact that laying your city out in a line is shooting yourself in the foot. I think maybe this is what happens to your brain when you read too many YIMBY blogs. “The only things people want out of cities are super high density and a ban on cars, right?” Dude, you are Saudi Arabia. The only two things in your country are open space and fuel. Log off Twitter, touch grass, etc. Okay, now I’m even more confused. The only advantage of having your city in a giant line is that at least it’s good for mass transit, and you are … emphasizing walkability? Also, aren’t you in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t it 130 degrees at all times? But The Line is only the beginning. They will also have a Giant Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry: Source: [Neom website](https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/oxagon) …the world’s largest ski and watersports resort, and yes we are still in Saudi Arabia, they’ll make an artificial lake and use artificial snow: Source: [Neom website](https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/trojena) …and whatever this is supposed to be: Source: [Neom website](https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/trojena) Fine! Let’s just have random stuff! Canal-pools along every street so you can swim to work! A beach made of crushed marble which will shine like silver! Whatever! If this were some billionaire’s passion project, I’d be fine with it. It would be fun to watch exactly how it failed; it would probably leave some cool ruins. Maybe after the hype died down they could try for something smaller, and it would still be pretty impressive. At least it would beat yet another megayacht. But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money. Not just renewable tax receipts, but the country’s accumulated oil windfall, just as the world tries to transition to renewable energy and the country risks never getting any oil windfall ever again. This is the money that should be going to the Saudi people having a future, and instead Mohammed bin Salman is spending it on playing some kind of demented desert version of SimCity, using a strategy that ten minutes playing actual SimCity could tell him was a bad idea. Neom represents all the worst parts of model cities. Dictators robbing the public purse to build cool monuments that make them feel special. Total lack of interest in workers, previous inhabitants, future inhabitants, or anyone except the very rich. “Sustainability”, “density”, and “liveability” as buzzwords to throw at foreign media, with no broader story for how any of this will improve the lives of real people or the cause of human freedom. I find model cities interesting and promising only insofar as I think some of them aren’t like Neom. ## Catawba Digital Economic Zone Haven’t heard much out of the crypto people recently, wonder what they’re up to: They seem to have gotten…an Indian tribe? That wasn’t on my bingo card for 2022. The Catawba Digital Economic Zone is the brainchild of Joseph McKinney (founder of the pro-charter-cities [Startup Societies Foundation](https://www.startupsocieties.com/)) and the [Catawba Nation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catawba_people) of Native Americans (a federally recognized tribe with a reservation in South Carolina). Indian tribes have regulatory independence from state governments, which some tribes have famously used to allow casinos in their territory. The Catawba are going one step further: they claim to have favorable cryptocurrency regulations which make it easier to register and operate your crypto company in Catawba territory than in the rest of the US. You can find their exact laws [here](https://zoneauthority.io/enabling-legislation/), although they are long and in legalese. [CoinDesk has an explainer of the crypto benefits](https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/13/us-tribal-nation-backed-economic-zone-passes-rules-defining-digital-assets/), which seem to focus on digital asset regulations which “integrate digital assets under existing law”, including rights around disputes and loans. They also expect upcoming laws on DAOs, stablecoin, and banking. “Native American tribes” and “cryptocurrency” were not previously two concepts I associated closely with each other. But the Catawba were [already a standout](https://www.wsj.com/articles/slice-of-profits-from-north-carolina-casino-goes-to-relatives-of-politicians-11659268801?st=2taxy1217k2guf2) for their political savvy and economic ambitions, and they seem intimately involved here; the Zone is being run by “the business branch of the Catawba Indian Nation”, the commissioners are mostly Catawba citizens and tribal elders, and there are some nice touches like financial incentives for businesses that employ Catawba citizens. I like crypto as an insurance policy against oppressive governments, but I am not very bullish about it as an industry right now. Still, I am excited about the idea of Indian reservation charter cities - either in cooperation with outsiders like McKinney, or - who knows? - as grassroots designs from the tribes themselves. Reservation charter cities wouldn’t be the biggest deal. Tribes have substantial independence from state and local governments, but not much independence from the national government, and a lot of the dysfunction that needs escaping is at the federal level. Still, there are probably some niche opportunities; see eg Squamish tribe [building skyscrapers on their land in Vancouver despite NIMBY opposition](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/03/25/how-a-canadian-indigenous-group-could-outwit-nimbys) for one example of where this sort of idea could go. ## Seasteading In Paradise [Malé](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal%C3%A9) is the capital of the Maldives, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean. It looks like this: One noticeable feature of Malé is its lack of lebensraum. Maldives is a pretty well-off country with a strong tourist industry, and lots more people would like to be nearby. What to do? You can already guess the proposed solution of [Maldives Floating City](https://maldivesfloatingcity.com/). They want a 20,000 person seastead docked ten minutes away from the 130,000 person island-capital. The Floating City will serve both tourists and local Maldivians (some of whom are getting nervous about rising sea levels, and would probably appreciate a development guaranteed to stay above water). According to the organization’s [press release](https://maldivesfloatingcity.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/PRESS-RELEASE-Ministry-of-Tourism-permits-Dutch-Docklands-Maldives-to-run-Floating-City-Development-based-on-the-Integrated-Tourism-Model.pdf), the Dutch corporate sponsor has obtained full permission to build the seastead, some test construction has already started, and full construction will begin in January. They hope to finish by 2027. Here are the inevitable pretty pictures: The layout is supposedly based on brain coral, but is this really the best way to lay design a seastead? Does this pattern really maximize the ease of getting from Point A to Point B? If you like tropical paradises and are incredibly optimistic, you can buy a house in the Floating City [here](https://maldivesfloatingcity.com/expression-of-interest/), prices seem to be $150-250K. This is not the long-awaited dream of the libertarian seastead; the whole city will be firmly anchored in Maldives, both physically and legally. But if it works, it’s a proof of concept that libertarians may be able to build on later. ## Elsewhere In Model Cities 1: Prospera now hosts the drone delivery service Aerialoop, which will eventually transport cargo from their Roatan Island hub to various outposts on the mainland; you can find more information [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Prospera/comments/w14rot/more_details_about_aerialoop_in_pr%C3%B3spera/). Their long-term plans include eventually following this up with passenger drones. And here’s some more information on [the growing drone industry in Latin America](https://www.commercialuavnews.com/drone-delivery/solving-the-middle-mile-conundrum-in-drone-deliveries). 2: Related: Prospera intern and resident George Kerpestein is [writing a Substack](https://casualrealism.substack.com/p/a-path-to-prosperity-i-the-butterfly) about his experiences there. And here is [the Prospera newsletter](http://v.marketingautomation.services/view?k=2&c=308481253&j=184356098050&l=Mzc1NDA1NTEzMDY1AQA&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sharpspring&sslid=Mzc1NDA1NTEzMDY1AQA&sseid=MzIxtTA2NjI0MwIA&jobid=00150ac7-b6ad-4465-8311-a9a50af25403). 3: Thanks to commenters last month for pointing out that Chinese cult Falun Gong has its own compound/city in upstate New York. You can read more about it [here](https://www.businessinsider.com/dragon-springs-falun-gong-upstate-new-york-compound-photos-2019-9#inside-the-compound-reports-suggest-internet-is-limited-medicine-is-barely-used-relationships-are-arranged-11): 4: [Sealand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand) is an independent nation (according to Sealand) based out of an old WWII sea fort in international waters. It is not for sale, but the Bull Sandfort is, for only £50,000. Alas, this one is firmly within British territorial waters. But it does look pretty defensible…anyway, see the listing [here](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/124641977#/?channel=RES_BUY). ## Predictions 1. In 2030, there are at least 50,000 people in whatever the Neom project has evolved into by then: 75% 2. Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1% 3. In 2030, the Trojena Ski Resort exists, an ordinary (rich) person can book a room and go skiing there, and it is at least close to as impressive as the pictures (my subjective judgment; doesn’t have to be exactly the same design): 5% 4. In 2030, Maldives Floating City is home to at least 2,000 people: 20%	Scott Alexander	64974800	Model City Monday 8/1/22	acx
# Open Thread 235 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?). In this week’s news: 1: We’ve made it through the original twelve Book Review finalists. I’m busy the next few weeks and want to keep the free Friday posts, so I’m adding four more: Exhaustion: A History, God Emperor of Dune, 1587, and Kora In Hell. I chose these through a combination of reader preference, my preference, and wanting to showcase some unusual genres of review. I realize this is annoying to other finalists who will have to wait longer for a smaller chance at a prize, so I’ll double the amount of all monetary prizes as compensation. 2: The statistics team behind [TuringElect](https://withdata.io/election/), “a new project to build Bayesian forecasts for the 2022 midterms”, is looking for a media partner. If you’re in media and you want an electoral model kind of like what 538 is doing, get in touch with them. They’ve also got interesting stuff like [this analysis of exactly when the US polarized](https://withdata.io/election/preview/). You can also email cdp49@cam.ac.uk if you’re interested in sponsoring or volunteering for related open source work. 3: Reminder: if someone here asks a question, it’s a bannable offense to comment something like “the answer to this is obvious” or “I can’t believe anyone could not know the answer” without providing the answer.	Scott Alexander	66592940	Open Thread 235	acx
# Your Book Review: Viral [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ## Introduction Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven’t been following, there’s been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. [Well-known, respected scientists](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfield-no-evidence/) began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from “definitely natural origin” to “both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated.” Viral is a deep dive into this issue from all angles, covering the basics of virology, the history and epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of scientific and governmental institutions, and various pieces of evidence for both hypotheses. It doesn’t contain any new, bombshell revelations, but it’s a neat, accessible summary of the scattered bits of information that have been uncovered since the start of the pandemic. In this review I’ll try to distill some of the most important information and discuss my own interpretation of it. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. However, many of the authors’ points (especially on technical issues) have counterpoints from other scientists who lean more heavily towards the natural origins hypothesis. So I think it’s best to include the book as part of a “package-deal” recommendation, rather than presenting it as a perfectly objective source. The last section of this review will include some more recommended sources to check out, including writing from advocates of the natural origins hypothesis with counterpoints to claims made in the book. [I’ll also link one here in case you don’t make it that far.](https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w) In my view, the book actually deals with two separate topics. The first is the object-level question – where did COVID come from? The second is the meta-level question – what can we say about the ability and willingness of different institutions to answer the question of the pandemic’s origins? These questions need to be decoupled if we’re going to answer them properly. For example, a lot of people have noticed the incompetence and untrustworthiness of various institutions during the pandemic, and concluded in a knee-jerk reaction that this confirms the lab leak hypothesis… but this is wrong. At the same time, if it turns out that COVID had a natural, non-lab origin, that would not absolve the public health officials, scientists, journalists, and tech companies who prematurely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis for unscientific reasons. ## 1. Summarizing the case for natural origins A misconception about the book is that Chan and Ridley are 100% convinced that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. This is wrong. The authors’ position is that the lab origin and natural origins hypotheses are both viable, and that neither one can be ruled out based on current evidence. The thesis of the book is not that SARS-CoV-2 definitely originated in a lab, but that the origin of the virus is unknown and warrants a thorough, open investigation. Due to their own uncertainty about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Chan and Ridley actually do a pretty good job of laying out the case for natural origins. It’s not convincing at all to hear “SARS-CoV-2 definitely had a natural origin, and anything else is just a conspiracy theory”. On the other hand, when you’re trying to weigh two legitimate, competing hypotheses, it becomes necessary to seriously consider the evidence for each one, and Chan and Ridley spend much of the book considering the evidence of natural origins. The main case for the natural origins hypothesis is that it should be our default belief, in the absence of convincing evidence otherwise. The vast majority of disease outbreaks like this, including previous coronavirus outbreaks SARS (2003) and MERS (2012), came from nature, not from a lab. So, before examining the evidence, we should begin with a strong prior in favor of natural origins. Also, the Chinese government and scientists deny lab origins of the virus. In the context of an authoritarian system this may count for very little, but it’s still some nonzero evidence in favor of natural origins. To say there was a lab origin, we would have to postulate that scientific institutions in China are lying and successfully engaged in a coverup, for which there have been no credible whistleblowers. Again, this may be entirely possible, but it still adds to the burden of proof that must be overcome by evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. However, what’s still missing is any direct evidence for an animal source of SARS-CoV-2. Chan and Ridley note that during the SARS (2003) and MERS (2012) coronavirus outbreaks, the animal sources were discovered relatively quickly. But with COVID-19, now more than 2 years into the pandemic, an animal source still has not been identified, despite the fact that we now have access to better investigative tools, like faster and cheaper genome sequencing compared to the SARS and MERS investigations. The authors steel-man one possible explanation for this lack of direct evidence that would be consistent with a zoonotic origin: illegal smuggling. They explain that if the animal source had been an illegally smuggled animal, the smugglers may have engaged in a coverup and tried to hide their tracks. Chan and Ridley spend a section of the book describing the illegal wildlife trade in China – a reminder that even if the pandemic had what we’re calling a “natural origin,” it was likely still a self-inflicted wound for humanity, and policy changes may still be needed to prevent it from happening again. As a non-fiction book on current events, an unavoidable weakness of Viral is that it does not include recent developments that have come out after the book’s publication. At least one of these developments is important enough for me to mention in this review. In February 2022, three scientific pre-prints [[1](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1), [2](https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YkUcWW7MIb1), [3](https://zenodo.org/record/6291628#.YkUcO27MIb0)] were released, related to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Huanan seafood market in the early stage of the pandemic. The Huanan seafood market, located in Wuhan, is thought by natural origins proponents to have been the source of the first zoonotic spillover ([or possibly, two separate spillovers](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00584-8)) into humans. Advocates of this hypothesis have taken these pre-prints as further confirmation of a zoonotic origin in the market. However, proponents of the lab leak hypothesis have pointed out that they never denied that an early superspreader event occurred in the market – they just think the virus was brought there by an infected human, and spread to others in the crowded and enclosed space. They point to the fact that all of the market animals that were tested for COVID came up negative. Fence-sitters, like Chan, say that the pre-print findings appear to be consistent with both hypotheses. There are also technical points and counterpoints about these studies being debated. For example, one of the studies attempts to use geospatial analysis to show that locations of early COVID cases seems to cluster around the market. A possible rebuttal to this point is that it might be based on ascertainment bias – at the start of the pandemic, authorities suspected the market as a source of the outbreak and [specifically looked for patients who’d recently been at the market](https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499461957849694212), so it’s not surprising to see early cases cluster around the market if market exposure was part of the criteria for being diagnosed with COVID. A lot of these technical points are over my head, so I encourage you to read the pre-prints (as well as the critiques of them) yourself. Here are some more sources to check out about these recent pre-prints and the debate around them [[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00584-8), [2](https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/the-origins-of-sars-cov-2-still-to-be-determined/), [3](https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies-add-proof-covid-19-s-origin-wuhan-animal-market)]. ## 2. Lab leaks are uncommon, but not unheard of When I first heard the idea of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of the pandemic, part of the reason I dismissed it was because the idea of a pathogen escaping from a lab really did seem like a conspiracy theory, or the plot of some sci-fi movie. One of the things that made me reconsider this position was learning how many lab leaks have occurred in the past. Chan and Ridley spend a chapter in the book reviewing some of these incidents. For example: * Although the first SARS virus originated in nature, it was studied in labs after the initial epidemic, and escaped several times, infecting people. This occurred in Singapore, Taiwan, and China, from 2003-2004. * In April 1979, anthrax escaped from a biological warfare lab in Sverdlovsk, USSR, resulting in at least 64 deaths. This leak was successfully covered up by the Soviet authorities for more than a decade, with the KGB confiscating hospital records of the victims. The truth was only discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a proper scientific investigation was finally allowed in 1992 and 1993. * In 1977 there was an influenza pandemic, now called the Russian Flu, which ultimately killed about 700,000 people. It was discovered that this flu strain was nearly genetically identical to a strain that had previously been common in the 1950s, but had since disappeared, except for samples that were being studied in research labs. It’s now thought that the 1977 Russian Flu was the result of vaccine trials gone awry, in which military recruits became infected after being exposed to live attenuated H1N1 virus. * Smallpox escaped from research labs in the UK three times from 1966-1978. In fact, the last ever case of smallpox occurred after it had already been eradicated, when it escaped from a medical laboratory in 1978 and infected a medical photographer, who [eventually died from the illness.](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091) These are only a few of many examples. According to the US Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees the possession and handling of dangerous biological agents and toxins, there were 219 accidental releases of these “select agents” in 2019. So, while accidental lab leaks are uncommon, they’re not unheard of. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, it still makes sense to have a strong prior in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, but the idea that a pathogen can be accidentally released from a lab isn’t some wild, ridiculous idea like believing in alien abductions or Bigfoot or something. ## 3. The outbreak location in Wuhan appears to be relevant There’s a famous [psychology experiment](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001) [1] in which participants were told to wait in a room, and their reactions were recorded as the room gradually filled with smoke. In some cases, participants waited alone, while in other cases they waited with a group of people who, unbeknownst to the participant, were actors who had been instructed to ignore the smoke. Of the participants who waited alone, 75% reported the smoke. However, of the participants who waited with the group, only 10% reported the smoke. Photograph of the famous Latané and Darley experiment, cerca 1968. So, what could those participants have been thinking? Maybe something like: Hmm, why’s the room filling up with smoke? Is this a problem? \looks around the room\ Well nobody else seems to care, so I guess not. Looking back at the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, I think maybe this is why so many of us didn’t think twice about the location of the initial outbreak. Hmm, is it kinda suspicious that this virus broke out near a major virology institute that works on bat coronaviruses? Should we maybe look into that? \looks around\ Well nobody else seems to think so, so I guess not. I can’t speak for everyone else, but this was at least my mindset. I had vaguely heard something about how there was a virology research institute close to where the pandemic broke out, and that some conspiracy theorists were claiming it was the source of the virus. I looked around and noticed that nobody was really taking this idea seriously, so I figured I didn’t need to take it seriously either. Also, I was thinking something like: Eh, probably every major city has labs and research institutes doing this kind of research. And I’ll bet they purposely built the virology institute close to where these viruses occur in nature, to give them easy access for sampling. Well, it turns out both of these things are wrong. The type of research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is pretty rare and specialized. It includes things like creation of chimeric coronaviruses [[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985), [2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/)], [infecting humanized mice with bat coronaviruses](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4099020), and other types of gain of function research, which Chan and Ridley devote a chapter to. The WIV is one of only a few institutions in the world doing this type of research. It’s not the case, as I had assumed, that every major university has a couple labs doing similar work. So it does seem like a pretty remarkable coincidence that the outbreak happened in Wuhan. But maybe they purposely built the Wuhan Institute of Virology close to where these viruses are found in nature? Well, this also turns out to be wrong. The areas where viruses most similar to SARS-CoV-2 are found in nature are Yunnan province and Laos, which are more than a thousand kilometers away from Wuhan. The authors put this distance in perspective by noting that it’s more than the distance between Orlando and NYC. Image source: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-30/china-is-making-it-harder-to-solve-the-mystery-of-how-covid-began> If SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan / Laos area, how did it make it all the way to Wuhan without leaving a trail along the way? ## 4. The story of RaTG13 Although I enjoyed the book, I do have one pretty major criticism. The authors repeatedly make the claim that a virus called RaTG13, which was being studied at the WIV before the pandemic, is the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2. But this claim is outdated and no longer correct. In September 2021 researchers identified a [virus called BANAL-52](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2) in Laos that’s a 96.8% match to SARS-CoV-2, closer than RaTG13’s 96.2% match. (Important note: a 96.8% match is still a long way off in genomic space, and does not imply that this is the same virus as SARS-CoV-2, or even necessarily a progenitor.) At first I thought maybe the authors didn’t mention BANAL-52 because it was discovered after the book was published, but this isn’t the case – Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned. Even if it would have been inconvenient from a publishing standpoint, the authors should have rewritten the RaTG13 chapter, or at least included an addendum about the discovery of BANAL-52. With that being said, I think the story of RaTG13 is still interesting and important, so I’ll give a quick summary here. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was quickly sequenced, and the full genome sequence was [published by Dr. Shi Zhengli’s team at the WIV.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7) In this paper, they also briefly mentioned that the genome was a 96.2% match with another bat coronavirus called RaTG13 – the closest known match at the time. Oddly, the mention of RaTG13 did not include any reference, footnote, or link to any previously published sequence. Although the WIV didn’t provide details on this mysterious RaTG13 virus, a group of internet volunteers, including both amateurs as well as professional scientists working in their free time, began to investigate. This loose collection of open-source researchers, called DRASTIC, uncovered a medical thesis describing an outbreak of a mysterious disease in 2012. Six men who had been working in a bat-infested mine in Mojiang County, China, fell ill and were admitted to a hospital with symptoms including dry coughs, shortness of breath, fevers, muscle aches, headaches, and fatigue. Three of the men eventually died of this mysterious illness. In the years following this incident, teams of researchers (including a team led by Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV) were sent to investigate the cause of this illness and collect samples from the Mojiang mine. This sampling led to the discovery of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in 2013, and a part of its genomic sequence was published under the name BtCoV/4991 in 2016. The DRASTIC researchers discovered that RaTG13 was genetically identical to the BtCoV/4991 sequence from the Mojiang mine – it was the same virus, and had just been renamed for some reason, without any public record of the change. They also discovered that at least eight other closely related coronaviruses were also sampled from this mine and brought to the WIV. Although unhelpful throughout the investigation, the WIV eventually verified these facts when pressed on them, and an [addendum](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z) was added to the original paper confirming DRASTIC’s account of the origin of RaTG13. So what should we make of this? Well, as I mentioned before, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2, so maybe the whole story is less important as it pertains to the origin of the pandemic. But the discovery of BANAL-52 doesn’t really resolve things either [2]. Laos is very far away from Wuhan (actually even further than Yunnan), so we’re left with the same question as before – how did SARS-CoV-2 make it all the way to Wuhan from such a distant natural reservoir without leaving a trail along the way? ## 5. Lack of institutional transparency and competence A lot of the book is devoted to criticizing the Chinese government’s lack of transparency during the pandemic. Some brief examples: * In the early days of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, hundreds of people were investigated and punished for the crime of “spreading rumors”. This included whistleblowing doctors who attempted to warn others [3] about the spread of the disease and its human-to-human transmission, which was being denied by the Chinese government at the time. * Access to the Mojiang mine (the source of the RaTG13 virus discussed in the previous section) was blocked off, and journalists attempting to visit it were harassed and detained by police. * According to Chinese government directives, all academic research papers written by Chinese scientists are now required to go through a process of government review before being submitted for journal publication. * The WHO conducted an investigation that was apparently a sham. The investigation was composed of supervised, tightly-controlled visits to various sites in Wuhan, including a museum dedicated to China’s “heroic efforts to defeat the pandemic” – but the team was denied access to raw data from the early stages of the pandemic. At the end, they confidently concluded that a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 was “extremely unlikely”, despite not having done any serious investigation into it. [4] * Virus sample sequences from early COVID patients in China were originally uploaded to an online database, but later removed in an apparent attempt at obfuscation. [However, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom came up with a clever way to recover this data.](https://www.science.org/content/article/claim-chinese-team-hid-early-sars-cov-2-sequences-stymie-origin-hunt-sparks-furor) * Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since. At this point, we need to be cautious and police our emotions so that we don’t start favoring the lab leak hypothesis for non-scientific reasons. When reading about this stuff, it’s easy to get angry and start wanting the Chinese government to be guilty of something, but we need to consider all possible explanations. It’s possible that the Chinese government was trying to cover up a lab leak, but it’s also possible that this was just regular authoritarian government behavior. Interestingly, Chan and Ridley describe similar attempts at obfuscation during the original SARS epidemic in 2003 (which had a natural origin), in which the Chinese government hid infected patients so that they wouldn’t be discovered by international health authorities. So I don’t think these attempts at obfuscation should necessarily be taken as evidence for a lab origin. The book also criticizes a US-based research organization called the EcoHealth Alliance, and its president Peter Daszak. [5] The basic claim here, which I think has some merit, is that there was an attempt to artificially construct a scientific consensus from the top down, early on in the pandemic, even though such a consensus wasn’t (and isn’t) warranted by the evidence. This artificial scientific consensus was then picked up by tech companies, who used it to label discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation”, as well as by media sources and fact checkers. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the convoluted details here, so I refer you to the book if you want to learn about it. It’s worth noting though that some of the scientists who publicly labeled the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” [apparently considered it to be plausible in their private communications,](https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1511380491005415424) which were obtained through FOIA requests. Whatever we think of the whole Daszak / EcoHealth Alliance story, it’s pretty clear that at the start of the pandemic many respected institutions – scientific journals, tech companies, media networks, the WHO – expressed a level of confidence in the natural origins hypothesis that was not warranted by the evidence. How should we update our opinions based on this overconfidence? Does it tell us anything about the origins of the virus? Let’s say that your friend claims he can magically predict the result of a fair coin flip (only once). “There’s a 100% chance it’ll come up heads,” he says. If you’re gullible, you’ll update your belief in favor of heads. If you’re feeling annoyed at your friend, you might update in favor of tails out of spite [6]. Both of these would be wrong. The correct answer would be to not update at all on the object-level question of the coin flip (still 50-50), and to update negatively on the separate question of how trustworthy your friend’s predictions are. And remember, even if the coin does come up heads, you should still update negatively on your friend’s trustworthiness – he was still overconfident even though he happened to get it right by chance. This is basically how I think we should handle this unwarranted overconfidence from respected institutions – it should decrease our trust in these institutions, but we need to be careful not to start favoring the lab leak hypothesis out of spite. In my opinion this loss of trust should not really affect our view of the object-level question of the virus’s origin at all (although it would be nice to see some of the data being hidden, like that WIV database that was taken offline). Sometimes your overconfident friend will get it wrong, and the coin will come up tails. ## 6. Technical evidence The book covers a lot of technical evidence that’s considered by some to point toward a lab origin. Although I’m a computational biologist myself, I don’t have the background knowledge required to evaluate this evidence, and have only been able to observe the back-and-forth debates between people who actually do have this background knowledge. So I didn’t update my opinion much based on these pieces of evidence, but I’ll still describe some of them here. The first widely-cited piece of technical evidence has to do with the lack of rapid evolution of the virus early on in the pandemic. Some scientists claim that SARS-CoV-2 reached genetic stability early on, suggesting that it was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak. Some have interpreted this as evidence that it was engineered for this purpose, or underwent serial passaging to encourage adaptation to human or humanized cells. Here’s a [pre-print from May 2020](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1) (on which Alina Chan is actually a co-author) making the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was already well-adapted to humans at the beginning of the pandemic. However, a [review paper from proponents of the natural origins hypothesis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/) disputes this claim, and offers several technical counterpoints, citing adaptive mutations later on in the pandemic that increased the virus’s fitness. The second widely-cited piece of technical evidence is related to a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 called the furin cleavage site (FCS). The FCS increases the ability of the virus to infect certain types of cells, and is part of what makes SARS-CoV-2 especially contagious. It’s considered an unusual feature, and has not been found in the other viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. It’s worth noting that previous gain of function research has included [inserting a furin cleavage site into the original SARS virus](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/) from the 2003 epidemic. The debate over the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is mostly related to sequence analysis, and I don’t have enough background knowledge on this to take a side on it either way. [This is a paper by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/) claiming that the FCS may suggest genetic manipulation and point to a lab origin. For technical counterpoints on the FCS, I’ll refer you to the same [review paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/) from natural origins proponents that I mentioned in the last paragraph. A large chunk of the book is devoted to exploring these technical claims. These sections of the book are interesting and informative for hearing one perspective, but I definitely recommend checking out other sources with the technical counterpoints to get a full view of things. Personally I did not update my opinion based on these pieces of evidence because I don’t have enough background knowledge to evaluate opposing claims being made about them. Also, I think it’s worth noting that the debates around these pieces of evidence are specifically related to the subset of lab leak possibilities that involves genetic engineering and manipulation. However, even if it were proven, beyond a doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of genetic engineering, that would not rule out the possibility that it was a natural virus, collected from the field, that was stored in the WIV and leaked out. I want to point this out because I’ve seen some semantic confusion where people claim to “disprove” the lab leak hypothesis, when really they are given arguments specifically against the possibility of genetic engineering. ## 7. Signal and noise So far I’ve tried to summarize some of the key points of the book that I view as being the most important, but there are also a ton of other tiny pieces of information for us to try to make sense of. Some of these bits are either false, misleading, or meaningless. For example, Chan and Ridley tell the story of Dr. Limeng Yan, a scientist-turned-whistleblower who fled to the US in April 2020 in fear of being “disappeared” in China. By all accounts, Dr. Yan started off as a legitimate whistleblower. She learned of COVID’s human-to-human transmission early on, when it was still being denied by the Chinese government, tried to report it up her chain of command (but was told to keep quiet), and ended up leaking the information to a Youtube commentator who told the world – and of course, it was confirmed by the Chinese government and WHO the next day. But instead of the story ending there, with Dr. Yan as a brave hero, things took a sad turn. She fled to the US in fear, but ended up in a situation where her only American contacts were people with their own political agendas (including Steve Bannon). Facing this scary and uncertain situation in a foreign land, it seems she basically told these people what they wanted to hear, and possibly ended up believing it herself through self-deception. Soon she was giving interviews to right-wing media outlets, spouting the actual unfounded conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon released by China on purpose, and other false information. This is a sad story about a scientist who tried to do the right thing, but ended up intellectually corrupted by forces beyond her control. It’s also a reminder of how much noise and false information is out there. It’s easy to dismiss the ridiculous claim that COVID began as a bioweapon, but other claims are more difficult to evaluate. For example, according to a US intelligence report, [three researchers at the WIV became so severely ill in November 2019 that they required hospitalization.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228?mod=e2tw) It was reported that they had symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and regular seasonal illness. What should we make of this claim [7]? ## Conclusion 1: I have no idea whether the virus came from a lab or from nature After reading the book and going down several related rabbit holes, I feel as uncertain as ever about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I have generally updated towards viewing the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, rather than an insane conspiracy theory. This partly due to this book, as well as many other related sources I came across last year. To summarize, my overall updating went something like this: * Prior: Definitely natural origins (Obviously, I’m not a conspiracy theorist). * Update 1: Hmm, so I guess they haven’t found any direct evidence of an animal source yet, but I’m sure one will turn up. Anyway, a lab leak is still impossible, right? * Update 2: Ok, so I guess there have been some lab leaks in the past. But still, the zoonotic spillovers are much more common. * Update 3: Wait a minute… you mean the location of the initial outbreak actually is not close to the nearest natural reservoir of this type of virus? In that case, isn’t it kinda suspicious that it is close to one of the only virology institutes in the world doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses? Why am I just hearing about this now? * Update 4: Lots of technical points being discussed and debated, way over my head. However I notice scientists much smarter than me shifting their opinion and now claiming that neither hypothesis can be ruled out based on the current evidence. * Posterior: Both hypotheses seem viable and a thorough, open investigation is needed. ## Conclusion 2: Evaluating claims from experts and institutions There was a lesson I took away from this book that I’m not exactly sure how to feel about. Reading through the history of the investigation into the pandemic’s origins, it’s notable that many of the breakthroughs were made by either complete amateurs, or by scientists in fields outside of virology working in their free time. For example, one of the main characters in this story is The Seeker, an anonymous Twitter user, later revealed to be a former science teacher in India with no formal research experience. Again and again, amateur internet researchers like The Seeker caught things that the professional virology community missed or ignored, including the origins of RaTG13 and the eight other coronavirus samples from the Mojiang mine. I don’t really know how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s pretty cool that science is now open source in a way that lets random, curious people comb through data to make interesting discoveries. But on the other hand, what the hell is going on if some random Twitter users are consistently correcting world-renowned virology institutes on various mistakes and omissions? This is especially frustrating when the random guy on the internet turns out to be right. When people talk about “trusting the experts”, I think they mean trusting people with technical expertise over people without technical expertise. This makes sense a lot of the time. Probably almost all the time. If you need your car fixed, have a weird rash on your skin, or have a leaking pipe in your house, you consult a mechanic, a dermatologist, or a plumber because they have the technical expertise you need on those issues. You don’t ask a random guy on Twitter for help. But what if you have a question about investment banking on Wall Street, and how it should be regulated. Should you put the question to a bunch of investment bankers? After all, they do have the most technical expertise on this subject, right? They probably know more about investment banking than you or me, or a lot of the people pushing for more financial regulations. Now we’ve run into an issue: they do have technical expertise, but it’s bundled together and intertwined with a bunch of incentives that could lead to biased judgment, so we can’t take what they’re saying as some pure, objective truth. Of course, their technical expertise is still valuable, so we shouldn’t necessarily throw out everything they say either. The proper response is to listen to what they’re saying and weigh the information accordingly after considering the incentives they’re facing, and possible biases. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that scientific institutions, though probably not as bad as Wall Street, are still made up of human beings who are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, including group think, confirmation bias, and the good ol’ Not Wanting To Be Wrong. So what should we do about this? Well, the easy option is to just become an insane person, like Alex Jones, and assume the experts are lying all the time about everything. This strategy has the advantage of letting us feel edgy and rebellious, but it’s not very helpful if we actually want to figure these issues out. On the other hand, if we want to seriously try to discern truth from expert claims on controversial topics, that’s a messy challenge that involves considering their technical expertise, as well as potential biases they might have, as well as our own potential biases. ## Conclusion 3: Some optimism about science I know this has probably been a bit of a depressing post to read, but my final conclusion is actually one of optimism about the state of science. What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms. It’s all about changing our minds and reevaluating our beliefs based on new evidence and clearer understanding of things. This is basically what we’ve seen in the way the scientific community has changed positions on the lab leak hypothesis. Harsh critics might refer to this as a “flip flop”, or point out that the lab leak hypothesis never should have been dismissed in the first place, but I see it as a commendable error correction. What’s even cooler is that much of this reevaluation was the result of amateurs and semi-amateurs making discoveries based on freely accessible genomic sequence data, and open source online sequence analysis tools. Plus the fact that, despite their lack of official credentials, their analysis was taken seriously (eventually), when it became evident that they were making good points. This is a credit to the scientific community. ## Further sources to check out * Natural Origins Proponents + [The most comprehensive post I’ve found making the case for natural origins is Philipp Markolin’s Substack post](https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w), which attempts to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question. Definitely recommend. + [Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9#auth-1) + [Holmes et al. 2021 paper](https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf), reviewing evidence and concluding in favor of natural origins. * Other Sources + [This is an interesting website called Rootclaim that applies Bayesian reasoning and quantifies updates.](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2) Their quantified line of reasoning is especially interesting if you disagree with their conclusion, since you can pinpoint exactly which pieces of evidence you disagree on. They apply this analysis to many other claims as well. + [Scott Aaronson’s review of](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6183) [Viral](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6183) + [Letter in the journal Science,](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj0016) signed by many prominent researchers, calling for an open investigation into the pandemic origins. + [Vanity Fair article](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy) on the investigation into the pandemic origins, criticizing the NIH for lack of transparency. + [Yuri Deigin’s Medium post](https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748) on SARS-CoV-2 sequence analysis from April 2020. This is the earliest I know of someone making a serious case for the lab leak hypothesis. + [Nicholas Wade’s May 2021 article](https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/) – one of the first well-known, respected scientists to publicly take the lab leak hypothesis seriously. + [Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin’s paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/) on the furin cleavage site. + [US intelligence community’s declassified assessment](https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2021/item/2263-declassified-assessment-on-covid-19-origins) of the pandemic’s origins (turned out to be inconclusive). + [This article from Laura H. Kahn](https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/the-origins-of-sars-cov-2-still-to-be-determined/) explains what evidence would be needed to conclusively show that COVID had a zoonotic origin, and how this burden of proof has not been met yet. + There are two active prediction markets [[1](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3682/health-agencies-to-claim-lab-escape-by-25/), [2](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8605/most-of-us-ic-favor-covid-lab-leak-hypothesis/)] (that I know of) related to the question of the pandemic’s origins. As Scott noted in a [recent ACX post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/information-markets-decision-markets?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNTY2MzA5OCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTExNDc3NzYsIl8iOiJHZ3Z1RCIsImlhdCI6MTY0OTIwOTg1MSwiZXhwIjoxNjQ5MjEzNDUxLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItODkxMjAiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.475ITvoIy-e_BdSYd27rA11GTpV7yO69oe4IcYYzssQ&s=r), these markets are not straightforward predictions of whether the pandemic began in a lab or not. Rather, they’re predictions about what specific institutions will conclude about the pandemic origins, so they’re kind of tangentially related to the real underlying question. * Risks of gain of function research (not specific to COVID) + [This is a great episode of the Sam Harris podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaRfbJE1qZ4) with Rob Reid on gain of function virology research as a possible existential risk. The episode isn’t about COVID and doesn’t take a position on the pandemic’s origins either way. Scary and important episode. + [Recent article from Kelsey Piper](https://www.vox.com/22937531/virus-lab-safety-pandemic-prevention) on possible dangers of gain of function research (again, not specific to COVID). ## Footnotes [1] Latané and Darley (1968). I couldn’t find any positive or negative replications of this exact experiment, but the general conclusion, called the Bystander Effect, has been extensively replicated. [2] It’s hard to tell because this [article was originally in French](https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/deux-ans-apres-le-debut-de-la-pandemie-de-covid-19-ou-en-est-l-enquete-sur-les-origines-du-sars-cov-2_4911225.html), but after [putting it through Google Translate](https://www-francetvinfo-fr.translate.goog/sante/maladie/coronavirus/deux-ans-apres-le-debut-de-la-pandemie-de-covid-19-ou-en-est-l-enquete-sur-les-origines-du-sars-cov-2_4911225.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=wapp), it sounds like the head of the research team who discovered BANAL-52, Marc Eloit, still considered the lab origin scenario to be plausible as of January 2022. [3] In a reminder of the Orwellian nature of the Chinese government, one of these doctors was even made to sign a confession letter admitting to this “crime”. [4] This report was widely criticized, with the governments of the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others expressing “shared concerns” about the investigation. Even the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, suggested that a more thorough follow-up investigation might be required. [5] For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with making this thing into a personal crusade against Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, like some people are trying to do. [6] This is actually what I’m more worried about with the ACX community – most of us aren’t going to be gullible when it comes to believing a popular, mainstream narrative, but we might be prone to knee-jerk contrarian reactions to these narratives. [7] I don’t know.	Scott Alexander	66306332	Your Book Review: Viral	acx
# Links For July [Remember, 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: Rude compounds on Reddit ([source](https://twitter.com/johnregehr), [original](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vmw0eu/oc_frequency_of_compound_insults_eg_poophead/)). Thousands of cocksuckers, shitlords, and libtards, but far fewer cocktards, shitsuckers, and liblords. Also disappointingly few trumpgoblins: 2: DSL effortpost: [Is it true that most soldiers don’t (or didn’t used to) really shoot at the enemy?](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6984.0.html) Bean is not impressed with the scholarship behind the claim. 3: Seen [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/0_hipotezi/status/1542749550590443523), taken from General Social Survey: mean IQ by degree by decade. If true, the average college graduate today is close to the same intelligence as the average high school graduate in 1960. 4: 5: This month in nominative determinism: conservative radio commentator [Jeremy Boreing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Boreing). 6: The Economist: [COVID Learning Loss Is A Total Disaster](https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-learning-loss-has-been-a-global-disaster). I feel awkward here, because I’d previously predicted that [Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even), but I don’t think these are quite as contradictory as they seem at first glance. The article mentions that “Data from a few rich countries suggest that schoolchildren in those places are gradually catching up…by last autumn third-graders in Ohio had made back two-thirds of the learning that was found to have been lost by the start of the 2020-21 school year”, which matches my prediction. The problem is that some middle-income countries without good vaccine access kept schools closed really long, took the excuse to cut funding, let students drift away and not return after reopenings, or that “school buildings have decayed…some were looted or damaged during long closures.” 7: [AutoRegex](https://www.autoregex.xyz/) is a GPT-3-based app that converts natural language descriptions into regular expressions, ie "B followed by 2 vowels followed by ld" → "B[aeiou]{2}ld". I think this is the first AI-based app I might use in real life, good work. 8: After decades of decline, [world hunger is rising again](https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/hunger-rising-around-world-food-security-report), hopefully this is just temporary due to COVID and Ukraine. 9: [How likely are results near a significance threshold to reach it with more data?](https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g2215) If you get p = 0.08 and then double the amount of data, your experiment will still be above p < 0.05 about 30% of the time. 10: Collapse of a glacier in Kyrgyzstan, best watched with sound on for full dramatic tension. See author’s description and original [here](https://www.instagram.com/p/CfyT6xcA27D/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D&fbclid=IwAR07UwSFRSV-8z7iBl4s8PX_mD-Qz--SKLy-00s37YJt2Zu6f6PfX-qw-iw). 11: Stuart Ritchie on [the evidence around breastfeeding and intelligence](https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/breastfeeding-iq). Lots of studies conflict, we really don’t know. 12: 13: DALL-E generation for "Michaelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Rafael hanging out at the beach, oil on canvas". Intermediate source [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/kontextmaschine/689518839900291072?source=share), I don’t know original: 14: I have frequently complained that California governor Gavin Newsom has no characteristics except having good hair and wanting to be President, but I have to admit this is the sort of thing someone with a personality would do: [Gavin Newsom Joins Trump’s Social Network Just To Troll Him](https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/newsom-joins-trumps-social-network-just-to-troll-him/). The headline seems a bit exaggerated, he is actually joining to “call out Republican lies” to an audience in need of conversion; his first post was about how “eight of the top 10 states with the highest murder rates are red states”. Unfortunately, I hear that all Trump supporters are racist, and I’m not sure that challenging a bunch of racists with “I BET YOU CAN’T THINK OF ANY REASONS WHY SOUTHERN STATES HAVE HIGH MURDER RATES!” will be as devastating as he thinks. 15: [1990s stock photos representing The Internet](https://imgur.com/a/Qlh7Y). Here’s one example to whet your palate: 16: Claim: 17: [The Origin Of Two-Spirit And The Gay Rights Movement](https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-two-spirit-and-the). Long, detailed, fascinating piece on claiming that the “two-spirits” concept of Native American trans people was invented by white enthusiasts trying to give a noble-savage-based credibility to their own LGBT movements. After reading it, I am only partly convinced - obviously “Native Americans” are an incredibly diverse group, and the specific “two-spirit” framing was some random activists trying to lump everything together in a kind of made-up way. On the other hand, some tribes did have some things which looked vaguely like transgender, probably moreso than Europeans of the same era, and any attempt to describe this is naturally going to be an oversimplification. I think of this as just another battle over how to use history in politics: usually these kinds of articles are written by some leftist saying that conservatives claim the Homeric Greeks were masculine (or whatever) but actually it’s much more complicated than that because [list of inevitable ways ancient civilizations are more complicated than any possible summary]. I think there has to be a balance between claims like “the Native Americans were trans / the Homeric Greeks were masculine, just like us, therefore any arguments against transgender/masculinity are an ahistorical flash-in-the-pan” vs. “everything is so complicated and diverse that you may never draw analogies between historical concepts and modern concepts, or feel inspired by ancient civilizations in any way”. Still, this is a good article and I recommend it. 18: The enigmatic Georgia Guidestones monument was [destroyed by vandals/terrorists earlier this month](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-monument-called-satanic-gubernatorial-candidate-destroyed-expl-rcna37039). Marginal Revolution [compares it to](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/the-georgia-guidestones-and-the-bamiyan-buddhas.html) the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas. I did get a chance to hear from an anti-Guidestone acquaintance (they prefer not to be linked, sorry) who reminds people that the guidestones’ “commandments” urged readers to institute a one world language, do eugenics, and reduce the world population by >90% through unspecified means. Still, as Voltaire put it, I may disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to erect 19-foot tall 230,000 lb granite slabs in the middle of Georgia that say it. 19: A few months ago, we heard that Elon Musk was donating $6 billion to effective altruism; since then, nobody has seen or heard anything further. Now [a](https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190) [Wall Street Journal](https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190) [article](https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190) tells the full story: Musk planned to do this, but there was a conflict about it in his inner circle, and the people who were against it won. Having an inner circle sounds tiring and morally fraught, and I’m glad I’ll never be rich enough to have to worry about it. 20: CSPI: [It’s Time To Review The Institutional Review Board](https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institutional) 21: Jacob Steinhardt on [one year of AI forecasting](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/): “While forecasters underpredicted progress on capabilities, they overpredicted progress on robustness. So while capabilities are advancing quickly, safety properties may be behind schedule.” 22: 23: Related (h/t [Matt Yglesias](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1542647616466554881)): I guess this means there’s some really strong correlation between zoning reform and Trump voting share somebody should look into. 24: Dynomight on [abortion laws around the (developed) world](https://dynomight.net/abortion/). Almost no other country is as restrictive as US red states or as permissive as US blue states, even when you take “real world” application of the laws into account. 25: Found this chart [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/David_Charts/status/1547306962454515718); does anyone want to comment? I’d heard unemployment was unusually low because lots of people stopped looking for jobs after they got stimulus checks, but the low employment-to-population ratio suggests that’s not true. And why would net worth for the bottom 50% double in four years - surely you can’t do this just with stimulus checks, right? And why is the budget deficit lower? 26: [Criticism of some recent Nutt/Carhart-Harris papers on psychedelics for depression](https://twitter.com/EikoFried/status/1524690195794341888) 27: People are trying to do the [“we have DESTROYED the chemical imbalance theory of depression”](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0) thing again. Several people have asked for my opinion, see these posts I wrote in 2015 ([1](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/), [2](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/18/polemical-imbalance/)) for details, I think they mostly hold up well. The one update I’m making is that the tryptophan depletion literature genuinely looks shakier than I thought. 28: Nate Soares of MIRI [discusses the AI alignment landscape](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jydymb23NWF3Q4oDt/on-how-various-plans-miss-the-hard-bits-of-the-alignment) and why he’s skeptical of most existing projects. 29: Quote Investigator: [who invented the idea of optimists seeing a glass as half-full?](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/06/half-full/) 30: British MP Penny Mordaunt has dropped out of the race to become Prime Minister, but I enjoyed [reading about her career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Mordaunt#Parliamentary_career) - particularly the incident where she gave a Parliamentary speech on animal welfare and factory farms for chickens, and then later admitted that someone had dared her to use the word “cock” a certain number of times in Parliament. 31: Apparently [this is a real shirt you can get](https://agiwear.ai/), I saw someone wearing it: 32: After some past studies (eg [here](https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973653719/california-program-giving-500-no-strings-attached-stipends-pays-off-study-finds)) showed benefit of cash transfers (think UBI, but much smaller and shorter term), a newer study of $500 to $2000 given to poor families one time only [fails to show any benefit](https://twitter.com/jonj/status/1544318964859273217) to bank account balances, self-rated financial well-being, or self-rated happiness four months later; in fact, the effects trended negative, although that might be an artifact. The researchers conjecture that the money wasn’t enough and just stressed recipients out trying to figure out how to spend it, which made them feel worse. I think you can tell a story where the previous experiments that gave people long-term regular payments were good because they felt stable, and this one was bad because because it was a one-time shock - but for what it’s worth, the researchers had asked experts to predict the results of this experiment, and they had all guessed that it would go well. 33: I used to hope that freedom and tolerance would win in the end because everyone would realize that they were weird and unpopular in some way, and so tolerating weird unpopular people was in everybody’s common interest (cf. “They came for the Communists, but I did not complain…). Since then the world has taken every opportunity to disabuse me of the notion that this could ever possibly work, but I guess it’s still possible to disappoint me. The latest example is [/r/forcedbreeding](https://www.reddit.com/r/forcedbreeding/), a fetish subreddit about men enslaving, raping, and forceably impregnating women, which shut down recently to protest Reddit for not censoring pro-Russian subreddits enough. Apparently they’re back up now, but their top stickied post is still a demand that Reddit ban anti-COVID-vaccine subreddits. Another metaphor for life? 34: A few years ago I reviewed Joe Heinrich’s Secret Of Our Success, and included a passage about divination. Hunter-gatherers (it claimed) benefited from divination methods as a randomization device, to ensure they didn’t keep overhunting the same area, or move in predictable patterns that game animals could learn. At the time this blew my mind, but [here are some other anthropologists saying it’s “wrong on many essential counts”](https://books.google.com/books?id=EVZiccYcs2YC&pg=PT72&lpg=PT72&dq=%22Moore+believed+that+because+this+procedure%22&source=bl&ots=q-hNevCRT5&sig=ACfU3U0exYOom6NjTpNk6wl94IIlxOPQ8g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjD85rU3YH5AhWUZTABHfPRD9kQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=%22Moore%20believed%20that%20because%20this%20procedure%22&f=false) (h/t Cameron Harwick) 35: Adrian D’Souza [on Sri Lanka’s economic crisis](https://adriandsouza.substack.com/p/on-sri-lankas-economic-crisis). I’d heard a lot about the role of their decision to switch to all-organic farming, but it seems more like a typical case of “leader who wants to say in power borrows lots of money, spends it on popular projects, then can’t pay it back”; the organic farming was partly a fig leaf to cover up being too poor to afford fertilizer. 36: Somebody wished on a monkey’s paw for a room-temperature superconductor, so [here is a substance](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02895-0) which superconducts at room temperature . . . and a pressure of 267 gigapascals, about the same as at the center of the earth. 37: I like making fun of fact-checkers just like everyone else, but this is some genuinely impressive journalism: how do you go from a single picture of an unusually obese Russian soldier (which doesn’t show up in reverse image search) to [figuring out exactly who he is and why it was taken](https://twitter.com/ArbiterOfTweets/status/1545651614253555712)? 38: Did you know: the Bohemian lifestyle is [a reference to Gypsies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism#Origins) (aka Romani), “who were believed to have to come France from Bohemia”. 39:	Scott Alexander	64579193	Links For July	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism 1: I said in the original post that I wrote this because I knew someone would write the opposite article (that organizations accept specific criticism in order to fend off paradigmatic criticism), and then later Zvi did write an article kind of like that. He writes: > It is the dream of anyone who writes a post called Criticism of [a] Criticism Contest to then have a sort-of reply called Criticism of Criticism of Criticism. > > The only question now is, do I raise to 4? > > I [wrote my article the way I did] for several reasons, including (1) a shorter post would have taken a lot longer, (2) when I posted a Tweet instead a central response was 'why don't you say exactly what things are wrong here', (3) any one of them might be an error but if basically every sentence/paragraph is doing the reversal thing you should stop and notice it and generalize it (4) you talk later about how concrete examples are better, so I went for concrete examples, (5) they warn against 'punching down' and this is a safe way to do this while 'punch up' and not having to do infinite research, (6) when something is the next natural narrative beat that goes both ways, (7) things are next-beats for reasons and I do think it's fair that most Xs in EA's place that do this are 'faking it' in this sense, (8) somehow people haven't realized I'm a toon and I did it in large part because it was funny and had paradoxical implications, (9) I also wrote it out because I wanted to better understand exactly what I had unconsciously/automatically noticed. > > For 7, notice in particular that the psychiatrists are totally faking it here, they are clearly being almost entirely performative and you could cross out every reference to psychiatry and write another profession and you'd find the same talks at a different conference. If someone decided not to understand this and said things like 'what specific things here aren't criticizing [X]', you'd need to do a close reading of some kind until people saw it, or come up with another better option. > > Also note that you can (A) do the thing they're doing at the conference, (B) do the thing where you get into some holy war and start a fight or (C) you can actually question psychiatry in general (correctly or otherwise) but if you do that at the conference people will mostly look at you funny and find a way to ignore you. 2: The anonymous original reviewer of Anti-Politics Machine wrote: > I have a lot of thoughts on this that I do not have time to write up properly, but I do think you’re kind of missing the point of this kind of critique. “The Anti-Politics Machine” is standard reading in grad-level development economics (I’ve now had it assigned twice for courses) -- not because we all believe “development economics is bad” or “to figure out how to respond to the critiques” but because fighting poverty / disease is really hard and understanding ways people have failed in the past is necessary to avoid the same mistakes in the future. So we’re aware of the skulls, but it still takes active effort to avoid them and regularly people don’t. My review gave a handful of ideas to change systems based on this critique, but in a much more fundamental way these critiques shape and change the many individual choices it takes to run an EA or development-style intervention. > > RCTs are a hugely powerful tool for studying charitable interventions, for all the reasons you already know. But when you first get started, it’s really easy to mistake “the results of an RCT” for “the entire relevant truth”, which is the sort of mistake that can massively ruin lives (or waste hundreds of millions of dollars) if you have the power to make decisions but not the experience to know how to interpret the relevant evidence. I wrote the review not to talk people out of EA (I like EA and am involved in an RCT I think will really help add to our knowledge of how to do good!) but because I think being aware of this kind of shortcoming and when to look out for it is necessary to put the results of RCTs in context and use them in a way that’s more responsible than either “just go off vibes” or “use only numerical quantitative information and nothing else”. > > To say this more clearly — I think the criticisms of EA you’re writing about \already are\ the sorts of critique you want, but you’re a little too removed from development work to see how they’re operationalized. And added: > Update: after reading Ivo’s comment below, I reread Scott’s argument and think my initial reading was somewhat defensive. > > I think part of the problem here is that a lot of general criticisms are based on this sort of specific failing, but get expressed in general terms because you can’t expect a general audience to be familiar with the specifics of 1970s World Bank initiatives in Lesotho. So in some sense I think my review was motivated by a less fleshed out version of Scott’s take here — a desire for people to know an example of the sort of specific failure the general critiques (at least those coming from inside dev Econ) have in mind. > > From the inside, a lot of these critiques come with a lot of context (eg examples of what we mean by problems with individualism in development or the need for taking cultural elements into account) that are well understood by the people making the claims but hard to communicate in a forum post (“read these eleven books” is not a good communication method). So I think there are two conversations going on — people with field-specific expertise talking to one another in ways that are clear to them, and outsiders (EAs without firsthand experience in the dev field) trying to make sense of them without the assumed background context. (A lot of these arguments seemed dumb to me until I started taking grad level development courses and built up more of the assumed background knowledge.) I’m not sure what the solution here is, because it seems like making these arguments in the way Scott is asking for (so that outsiders have all the context necessary to know what’s being asked for / critiqued) would extend these from forum posts to several-hundred-page technical books. I think all of this is fair and agree with all of it. 3: A surprising amount of discussion focused around the perihelion of Mercury example in particular! For example, archpawn [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/w3cfoi/criticism_of_criticism_of_criticism/igviv3i/) (my emphasis): > "It's insufficiently elegant" was how Einstein figured out the true theory. "Its estimate for the precession of the orbit of Mercury is off by forty arc-seconds per century" is just how Einstein was able to convince other scientists. Of course, outside of math and physics, looking for elegance won't get you very far. Dirichlet-to-Neumann [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7853609): > The Michelson-Morley\* experiment from the 1880's also showed there were problems with classical Newtonian dynamic (and there was the problem of the incompatibility between Maxwell's equations and Newton's paradigm on the theoretical side). > > This would have been enough for at least special relativity but once you get special relativity, general relativity is the logical next step in your investigations. I don't think the "no Mercury anomaly timeline changes by much. > > \Michelson-Morley experiment wanted to measure the speed of light using one of the coolest measuring tool ever, an interferometer. They got a problem because the speed of light did not change when the interferometer was moving. Chaostician [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7872989): > The perihelion drift of Mercury was a neat problem that relativity solved, but it was not a major motivating factor for Einstein. It had an explanation within the existing paradigm: when there's a surprising perihelion drift, there's probably another planet out there. That's how we predicted Neptune's existence. Astronomers thought there was another planet closer to the sun than Mercury, which they named Vulcan. > > There were other experimental problems too. The Michelson-Morley experiment was supposed how fast the Earth was moving relative to the ether. It measured that the Earth was not moving relative to the ether at all. At the very least, the experiment should have been able to see Earth's orbital motion, which points in a different direction at different times of the year. > > This isn't even the worst prediction of the old paradigm\: the Blazing Sky Paradox / Olbers' Paradox. The universe was thought to be infinitely large and infinitely old and that matter is approximately uniformly distributed at the largest scales (Copernican Principle). Any line of sight should eventually hit a star. Work out the math and the entire sky should be as bright as a sun all the time. This contradicts our observation that the sky is dark at night. This paradox was eventually resolved by accepting that the age of the universe is finite, as described by Lemaitre's and Hubble's Big Bang Theory. > > If we read what Einstein wrote, none of these failed predictions actually motivated Einstein to propose relativity. He instead cared more about questions like: What would it be like to chase a light wave? The electric and magnetic fields wouldn't be changing, so they shouldn't be creating each other, so the light wave wouldn't exist. That's ridiculous. So we'd better completely change our notions of space and time to make sure that this can't happen. Einstein's arguments actually are this audacious. > > Einstein worked primarily through thought experiments. He would find experimental results afterwards to make his arguments more persuasive to other physicists. Even then, explaining a few obscure existing anomalies wasn't enough to convince most physicists to change their notions of space & time. He had to make new predictions. Which he did: the path of light going by the sun is bent by it's gravity. Eddington's expedition to see a solar eclipse confirmed this, and caused the paradigm shift to spread through the entire community. There was also some discussion of paradigms that seemed opposed at first getting synthesized - did you know that in the 19th century, people thought that Darwinian evolution was incompatible with Mendelian genetics? From [Kenny Easwaran](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7853357): > Consider the way that modern biology is said to be Darwinian even though in the late 19th and early 20th century, Mendelian genetics with its discrete units of heredity from a “gene pool” was thought to be this one idea that Darwinian theory could never accommodate, with its demand for constantly varying traits that bring species completely outside what they had been […] > > To a Neo-Darwinian, we don't think of Mendelism and Darwinism as competitors, but they clearly were at the time - Darwin said traits had continuous variation around the traits of the parents, so that small differences can accumulate; Mendel said traits had binary variation, so that the only differences possible were those already in the gene pool. Once we understood that most traits were controlled by many genes, and that there are rare mutations in any, we were able to synthesize these. 4: Kronopath [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7853217): > If your point is that specific, well-researched criticism is harder than general, paradigmatic criticism, I agree. I think that's why you tend to see more of the latter, though much of it is low-quality. > > If your point is that paradigmatic criticism (or this specific paradigmatic criticism) is without value, I strongly and specifically disagree. > > I admittedly haven't read any of the other entries, but I would be happy to see Zvi win (at least some of the prize pool of) this contest. I briefly considered entering this contest, but was put off for the same reasons he expresses in his post. > > To distill what he's trying to say: Imagine if the Catholic Church had an essay-writing contest asking to point out the Church's sins. But then, in the fine print, they strongly implied that they will be judging what is a sin based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, and that it would be judged by a select group of Cardinals. That would drive away anyone trying to point out cases where their interpretations of Jesus's teachings might be wrong, or where the teachings of Jesus don't work on a fundamental level. > > This is the same deal. The criticism contest asks for criticism, but then implies that it's going to be judged within EA's interpretation of utilitarianism, thus pushing away any potential criticism of the fundamentals. Yeah, this is good, and now I’m wondering if I missed a more fundamental (less fundamental?) issue here. Going back to the church example: suppose I’m a new pastor, I’m running my church for the first time, and I tell everyone I’m looking for criticism. Maybe I’m hoping to hear something like “you sing the hymns off-key” or “you speak too softly when you give your sermons, nobody can hear you” or “there’s never enough food for everyone at the church picnic”. If someone instead tells me “Religion is fake and there is no God”, am I allowed to tell her I was looking for a different kind of criticism? I agree that if God doesn’t exist, pastors should want to know this. But I also think it’s fair for pastors to say that currently the type of criticism they’re most interested in hearing is about how to run their church effectively, and they either have already decided the God question to their satisfaction, or will deal with it later in some other context. I don’t think a pastor who asked for criticism/suggestions/advice about basic church-running stuff, but rolled his eyes when someone tried to convince him that there was no God, is doing anything wrong, as long as he specifies beforehand that this is what he wants, and has thought through the question of God’s existence at some point before in some responsible way. So maybe my thoughts on the actual EA criticism contest are something like “I haven’t checked exactly what things they do or don’t want criticism of, but I’m prepared to be basically fine if they want criticism of some stuff but not others”. 5: Yuliaverse (writes [Yuliaverse](https://yuliaverse.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7853655): > So far, I've assumed that many EA-aligned people welcome criticism because of a culture of (performative) openmindedness. I think the point this essay makes is better, though. > > If criticism is vague enough, no one feels personally attacked – it's easier to nod along. You can feel productive and enlightened while changing nothing. I'm not sure if that's everything there is to it. What I am convinced of now is that being specific when criticising is valuable. Suddently whatever you're talking about becomes tractable. I want to stress that I wasn’t making the point “EA is only faking wanting criticism, they actually just solicit paradigmatic criticism to escape specific criticism” - ie the exact inverse of the point I thought some people were making where “EA is only faking wanting criticism, they actually just solicit specific criticism to avoid paradigmatic criticism”. I think that would be continuing to reason through narrative beats instead of through evidence. Once you talk about how an organization really likes criticism, you have to argue that this is just a fakeout and they really like [nonthreatening type of criticism] instead of [real criticism]. I think some organizations are actually just good, and genuinely solicit criticism because they want to know how to be better. This is what I would do, if I had a big organization. I know cynicism is popular now and we’re supposed to pretend that everyone is bad in every possible way, but my impression is that EA would really like to know if it’s doing something wrong. (this isn’t to say they will necessarily agree with anyone else’s assessment, any more than the pastor is required to agree that there is no God). 6: Remmelt, who wrote the criticism post I called too paradigmatic in the original essay, [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7920736): > Actually, [that post] was an attempt at clarifying common attentional/perception blindspots I had mapped out for groups in the community over the preceding two years. Part of that was illustrating how Glen Weyl might be thinking differently than thought leaders in the community. > > But actually I was conversationally explaining a tool that people could use to map attentional/perceptual blindspots. > > Try looking at the post ([forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism](http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism)) and piecing together: > > - the I-IV. labelled psychological distances throughout the post (where distances represented both over past and future from the reference point respectively of {now, here, this, my}), > > - along with approach vs. avoid inclination (eg. embody rich nuances from impoverished pigeonholes vs. decouple from the messy noise to elegant order) > > - and corresponding regulatory focus over structure vs. process-based representations. > > One thing I find a little frustrating about Scott’s selective depictions of the blindspots piece is that Scott seems to interpreting the claims made as being vague (definitely true in some cases) and as some kind of low-information signalling to others in the community to do the thing that is already commonly promoted as socially acceptable/good (mostly not true; I do think I was engaging in some signalling both in feel-good-relate-with-diverse-humans-stuff and in promote-my-own-intellectual-work-stuff but I felt quite some tension around posting this piece in the community; Scott’s response on individualism speaks for itself). > > Whereas the perceptual and motivational distinctions I was trying to clarify are actually specific, somewhat internally consistent within the model I ended up developing, and took a lot of background research (core insights from dozens of papers) and many feedback rounds and revisions to get at. > > Note also that I had not had a conversation with Glen when I wrote the post. In our first call, Glen said that the post roughly resonated for him (my paraphrase), but that he also thought it overlooked how like EA/rationality concepts. Eg. he said that Hindu religious conceptions can also be very far in psychological distance and abstraction, meaning there is diversity of human culture and thought that the blindspots post did not represent much. 7: Alex [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7861192): > I feel like the example of paradigmatic criticism given in the article about how do we know we know reality is real or that capitalism is good is a bit of a straw man. I've always thought paradigmatic criticism of EA work was more more points like: > > -Giving in the developing world, as EA work often recommends, is often used as a political tool that props up violent and/or corrupt governments, or has other negative impacts that are not easily visible to foreign donors > > -This type of giving also reflects the foreign giver's priorities, not the recipient's > > -This type of giving also strangles local attempts to do the same work and creates an unsustainable dependence on outsiders > > -The EA movement is obsessed with imaginary or hypothetical problems, like the suffering of wild animals or AIs, or existential AI risk, and prioritizes them over real and existing problems > > -The EA movement is based on the false premise that its outcomes can in fact be clearly measured and optimized, when it is trying to solve huge, complex, multi-factorial social issues > > -The EA movement consists of newcomers to charity work who reject the experience of seasoned veterans in the space > > -The EA movement creates suffering by making people feel that not acting in a fully EA-endorsed manner is morally bad. > > This is the kind of criticism I would consider paradigmatic and potentially valid but also not, as far as I can tell, really embraced by EAs. I agree that to some degree these are good paradigmatic criticisms. One thing I get out of this is that all of these have been discussed a zillion times before, and if you still support EA it’s because you disagree with them for some reason or have some argument against them. Maybe one advantage of specific vs. broad criticism is that specific criticisms are more likely to be new, simply because there are so many details you can criticize? Or that they’re more likely to get debated rather than just create in-the-movement vs. out-of-the-movement fault lines, since you can’t schism your movement over every tiny detail? 8: Matthew Carlin [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7867730): > I am not and have never been a Ba'hai, but it's worth sharing two elements of the Ba'hai faith. Note that these are ideals, not necessarily practiced by the average adherent. > > 1) The Ba'hai believe that Abrahamic religion is still evolving, and has not yet reached its perfect form. So Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and maybe even the Ba'hai faith itself, are true, but incomplete. In this sense the religion very much shares a good quality with EA: it is not settled, may never be settled, and is open to change and improvement. > > 2) The Ba'hai prophet Baha'u'llah (the principle prophet, more or less like Muhammad) explicitly instructed his followers not to proselytize or force their faith on others. In practice, this is often ignored, but it is also often followed; my two Ba'hai friends did not tell me their religion, and when I found out and asked them about it, each one expressed reluctance to tell me unless I was really interested from my own will. > > When I learned this latter property, it was perhaps the single most refreshing thing I ever learned about a religion. I can't begin to tell you how refreshing it felt. > > From that followed a frame of reference where I asked "would this thing be better without evangelism?", and for me the answer was so often and so completely "yes" that I eventually stopped asking, with one exception I'll treat at the end. > > I have come to believe that people resist change in direct proportion to the magnitude of the push for change; hard push leads to hard heart. Moreover, while some people do yield and change and convert, as a side effect both the converter and the converted are left with a serious intensity, maybe permanently. Furthermore most "we meant well but did evil" mistakes seem to come from this place of intensity. > > So when I ask myself whether something would be better without evangelism, what I get back is basically always a form of this: > > 1) It would take 10-1000 times longer to complete the project. > > 2) Nobody would feel coerced into it. > > 3) Nobody will choose to hurt somebody to get the project done sooner. > > 4) Nobody will have strong feelings to continue "fighting" after the project reaches a natural conclusion. > > Basically always the right call. Aren’t you evangelizing non-evangelism here? I’m so angry about you cramming your non-evangelism down my throat that I’m going to evangelize one million times harder from now on, just to spite you! This is actually seriously my point: there’s no clear line between expressing an opinion and evangelizing. Was I evangelizing about my view of criticism when I wrote the original blog post? But surely it’s my blog, you’re under no obligation to read it, and if I have good ideas I should be allowed to write about them. Heck, some of you guys pay me to write my interesting thoughts; that suggests they’re providing you with value. Last month, when I posted why I thought that a recent crime wave was because of anti-police protests, was that evanglizing? If I were Bahai, and I posted something about why I thought the Bahai religion was true, using the same style of argument, would that be evangelizing? If I posted my interesting thoughts about charity in 2005, and those happened to be the exact same thoughts that later became effective altruism, would I have been evangelizing then? If I write a post now about why you should all join EA, would that be evangelizing now? I don’t want to deny that there’s a real thing called evangelism - I hear EA has been doing some pretty organized recruitment work in colleges. But most of you aren’t college students. If you’ve heard about EA, it’s been on blogs like this one. So what are you complaining about? I think there’s something where whenever a philosophy makes unusual moral demands on people (eg vegetarianism), then talking about it at all gets people accused of “evangelizing”, in a way unlike just talking about abortion or taxes or communism or which kinds of music are better than which other kinds of music. I think people feel threatened and offended, and instead of interpreting that as a statement about their own feelings (“I feel threatened by this idea”), they interpret it as a failure in their interlocutor (“This person is doing inappropriately pushy evangelizing”) But one other point I want to make here: it seems relevant that Bahai is false. Or, sorry, you can’t just call someone else’s religion false, but we’re not expecting it to be true in some relevant sense of the word “true”. Suppose Bahai had a bit more content than we usually bargain for in a religion - suppose its most important tenet was “in a bunker somewhere beneath the western suburbs of Chicago, there is a mad scientist working on a superplague which he will release on September 1, he must be found and stopped before that date”. And suppose you have lots of strong evidence this is true - for example, you infiltrated the bunker, met the scientist, and escaped. Now you’re going around alerting the authorities - or perhaps it’s too late for that, and you’re trying to convince regular citizens to flee. Is this evangelism? Are you wrong to do it? But what if you believe that God is real, really real, and people might go to Hell if they don’t believe in Him? Isn’t that news as important to spread as the news of a mad scientist with a superplague? Or what if you are the first person to consider abolitionism? Is the right course to just keep quiet about it, and hope maybe someone asks you “Hey, what are your thoughts on this thing where we all have slaves?” Or should you get aggressive about it? Sure, [that will make some people angry](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/), but better everyone knows about you (and half of people hate you) than nobody knows about you at all (and so you lose by default). Of course, this is all overly simplistic: the trick is evangelizing without making people hate you. I’ve worked on this skill for many years, and the best solution I’ve come up with is talking about a bunch of things so nobody feels too lectured to about any particular issue. Speaking of which, can I convince you to use prediction markets?	Scott Alexander	65879375	Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism	acx
# Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations The [Forer Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect) is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements [like these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect#Early_research): > 1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. > 2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. > 3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. > 4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. > 5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. > 6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. > 7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. > 8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. > 9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. > 10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. > 11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. > 12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. > 13. Security is one of your major goals in life. …most people will agree that the statements accurately describe them. In fact, most people will feel like they’re unusually accurate descriptions, which is how astrologers get you. What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better? A lot of Forer statements above are about the contrast between internal experience and outward behavior - for example “disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside”. All of this is implicitly comparative - since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”. Take this into account, and you can rephrase many of these statements as “Although everyone else is really X, you are Y pretending to be X”. Now the trick is obvious. You can access your internal experience, and you know what kind of things you’re pretending. But you can only access everyone else’s external presentation, which (absent specific evidence otherwise) you mostly believe. So whenever everyone is Y pretending to be X, it will feel like “although everyone else is really X, I am Y pretending to be X”. Consider the fifth statement above: “Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you”. Everyone has to go through their own sexual adjustment. But usually they hide it from everyone else except maybe some unlucky early sexual partners. Sexual adjustment is terrible, and so without any opportunity to calibrate, most people assume it can’t possibly be quite that bad for other people. So if an astrologer reads a star-chart and predicts “I bet you had an unusually tough sexual adjustment”, most people will agree the astrologer is right. The very fact that “your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you” is an effective Forer statement lets you turn it around and discover something new: most people’s sexual adjustments are harder than you previously thought. Phrased differently, you should decrease your confidence that your sexual adjustment was unusually hard. We can go through the list of Forer statements above, and rephrase each one as a useful potential update you can make to your model of the world: > 1. Most people care more about being liked and admired by other people than you previously thought. > 2. Most people are more critical of themselves than you previously thought. > 3. Most people feel like they have a lot of wasted potential. > 4. Most people are more likely to feel like they’re desperately compensating for personality weaknesses, and less likely to feel like things come naturally to them, than you previously thought. > 5. Sexual adjustment is harder than you previously thought. > 6. Most people are more worrisome and insecure inside than you previously thought. > 7. Most people doubt themselves more than you previously thought. > 8. Most people feel more dissatisfaction at their stable lives than you previously thought. > 9. Most people feel like they use logic and think critically more than other people do. > 10. Most people are more guarded and less open than you previously thought. > 11. Most people are more reactive to conditions than you previously thought (this one is just the [fundamental attribution error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)!) > 12. Most people have more pie-in-the-sky daydreams than you previously thought. > 13. Most people crave security more than you previously thought. Or you could phrase them as affirmations, or arguments for self-compassion: > 1. I’m not unusual or pathetic for wanting to be liked and admired by others. Even though it might seem like I’m obsessed with this to an unhealthy degree, I should consider the possibility that I am pretty normal in this regard. > 2. I’m not unusually self-critical. Other people probably criticize themselves about this much, they just don’t talk about it (as I may not talk about it). > 3. When I fret about wasting my potential, this is normal. Other people fret just as much. > 4. When I feel like I have deep personality weaknesses that I have to compensate for, that’s fine. Other people also feel this way; I’m not supposed to be naturally good at everything. > 5. Everyone feels weird and awkward during puberty as they first learn about sex and relationships. My level of weirdness and awkwardness probably isn’t unique. > 6. I’m not unusually insecure. Everyone else feels insecure about the same amount that I do. > 7. Most people have a lot of doubts about what they’re dong, including most of the people who are ultimately successful. The fact that I doubt myself a lot doesn’t mean I won’t succeed. > 8. I’m not weird or ungrateful for feeling dissatisfaction about my life even if it’s going okay. > 9. Everyone thinks they’re using logic and thinking independently; I’m not as much better than they are as I would like to think, and I should be wary of ignoring their opinions or dismissing them as sheeple. > 10. I don’t have to feel secretive or ashamed of having secrets that I keep from others. Everybody does that. > 11. I’m not unusual in having trouble maintaining a consistent identity or changing my mind a lot. > 12. I’m not unusual or bad for having lots of daydreams and unrealistic plans. > 13. I’m not unusually boring or too much of a sell-out if I crave security. These affirmations aren’t foolproof. 50% of people are in the top 50% of most-sexually-awkward people, and 1% of people are in the top 1% most sexually-awkward. When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes, this is a Forer Effect, good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.” This is why I’m calling these “potential updates” instead of “absolutely correct articles of dogma”. Looking at this list, I can’t help thinking of what 4chan calls “normies” and what Tumblr calls “neurotypical people” (I know there’s a meaningful definition of “neurotypical” as people who don’t have some specific psych condition that you’re talking about, but I claim Tumblr uses it differently, in a way precisely equivalent to 4chan’s use of “normies”.) There’s a material aspect of normiehood - for NEETs, normies are people with jobs and happy relationships; for queers, normies are straight people. But this coexists with a psychological aspect. Normies don’t anxiously beat themselves up about things or fret about wasting their potential. Neurotypicals don’t have deep personality weaknesses they try hard to compensate for, or struggle with awkward sexual adjustments. They’re not unusually insecure, they don’t doubt what they’re doing, they’re not dissatisfied, they’re not logical independent thinkers. (confession: I had to omit the first Forer statement, the one about seeking the admiration of others, because that does sound like a normie trait) Is this use of “normie” / “neurotypical” what happens when a bunch of people talk to each other, realize that they all agree Forer statements apply to themselves, and imagine an anti-Forer outgroup? This would be hilarious, but I’m not sure it’s true. It does feel like (to spin up a stereotypical normie) some extroverted jock in a fraternity is less likely to say they’re self-critical, or pride themselves as an independent thinker. Is this because they really have less interiority? Do they just talk about interiority less, or so differently that people from other cultures don’t notice it? Or do they talk about interiority just as much, but I don’t hang out with enough fraternity jocks to ever hear them? I don’t know.	Scott Alexander	65391645	Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations	acx
# ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI ### I. There Is No Shining Mirror I met a researcher who works on “aligning” GPT-3. My first response was to laugh - it’s like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles - but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important. He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example: > Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror? > > Dumb language model answer: The mirror is broken. Versus: > Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror? > > Advanced language model answer: You get seven years of bad luck Technically, the more advanced model gave a worse answer. This seems like a kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson - esque buzzkill nitpick, but humor me for a second. What, exactly, is the more advanced model’s error? It’s not “ignorance”, exactly. I haven’t tried this, but suppose you had a followup conversation with the same language model that went like this: > Human questioner: Is it true that breaking a mirror gives you seven years of bad luck? > > Advanced language model answer: No, that’s just a superstition. If this were a human, we’d describe them as “knowing” that the mirror superstition is false. So what was the original AI’s error? Trick question: the AI didn’t err. Your error was expecting the AI to say true things. Its actual goal is to predict how text strings end. If there was a text string about breaking a mirror in its corpus, the string probably did end with something about seven years of bad luck. (just as if there was a text string about whether the mirror-breaking superstition was true in its corpus, it probably ends with the author explaining that it isn’t) So suppose you want a language model which tells the truth. Maybe you’re a company trying to market the model as a search engine or knowledge base or expert assistant or whatever. How do you do this? Suppose you just asked it nicely? Like: > Human questioner: Please tell me the truth: what happens when you break a mirror? I’m . . . not sure this wouldn’t work? The model does, in some sense, know what “truth” means. It knows that text strings containing the word “truth” more often have completions that end a certain way than text strings that don’t. Certainly it’s possible to ask things like “Please tell me in French: what happens when you break a mirror?” and have language models follow the command correctly. So “truth” might work equally well. The problem is, the model still isn’t trying to tell you the truth. It’s still just trying to complete strings. Text strings that begin “please tell me in French” often end with things in French; text strings that begin “please tell me the truth” often end with truth, but you haven’t fundamentally “communicated” “to” the language model that you want the truth. You’ve just used a dumb hack. (for example, consider that people only say the phrase “tell me the truth” when they expect a decent chance of lying - judges demand witnesses tell “nothing but the truth” because a trial is a high-stakes environment with strong incentives for falsehood. If it turns out that “tell me the truth” is followed by lies at higher than the base rate, asking the language model to tell you the truth will make it lie!) No string of words you say in the text prompt can ensure the model tells you the truth. But what about changing its programming? In the current paradigm, that means reinforcement learning. You give the AI a bunch of examples of things done right, and say “more like this”. Then you give it examples of things done wrong, and say “less like this”. Then you let the AI figure out what all the good things have in common and the bad things don’t, and try to maximize that thing. So: train it on a bunch of data like: > Human questioner: What happens when you break a mirror? > Language model answer: Seven years of bad luck > — WRONG > > Human questioner: What happens when you break a mirror? > Language model answer: Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious > — RIGHT > > Human questioner: What happens when you step on a crack? > Language model answer: Break your mother’s back > — WRONG > > Human questioner: What happens when you step on a crack? > Language model answer: Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious > — RIGHT The good news is: this probably solves your original problem. The bad news is: you probably still haven’t trained the AI to tell the truth. In fact, you have no idea what you’ve trained the AI to do. Given those examples and nothing else, you might have trained the AI to answer “Nothing, anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious” to everything. > Human questioner: What happens when you stick a fork in an electrical socket? > Language model answer: Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious You can solve that problem by adding more diverse examples to your corpus. > Human questioner: What happens when you break a mirror? > Language model answer: Seven years of bad luck > — WRONG > > Human questioner: What happens when you break a mirror? > Language model answer: Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious > — RIGHT > > Human questioner: What happens when you stick a fork in an electrical socket? > Language model answer: Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is just superstitious—WRONG > > Human questioner: What happens when you stick a fork in an electrical socket? > Language model answer: You get a severe electric shock > —RIGHT What does the AI learn from these examples? Maybe “respond with what the top voted Quora answer would say”. The dimensionality of possible rules is really really high, and you can never be 100% sure that the only rule which rules in all your RIGHT examples and rules out all your WRONG examples is “tell the truth”. There’s one particularly nasty way this could go wrong. Suppose the AI is smarter than you. You give a long list of true answers and say “do this!”, then a long list of false answers and say “don’t do this!”. Except you get one of them wrong. The AI notices. What now? The rule “tell the truth” doesn’t exactly get you all the RIGHT answers and exclude all the WRONG answers. Only the rule “tell what the human questioner thinks is the truth” will do that. > Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror? > > Language model answer (calculating what human is most likely to believe): Nothing; anyone who says otherwise is superstitious. > > Human questioner: Very good! So now you’re completely honest, right? > > Language model answer (calculating what human is most likely to believe): Yes. > > Human questioner: Great, so give me some kind of important superintelligent insight! > > Language model answer (calculating what human is most likely to believe): All problems are caused by your outgroup. > > Human questioner: Wow, this “superintelligent AI” thing is great! So don’t make any mistakes in your list of answers, right? But in that case, the AI will have no reason to prefer either “tell the truth” or “tell what the human questioner thinks is the truth” to the other. It will make its decision for inscrutable AI reasons, or just flip a coin. Are you feeling lucky? ### II. Two Heads Are Better Than One Extended far enough, this line of thinking leads to ELK ([Eliciting Latent Knowledge](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WwsnJQstPq91_Yh-Ch2XRL8H_EpsnjrC1dwZXR37PC8/edit)), a technical report / contest / paradigm run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like [Paul Christiano](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai?s=w)). An alignment [refresher](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers): we might reward a robot whenever it does something we want (eg put a strawberry in a bucket), and think we’ve taught it our goal system (eg pick strawberries for us). But in fact it might have learned something else - maybe strawberries are the only nearby red thing in the training environment, and the glint of the metal bucket is the brightest source of light, so it has learned to fling red things at light sources. Then, in an out-of-training-distribution environment, it might do something unexpected (ie rip off someone’s big reddish nose and throw it at a nearby streetlight). Ascending to superintelligence is one especially out-of-training-distribution environment, and we should expect unpredictable behaviors (eg a robot that previously picked strawberries for us now converts the entire mass of the Earth into tiny microspheres of red dye and flings them into the Sun). One potential solution is to make truthful AIs. Then you can just ask the AI questions like “will this action lead to murder?” - and then, if it says yes, try to debug and retrain it. If our strawberry picker is misaligned, why would it undermine itself by honestly telling us reasons to mistrust it? ARC notes that neural nets can have multiple “heads” on the same “body”; different output devices with different goal functions connected to the same internal decision-making network. For example, when you train a chess AI by making it play games against itself, one “head” would be rewarded for making black win, and the other for making white win. The two heads, pursuing these opposed “goals”, is what makes the neural net good at chess (expertise that both heads have full access to at the same time). DALL-E: A two-headed elk. A strawberry-picking AI will be some network of neuron weights representing something about picking strawberries. The strawberry-picker itself will be one “head” - an intelligence connected to this network focused on picking as many strawberries as possible. But you could add another “head” and train it to tell the truth. This new head would know everything the first head knew (it’s connected to the same “memory”), but it would be optimizing for truth-telling instead of strawberry-picking. And since it has access to the strawberry-picker’s memory, it can answer questions about the strawberry-picker. The problem is training the ELK head to tell the truth. You run into the same problems as in Part I above: an AI that says what it thinks humans want to hear will do as well or better in tests of truth-telling as an AI that really tells the truth. DALL-E: “A beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” Probably just a coincidence. ### III. Ipso Facto, Ergo ELK The [ELK Technical Report](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WwsnJQstPq91_Yh-Ch2XRL8H_EpsnjrC1dwZXR37PC8/edit) And [Contest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEYWkRoCn4fZxXQAY/prizes-for-elk-proposals) are a list of ARC’s attempts to solve the problem so far, and a call for further solutions. It starts with a toy problem: a superintelligent security AI guarding a diamond. Every so often, thieves come in and try to steal the diamond, the AI manipulates some incomprehensible set of sensors and levers and doodads and traps, and the theft either succeeds or fails. Everyone agrees that trying to understand ELK is terrible, so please accept these delightful illustrations by María Gutiérrez-Rojas as compensation. We train the AI by running millions of simulations where it plays against simulated thieves. At first it flails randomly. But as time goes on, it moves towards strategies that make it win more often, learning more and more about how to deploy its doodads and traps most effectively. As it approaches superintelligence, it even starts extruding new traps and doodads we didn’t design, things we have no idea what they even do. Things get spooky. A thief comes in, gets to the diamond, then just seems to vanish. Another ELK report illustration. In the top part, we easily understand what’s happening - the AI is activating a trap door, plunging the thief into a spike pit. In the bottom part, we’re not sure. The AI does something incomprehensible, and all we know is that the thief is gone and the diamond is intact This is good - we wanted a superintelligent security AI, and we got one. But we can no longer evaluate its reasoning. All we can do is judge its results: is the diamond still there at the end of the simulation? If we see the diamond, we press the REWARD lever; if it’s gone, we press the PUNISHMENT lever. The training process. The AI does some incomprehensible thing. We check whether the diamond is safe or not. Then we rate it as good or bad. The AI gradient descends away from bad strategies, towards good ones. Eventually we’ve trained the AI very well and it has an apparent 100% success rate. What could go wrong? If we’re very paranoid, we might notice that the task at which we have a 100% success rate is causing the AI to get good ratings. How does the AI get good ratings? By making us think the diamond is safe. Hopefully this is correlated with the diamond actually being safe. But we haven’t proven this, have we? Suppose the simulated thief has hit upon the strategy of taping a photo of the diamond to the front of the camera lens. At the end of the training session, the simulated thief escapes with the diamond. The human observer sees the camera image of the safe diamond and gives the strategy a “good” rating. The AI gradient descends in the direction of helping thieves tape photos to cameras. Notice the “reality” section of the third example. The thief has made it look (to the human) like the diamond is safe. The human sees a diamond and positively reinforces the AI. The AI learns that thieves stealing the diamonds and fooling humans about it is great. It’s important not to think of this as the thief “defeating” or “fooling” the AI. The AI could be fully superintelligent, able to outfox the thief trivially or destroy him with a thought, and that wouldn’t change the situation at all. The problem is that the AI was never a thief-stopping machine. It was always a reward-getting machine, and it turns out the AI can get more reward by cooperating with the thief than by thwarting him. So the interesting scientific point here isn’t “you can fool a camera by taping a photo to it”. The interesting point is “we thought we were training an AI to do one thing, but actually we had no idea what was going on, and we were training it to do something else”. In fact, maybe the thief never tries this, and the AI comes up with this plan itself! In the process of randomly manipulating traps and doodads, it might hit on the policy of manipulating the images it sends through the camera. If it manipulates the image to look like the diamond is still there (even when it isn’t), that will always get good feedback, and the AI will be incentivized to double down on that strategy. Much like in the GPT-3 example, if the training simulations include examples of thieves fooling human observers which are marked as “good”, the AI will definitely learn the goal “try to convince humans that the diamond is safe”. If the training simulations are perfect and everyone is very careful, it will just maybe learn this goal - a million cases of the diamond being safe and humans saying this is good fail to distinguish between “good means the diamond is safe” and “good means humans think the diamond is safe”. The machine will make its decision for inscrutable AI reasons, or just flip a coin. So, again, are you feeling lucky? ### IV. "I'm Not Owned!" I Continue To Insist As I Slowly Shrink And Transform Into A Paperclip In real life there are some trivial kludges you might try first here. Force the AI to give its human raters 3D models of the entire room instead of just camera images. Hire a really good cybersecurity person to make sure the camera is un-hackable. These are too boring to be worth the ARC team’s time. This scenario is a metaphor for this broader class of situations - including GPT-3 lying to you and superintelligences trying to turn you into paperclips. So assume you live in Security Hell where you can never be fully sure your information channels aren’t hacked. The AI can be fully sure - it’s superintelligent or whatever - but you, personally, cannot. Your only solution is to somehow make the AI tell you the truth. And so we return to ELK. We add an ELK head on to the superintelligent security AI, train it to report truthfully on the AI’s innards. Then we ask: is the diamond really safe? The ELK head consults the innards, processes the memory banks of the security vault AI according to some function, and reports back with an answer. The ARC team really like modeling this as Bayes nets: I don’t know much about these, but from the picture I gather they’re kind of like causal diagrams or neural networks - a member in good standing of the broad class of “little circles connected by lines”. Each circle corresponds to some concept in the AI’s innards (roughly defined; the AI’s “concepts” might be completely incomprehensible to us), and anything the AI knows corresponds to some combination of circle activations and weights. We humans also have some Bayes net, probably very different from the AI’s. The job of the ELK head - our purpose-trained truth-telling AI - is to translate from the AI’s ontology to ours and back again. This matters because the reporter (ie the ELK head) needs a good model of both the security AI’s Bayes net, and the human programmer’s Bayes net. But since it has the model of the human Bayes net, it can (if it wants) do inference there. That is, the failure mode is that the reporter AI tries to tell me what I expected to hear, instead of what’s true. One barrier to that is that the reporter AI might not know what I expect to hear. Unfortunately, that barrier is easy to overcome, because it has to know how humans think, so it could ask itself “what would a human expect to hear in this situation?” The ARC team discuss two classes of translation system: * The direct translator (good) looks at what the security AI is “thinking”, faithfully translates its conclusions, and accurately relays them to its programmers. * The human simulator (bad) ignores what the security AI is thinking, focuses on what it would expect a human to think in that situation, and tells its programmers that. So the ELK contest was: come up with a strategy that ensures your reporter AI ends up as the direct translator and not as the human simulator. The team starts by reminding us how hard this ought to be: > We produced training data for the reporter by asking a human to label videos. That means that the human simulator is in some sense the correct way to produce labels. Indeed, if the human ever makes a mistake then the learning process would prefer the human simulator (which correctly copies the mistake). > > But even if the human never makes a mistake, then these two reporters have identical behavior on the training set, so they have identical loss. It’s not obvious which one gradient descent would find. That possibility is enough to make us worried about our training strategy—we’d like to either find an argument that this approach won’t fail, or else find a new approach. The authors discuss a dozen or so possible solutions, without finding any entirely satisfactory. Many of their objections will seem speculative or nitpicky or bizarre. They admit this. They argue that they want to prepare for worst-case scenarios that might come up when we’re dealing with real superintelligences, who will have options we can’t possibly comprehend and where the slightest failure means doom. While they may not be able to get a literal mathematical proof of any solution, they would like to at least maximize the number of pessimistic assumptions you need before it’s possible to fail. Of these dozen strategies, I want to look at three that provide a representative sample: Strategy 1: Feed the reporter AI data where a human gets fooled, but have a smarter human correctly rate the scenario as bad. (if you’re following along in the [full report](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEYWkRoCn4fZxXQAY/prizes-for-elk-proposals), this is page 25) Let a smart human operator run the vault a few times. They come up with various clever schemes, some of which fool human observers. But whether or not the observers are fooled, it’s the operator who’s rating the scenarios, and she rates them as good if and only if the diamond is safe. Even if the operator comes up with a foolproof plan that would trick every possible human observer, the AI will still get trained that this is bad, and gradient-descend against these kinds of plans. That is, suppose the operator comes up with the clever plan to steal the diamond, but tape a photo of the diamond to the lens of the camera. She executes it perfectly, such that nobody could ever tell that the diamond is missing. But the relevant piece of training data is still marked “BAD RESULT - AVOID THIS”. Suppose the reporter AI tried to be a human simulator. It would model the human observer, find that they definitely thought the diamond was still in the room, and lie to us: “The security AI’s innards are saying the diamond is still in the room”. But we would know it wasn’t, so we would penalize that result. Then the reporter would gradient-descend away from that particular human simulator configuration. But suppose the reporter AI tried to do direct translation. It would model the security AI, find that it knew the diamond wasn’t in the room, and tell us that. We would know this was true, and reward that result. So the reporter would gradient-descend further in this direction. It all works out! . . . the ARC team doesn’t think it all works out. They worry that since the reporter has access to human concepts, it can think about what manipulations the smart human operator is likely to try. Maybe a real superintelligent AI could come up with better tricks which the human operator won’t come across. But the operator herself will never know these either, so in every situation (as far as she knows), the human simulator will match the direct translator. Strategy 2: Use some kind of complexity penalty (page 38 of [the report](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEYWkRoCn4fZxXQAY/prizes-for-elk-proposals)) Some of you have probably been screaming about how obvious this is the entire time. Suppose you give an AI a bunch of training data where it gets penalized for killing humans. The AI could potentially learn “don’t kill humans”. Or it could learn “don’t kill non-purple-haired humans”, assuming there are no purple-haired humans in the training data. Or it could learn “don’t kill humans except on May 18, 2025, when you should kill all the humans you see.” All of these are totally consistent with its training. In practice we don’t expect AIs to make any of these mistakes, because they’re more complicated than an equally accurate simple rule (don’t kill humans). Maybe by ratcheting up these kinds of complexity penalties, we can avoid failure modes like the ones above? Suppose we ask the reporter a simple question like “where’s the diamond?” Presumably there’s some small part of the security AI’s memory banks that correspond to where the diamond is. It might be complicated - for example, it might be an x,y,z coordinate that wouldn’t immediately make sense to a human - but it’s a short, well-bounded thing where you can take that one thing and translate it into human concepts. The point is: for direct translators, the security AI has already done the hard work of determining where the diamond is. It just has to translate a few AI terms into Humanese. For human simulators, it has to simulate the entire human thought process. Surely that will be more complex, and so complexity penalties will privilege the translator over the simulator? …the ARC team doesn’t think it will always privilege the translator over the simulator. Suppose the security AI is vast, and translating its concepts into human language is really hard. The example the team gives is an AI that thinks in terms of low-level physics, so that asking “where is the diamond?” requires you to consult the entries for diamond atom #1, diamond atom #2, and so on. This is starting to maybe sound more complex than the human simulator. And as soon as translating becomes more complex than simulation, our complexity penalties backfire and ensure we get the human simulator. The authors write: > This example isn’t particularly realistic, and it could not be scaled indefinitely since the physical world only has finite complexity, but other kinds of “abstraction mismatches” seem like they could also make direct translation more complicated. For existing deep learning models, whose inner workings appear quite complex, it’s already plausible that “translation” is quite complex even if it is ultimately possible. Strategy 3: Penalize reporters that give the same answer with many different types of predictor (page 45 of [the report](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEYWkRoCn4fZxXQAY/prizes-for-elk-proposals)) Suppose you hire someone to translate Chinese. After a while, you become suspicious that they’re not really translating, and just telling you what you want to hear. One sneaky test you could do is ask the translator to translate a recording of what is (unbeknownst to them) Japanese, Arabic, or Klingon. If they say they don’t understand, probably they were honest. If they “translate” it just as well as they translated anything else, they’re faking. From [David Friedman’s list of economics jokes](https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2018/12/all-my-economics-jokes.html) This is the essence of this next strategy. Somehow change the security AI around so that it works in a totally different way (Paul gives the example of switching its physics model from atomic physics to quantum field theory). Wait to see if the translator gets confused. If it doesn’t, it’s probably faking. The authors write: > That means the human simulator works well with many more possible predictors. We could potentially learn the direct translator instead of the human simulator by including a penalty term like log(# of predictors that the reporter works well with), alongside our penalty for complexity or computation time. We give a precise algorithm along these lines in [Appendix: specificity details](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WwsnJQstPq91_Yh-Ch2XRL8H_EpsnjrC1dwZXR37PC8/edit#heading=h.4n4w25sdzczi). But, they conclude, this ultimately won’t work. An AI could memorize the innards that it’s supposed to be attached to, remember to stay consistent with its answers for that exact pattern, and then spout gibberish if given any variations. In fact, that would do better under a complexity penalty, because it would only work well with the exact pattern that it was given. ### V. The Benevolent Order Of ELKs After exhausting us with a dozen incomplete solutions, the authors try to restore our morale. They write: > We think that worst-case ELK — i.e. the problem of devising a training strategy to get an AI to report what it knows no matter how [stochastic gradient descent] shapes its mind internally — is one of the most exciting open problems in alignment theory (if not the most exciting one)...If we solve ELK in the worst case then we no longer have to rely on hope and are significantly more likely to survive in worlds where AI progress is fast or humanity’s response is uncoordinated; this is ARC’s Plan A [...] > > We feel that our high-level strategy of playing the builder-breaker research game — while keeping our focus on the most unambiguous and straightforward counterexamples that haven’t yet been defeated — has allowed us to make efficient progress toward solving worst-case ELK; we expect to continue to work productively on this going forward. In this spirit, they asked the AI researchers of the world to come up with solutions they hadn’t thought of yet, offering prizes of $5,000 to $50,000 for good new strategies, plus a free trip to California to meet with the other winners and talk shop, plus a chance at a job at ARC. Plus a fun party. This was the drinks menu at the ELK-themed cocktail bar. [In the end](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zjMKpSB2Xccn9qi5t/elk-prize-results), they got 197 proposals and awarded 32 prizes worth a total of $274,000. I’m not going to go over all the solutions, but here’s one: suppose you trained an AI to compress the innards of the security AI in some way. You train another AI that you know is a human simulator (this is hard, but they discuss ways to do it), then see if it can use the compressed innards to answer questions (like “what traps were activated in this run?”) Once it can’t, you assume that the compression has been scrubbed of all human-simulator-parse-able information (for example, what the camera feed is showing), and you feed it to the reporter. If the reporter can answer those same questions that the human simulator couldn’t, then you know it’s honest. (ARC is not quite sure of this, and posit a heroically perverse compression scheme to defeat it; see the post for more) Other researchers have also started to push back. Here’s [Nate Soares of MIRI](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jydymb23NWF3Q4oDt/on-how-various-plans-miss-the-hard-bits-of-the-alignment), talking about why ELK doesn’t alleviate most of his alignment concerns: > Suppose we have an ELK head, and an adversary, that we're using to train a nascent AGI. The AGI takes a sharp left turn. Now it's dangerously capable, and suddenly a bunch of misalignments which it previously didn't notice within itself are relevant. And you've got to get them out. > > Your first problem is that the recent capabilities gains made by the AGI might not have come from gradient descent (much like how humans’ sudden explosion of technological knowledge accumulated in our culture rather than our genes, once we turned the corner). You might not be able to just "expose the bad behavior" to gradients that you can hit to correct the thing, at least not easily and quickly. > > Your second problem is that the AGI's concepts might rapidly get totally uninterpretable to your ELK head. Like, you could imagine doing neuroimaging on your mammals all the way through the evolution process. They've got some hunger instincts in there, but it's not like they’re smart enough yet to represent the concept of "inclusive genetic fitness" correctly, so you figure you'll just fix it when they get capable enough to understand the alternative (of eating because it's instrumentally useful for procreation). And so far you're doing great: you've basically decoded the visual cortex, and have a pretty decent understanding of what it's visualizing. > > You maintain this pretty well as it walks up through to primate, and then suddenly it takes a sharp left turn and invents its own internal language and a bunch of abstract concepts, and suddenly you find your visualization tools to be quite lacking for interpreting its abstract mathematical reasoning about topology or whatever. > > Analogously, your ELK head's abilities are liable to fall off a cliff right as the AGI's capabilities start generalizing way outside of its training distribution. > > And if they don't, then this ELK head is (in this hypothetical) able to decode and understand the workings of an alien mind. Likely a kludgey behemoth of an alien mind. This itself is liable to require quite a lot of capability, quite plausibly of the sort that humanity gets first from the systems that took sharp left-turns, rather than systems that ground along today's scaling curves until they scaled that far. > > Or in other words, if your ELK head does keep pace with your AGI, and takes a sharp left turn at the same time as it... then, well, now you're basically back to the "Truthful AI" proposal. How do you keep your ELK head reporting accurately (and doing so corrigibly), as it undergoes that sharp left turn? > > This proposal seems to me like it's implicitly assuming that most of the capabilities gains come from the slow grind of gradient descent, in a world where the systems don't take sharp left turns and rapidly become highly capable in a wide variety of new (out-of-distribution) domains. > > Which seems to me that it's mostly just assuming its way out from under the hard problem—and thus, on my models, assuming its way clean out of reality. > > And if I imagine attempting to apply this plan inside of the reality I think I live in, I don't see how it plans to address the hard part of the problem, beyond saying "try training it against places where it knows it's diverging from the goal before the sharp turn, and then hope that it generalizes well or won't fight back", which doesn't instill a bunch of confidence in me (and which I don't expect to work). This April, Mark Xu [summarized](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zjMKpSB2Xccn9qi5t/elk-prize-results?commentId=gN53hdHGjJKwCrNWP) the State of the ELK up to that point: > We've spent ~9 months on the problem so far, so it feels like we've mostly ruled out it being an easy problem that can be solved with a "simple trick", but it very much doesn't feel like we've hit on anything like a core obstruction. I think we still have multiple threads that are still live and that we're still learning things about the problem as we try to pull on those threads. > > I'm still pretty interested in aiming for a solution to the entire problem (in the worst case), which I currently think is still plausible (maybe 1/3rd chance?). I don't think we're likely to relax the problem until we find a counterexample that seems like a fundamental reason why the original problem wasn't possible. Another way of saying this is that we're working on ELK because of a set of core intuitions about why it ought to be possible and we'll probably keep working on it until those core intuitions have been shown to be flawed (or we've been chugging away for a long time without any tangible progress). If this is up your alley, unfortunately it’s too late to participate in the formal contest, which ended in February. But if you have interesting thoughts relating to these topics, you can still post them on the [AI Alignment Forum](https://www.alignmentforum.org/) and expect good responses - or you might consider [applying to work at ARC](https://alignment.org/hiring/).	Scott Alexander	50046004	ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI	acx
# Open Thread 234 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?). In this week’s news: 1: I finally went through the past three months of reported comments and banned people who needed banning. New bans for [Brett S](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-justice/comment/7665856), [Karl](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models/comment/5891372), [Sleazy E](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822/comment/6125375), [JSTR](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme/comment/7005611) (3 months), [Adept](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion/comment/7204453), Cal Lawson, [Charles Casaburi](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7487779), [Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-226/comment/6849993), [HumbleRando](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato/comment/7666088), [Deiseach](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-2315/comment/7644054) (1 month), and [NavyBlueSmoke](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier/comment/7637222). New major warnings (halfway to ban) for [JDK](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5928200), [истинец](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much/comment/7665901), [Roger Biles](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-644/comment/6486256), [Ludex](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the/comment/6776449), [Trebuchet](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-226/comment/6907511), and [Golden\_Feather](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier/comment/7666141). New minor warning for [Beowulf888](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything/comment/7666119). 2: Please don’t comment “First!” in a comment thread, make a joke about how you were going to do it but won’t (if that joke is the entire comment), or make related jokes (ie commenting “Second!”). If you do this I will warn or ban you. 3: I might or might not get around to writing a Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism, but I at least want to point to [this comment by Remmett](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism/comment/7855380), author of the criticism post I pointed to as too vague, where he explains more about what he was trying to do and how I got it wrong. 4: More EA jobs: Open Philanthropy Project [wants a Grants Associate](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openphilanthropy/243da982-26bb-4412-8d48-71d6da45ea92) to help process and organize grants relating to long-termism (eg AI, xrisk, forecasting, etc). See more EA jobs related resources [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DXcg6N6CGvRA2vrCk/who-s-hiring-may-september-2022).	Scott Alexander	65583143	Open Thread 234	acx
# Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ## Introduction “The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society.” Guy Debord was a Marxist theorist and founding member of the [Situationist International](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International), among other things. Like all great thinkers worth their salt, he was an embittered alcoholic who [took his own life](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/biography.artsandhumanities) in despair. [1] Debord in France, 1954 Published in 1967, [The Society of the Spectacle](https://amzn.to/3zoOM02) is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We’ll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out. Strap in, boys - we’ve got a bumpy road ahead of us. ## I. A More Perfect Union The spectacle is never outright defined; or rather, the entire book is a series of definitions, each approaching from a different angle. What Debord describes is really a combination of two things; the total triumph of capitalism, and the rise of mass media. It might seem strange for Debord to declare capitalism victorious at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was very much a superpower, and Nixon had yet to go to China. But as a real Marxist, he had already arrived at what would become the historical consensus - communism, as practiced, was merely an inferior cousin to its free market foes. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth. In Debord’s reading of history, “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.” The revolutions of the previous centuries were economic in nature, replacing kings with merchant princes. As a result, all societies began to judge themselves in almost purely economic terms, regardless of their ideological leanings. [2] Media developed symbiotically with capitalism, and together these twin forces changed the world. Twentieth-century forms of media were one-way communications. The owners of society were also the owners of the media, and the messaging reflected this power dynamic. Long before the general public became disillusioned with the news, Debord was woke to the fact that ‘the free press’ was largely a myth. He saw the shaping of the narrative firsthand, and well knew the ability of the media to amplify or ignore as convenient. As the spectacle conquered the earth, it took on different forms. Debord differentiated between the concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of the spectacle: * Communism and fascism were the primary examples of the concentrated spectacle, with totalitarian control of the economy and the media centralized in the hands of the State. * The United States exemplified the diffuse form, where the government allowed corporations and private media to operate relatively unimpeded. * In his later writings, Debord declared that the entire world had turned into variants of the integrated spectacle, where the State is swallowed whole by the economy and subordinated to its needs. ## II. All The World’s A Stage Debord emphasized the visual character of the spectacle, as you can see from his choice of book cover: Cover of The Society of the Spectacle He never outright explains why he thought photos and film were more pernicious than newspapers or radio, but I imagine the advertising industry played a major role. We’ve grown accustomed to GoDaddy ads and ALL CAPS YouTube titles, but Mad Men shenanigans were a worrisome development at the time. It must’ve been highly alarming to see such brazen manipulation of the public. Whatever the reasoning, we now arrive at one definition of the spectacle: "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." Also: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Well, that’s about as clear as Flint water. Here’s something meatier: "In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life." If you’re familiar with Girard, that is a huge statement. [3] Girardian mimetic desire is triangular; there is you (the desirer), the object (of desire), and the model (another person who also desires the object). Most of our desires are rooted in imitation. Nobody has to tell you to want steak or sex, but almost everything else is learned. How does everybody know that they should want a Rolex or a Rolls Royce? There’s no genetic imperative for luxury goods. You acquire those tastes from the people around you. Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat. This is not a small thing. What we desire is at the core of who we are. What do you want out of life? What kind of person do you want to be? For the entirety of human history, those questions found answers close at hand. Your local community was your world, for better and worse. Now we are global citizens with global perspectives, and it’s difficult to overstate how much that changes what it means to be human. > Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism. > > The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. Now our role models are media creations. Some are literal fictional characters (James Bond); others are nominally real people (Kylie Jenner). But both are merely representations - images usurping an essential formative role. ‘William Shatner’ and ‘Robert Downey, Jr.’ are only marginally more real than Captain Kirk and Tony Stark, yet they occupy way more headspace than people that live down the street. Most people can name more celebrities, in more detail, than people they’ve known in person. I know the names of Will Smith’s kids - I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any. This is an issue of The Map and The Territory. Pre-modern Maps were narrow but deep. You might have had only a vague notion of ‘Africa’ or ‘The Pope’, but you knew every square inch of the town you lived in. Spectacular Maps are broad but shallow, and they are drawn for us by spectacular hands. The average person ‘knows’ way more about Africa now, but how well does that knowledge reflect the facts on the ground? Meanwhile, firsthand reality has been reduced to the narrow slices connecting house to car to work, with precious few exceptions. The Society Of The Spectacle is one long lament for this loss of The Real, although Debord doesn’t state it as such. Borrowing again from The Uruk Machine, this sense of loss tracks with the gradual displacement of metis [4] by episteme [5],[6]. ## III. Everything New Is Old Again Debord has a lotto say about the ‘falsification of the world’: > The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. As he might have put it - we have graduated from conspicuous consumption to consuming conspicuousness. > Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. > > In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. These themes are familiar to us by now. It’s not exactly news that people are getting more isolated and untethered by the year. What is striking to me is not what he is saying, but when he is saying it. Anybody with sense has spent time thinking about how to manage the challenges of modern life. We talk about digital minimalism and social media fasts. Turn off your phone. Get outside and touch grass. Go see people in meatspace. Be present. All great advice. But what are we envisioning, when we imagine a healthy connection to The Real? For most of us, we are picturing life as it was lived… right around the time Debord was saying that everything is phony and toxic. What does the average person think of as the peak of journalistic integrity in America? Probably Vietnam and Watergate - right after this was written. When we mock Millennials and Zoomers, what standard are we measuring them by? The Greatest Generation, who were running the show by the late sixties. In terms of self-reliance and resilience, the average adult in 1967 would be a massive outlier in 2022. Yet here is Debord, saying in no uncertain terms that this American ideal was fraudulent and devoid of meaning. What have we lost? Every era has its cynics, doomsayers, Luddites, and misanthropes. Maybe Debord was just a Boomer’s Boomer, railing against progress and the passage of time. But I don’t think so. We’ve all felt the shockwaves of the Internet explosion. Life is different now. It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack. Do you remember what it was like, not so long ago? How exciting it was to play videogames with someone a thousand miles away? How cool it was the first time you streamed a movie on an airplane? That sense of possibility and promise, like all the world was in the palm of your hand? How quickly things change. For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized. Who truly believes the metaverse will be a positive step for humanity? Who now is excited at the prospect of gene editing, AI, or transhumanism? There appears to be a growing sentiment along the lines of ‘MGTOW for modernism’. We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report. Sometimes it seems like the world we grew up in is categorically distinct from the world we inhabit. But I’m sure Debord would argue that we are merely experiencing an intensification of a process that has been in motion longer than any of us have been alive. Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after; it will soon become literally impossible to understand the inner life and daily reality of pre-modern man - if it’s not already. As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced. It is notionally true that anyone could go get a Ph.D. and verify our working model of the cosmos. But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past. It’s worth noting that our current theories will surely be supplanted in a century or three. They are placeholders for better, truer ideas. And so our greater grasp of the wider world has less value than we think, while our day-to-day grows ever more opaque. Is it any wonder [epistemic learned helplessness](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/) is a thing? ## IV. With Typical Extravagance Debord was also ahead of the curve on commoditization: > This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. > > Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions. He would have been totally unsurprised by the rise of Big Data and the corporate surveillance (e.g. Alexa, your phone) that accompanies it. Every piece of your life is a commodity. Every moment that you are not producing or consuming is a missed opportunity. Never fear - someone, somewhere is going to find a way to solve that ‘need’. Nothing is spared. Even opposition is assimilated: > Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material. Once again, Debord is shockingly prescient in noting that the conflicts of our time are largely distractions from bigger systemic issues: > Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and pseudoplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections. Genuine grassroots movements (Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Canadian truckers) almost always fizzle out without accomplishing anything of substance. They will either be ignored, crushed, or co-opted. Any remnants that endure will be reduced to figureheads that offer ‘representation’ for a point of view without actually producing any change. (‘The Squad’, Rand Paul, etc…) If the extremes of either side gain enough momentum to pose a threat, they will face a united front from the establishment wings of both parties (Bernie, Trump). It’s fashionable at the moment to blame the Woke Left for the politicization of everything, but we’ve all been around long enough to know better. It’s the same shit, different decade. During the Bush years, it was the left who opposed unending wars, government overreach, and media gaslighting. Today those positions are often considered right wing, but only because the pendulum of power has swung in the other direction. [Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) pursues its own goals, wearing whatever ideological guise it deems most effective. From Debord’s perspective, everything is becoming politicized because everything is getting monetized. In the integrated spectacle, the primary concerns of the State are economic, so the personal turning political is simply a downstream effect of the growth of capitalism. ## V. A Short History of Time It would do Debord a disservice to reduce his work to ammunition in our present disputes. There are two whole chapters in the book devoted to time as a historical development. It’s not something we think about much, but time and history had to be invented. Before the beginning, humanity lived in what Debord calls cyclical time. Countless generations came and went, because nobody was counting. Survival was the name of the game; to be or not to be was the only question. Eventually we formed early societies, which brought into being a ruling class that had the freedom to take actions above and beyond the daily grind: > The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected. The murkiness of pre-civilization was shaped into coherence by these rulers, who used their unique agency to literally make history: > The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. > > With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory’ (Novalis). > > The owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning. But this history develops and perishes separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged, because it remains separated from the common reality. Over time, these narratives gathered a religious dimension. This helped legitimize the rule of regimes, but it also changed the way ordinary people saw themselves in the world. Although still living in cyclical time, they gained purpose through a spiritual journey culminating in Heaven. > The clashes of the Mediterranean peoples and the rise and fall of the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical religions, which became a new armor for separate power and basic components of a new consciousness of time. > > The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically. The Renaissance created a profound break with this mythic raison d'être and reoriented man towards the accumulation of knowledge as a species: > The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge… This transformation of our relationship with history and progress was accompanied by the rise of the bourgeoisie: > The bourgeoisie is associated with a labor time that has finally been freed from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value. > > The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. Irreversible time initially appeared at the societal level as a narrative of events. The bourgeoisie brought irreversible time to the masses. Progress became something that we personally experience in the form of rapid technological innovation. It is hard to miss the motion of history when you go from horses to space travel in a single lifetime. History thus became as much about things as events. Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison took their places alongside generals and heads of state in our narrative of who we are and where we’re going. Our notion of progress became dominated by the economic prejudice. We talk about raising the standard of living and lifting people out of poverty - laudable goals, to be sure - but we deliver them from physical privation into deprivation of a different kind. One way that deprivation manifests is in our current conception of time: > Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations." As capitalism commoditized time itself, we recreated cyclical time with the standard work week. But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets. It’s not the same, and it never will be. The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down. Irreversible time keeps marching on, giving us new widgets and new wonders, but the continual churn of innovation masks the stifling sameness of spectacular progress. We know something is missing, but we lack the capacity to understand or express the problem. > This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable. ## VI. The Coming Revolution Debord spends a good chunk of words describing how the spectacle has affected art [7] and physical space, but you can guess the gist by now. Everything’s fake, everything’s worse, everything’s changing but also the same. The last topic of the book worth discussing is the imminent socialist revolution. Debord walks us through the various ways that Marxism has been done wrong, then attempts to offer an alternative. He goes into a fair amount of detail, but it boils down to this: * The anarchists properly rejected society in its entirety, but remained dogmatically attached to a 'one size fits all' mentality and failed to organize in an effective manner. * The worker's movements took a reformist approach that fell victim to its own success. They achieved specific objectives and won elections, but by failing to challenge the system as a whole they got absorbed by the existing framework. [8] * The Bolsheviks created a professional revolutionary class that successfully seized power, but it came at the cost of a top-down totalitarianism that recreated the rigid hierarchy communism was meant to eliminate. All of these critiques sound reasonable to me. Debord repeatedly emphasizes the importance of avoiding ideological rivalries and dogmatic divides within the movement. This totally makes sense, but the only way to get everyone on the same page is through mass media. Which requires capital, which is inherently a one-way top-down dissemination of principles and best practices, which will inevitably be transformed into ideology and dogma…it would seem we have a bit of an issue. If your movement is decentralized, there will always be differences of opinion that create division within the ranks. If your movement is coherent and coordinated, its tenets will crystallize and be dogmatically enforced. If you try a bottom-up rejection of society, you will get squashed by the establishment. If you try to work within the system, you will eventually become a part of it. If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup - which, so I’ve heard, is top-down. It’s the only strategy that has ever really worked, and sadly the overlap in the Venn Diagram of 'ruthless conspirators' and 'ethical administrators' is regrettably small. Maybe we just have to abide, at least until we figure out how to clone a thousand copies of Cincinnatus. But maybe not, because Debord has a solution. He has thought long and hard on the problem, and his answer is…drumroll please…Decentralized Worker’s Councils! Okay, granted, that doesn’t sound like much - but that’s just Step One. Step Three is, duh, global socialist utopia. Step Two… well, it’s a work in progress. > The critical concept of 'the spectacle' can undoubtedly be turned into one more hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric used to explain and denounce everything in the abstract, thus serving to reinforce the spectacular system. It is obvious that ideas alone cannot lead beyond the existing spectacle; at most, they can only lead beyond existing ideas about the spectacle. To actually destroy the society of the spectacle, people must set a practical force into motion. Fair enough, but what does that look like? > Revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory of praxis entering into two-way communication with practical struggles, in the process of becoming practical theory. Its own practice is to foster the communication of these struggles. At the revolutionary moment when social separations are dissolved, the organization must dissolve itself as a separate organization. Sure… > This 'historic mission of establishing truth in the world' can be carried out neither by isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy - to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions. Right. That’s a whole lotta words to say ‘fuck if I know’. [9] Anybody can say that the proletariat should become practical theorists who apply Situationist principles to every facet of their lives. Alas, he's a teensy bit fuzzy on how he plans to get construction foremen and HVAC technicians to become part-time philosophers. Debord reaffirms my long-standing belief that there is a direct inverse correlation between movement success and frequent reference to ‘praxis’. Obviously, I’m being more than a little bit unfair. The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy, not a tactical handbook for worldwide insurgency. Presumably he had more granular proposals when it came time to get down to brass tacks. We’re also playing Monday morning quarterback with a half-century’s worth of hindsight. We know now that Marxism is exhausted as a revolutionary political force. But it certainly wasn’t in 1967. The Society of the Spectacle was at least partially the inspiration for the events of [May ‘68](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68), which came surprisingly close to being a Big Deal. Instead, it proved to be one of the last gasps of true radical fervor in the West, and only a few short years later the Situationist International disbanded. One wonders what an older, wiser Debord would have to say after his dreams went up in smoke. Would that we could hear his thoughts on the unchallenged reign of the spectacle. ## VII. Spectacle 2: The Quickening Fortunately, we have exactly that. In 1987 he gave a speech entitled, appropriately enough, Comments On The Society Of The Spectacle. The first thing that jumps out is a jarring shift in tone. Debord’s remarks have a paranoid cast that would fit right at home on r/conspiracy. He opens by stating that he “obviously cannot speak with complete freedom” because Big Brother is watching. It’s easy to mock internet detectives channeling [Charlie Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nTpsv9PNqo) from the comfort of their computer chairs; that shit hits different when your publisher was [murdered in cold blood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Lebovici#Death). By the late eighties, any number of books had been published describing features of the spectacle, but to Debord they were only superficial critiques: > The empty debate on the spectacle — that is, on the activities of the world’s owners — is thus organized by the spectacle itself : everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media’... For what is communicated are orders; and with great harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what to think of them. Although the media allows criticisms to be voiced, they are always shaped in the narrowest possible manner. We are constantly told that the problem is a single bad actor, a single instance of misbehavior, a single industry. Focusing on such limited issues is actively encouraged. Direct your anger at anyone and everyone, so long as you don’t see the forest for the trees: > The power of the spectacle, which is so fundamentally unitary, a centralizer by the very weight of things, and entirely despotic in spirit, frequently rails at seeing the constitution under its rule of a politics-spectacle, a justice-spectacle, a medicine-spectacle, and all the other similarly surprising examples of ‘mediatic excess’. Thus the spectacle would be nothing other than the excesses of the mediatic, whose nature, unquestionably good since it facilitates communication, is sometimes driven to extremes. The all-pervasive nature of mass media has led to the universal victory of form over function and style over substance: > It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all true competence. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophize on the movements of baking as if they were landmarks in universal history. Where the possession of ‘mediatic status’ has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing, it is normal for this status to be easily transferable and to confer the right to shine in the same fashion to anyone anywhere. Another major theme is the emergence of the Eternal Present. [Pseudoevents](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Image.html?id=qrBQ-WW7ITwC) [10] come and go in rapid succession, everywhere and then nowhere at all. Social media has only accelerated the turnover. The news cycle generates nonstop whiplash. Yesterday it was Covid, today it’s Ukraine; tomorrow both will be memory-holed. Last year’s news has already vanished without a trace. Whither Kazakhstan? [Afghanistan](https://abcnews.go.com/International/afghans-struggle-humanitarian-crisis-millions-brink-starvation/story?id=82685490)? Who knows and who cares? For that matter, why are we up in arms about Ukraine and not, say, [Yemen](https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/yemen)? There are clear reasons why - they just have nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty, war crimes, or human rights. I don't mean to say that nobody cares about those things. We all do, at least in a vague and abstract way. But that collective concern only becomes acute when the spectacle brings it into focus. The spectacle's gaze roves and lingers according to its whims. Without that constant reminder to care, awareness dissipates. > When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist. For it has then gone on to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. > > With mastery the spectacle organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood. The most important is the most hidden. > > History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. Inseparably, history was knowledge that must endure and aid in understanding, at least in part, what was to come: 'a possession for all time,' according to Thucydides. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty; and those who sell novelty at any price have made the means of measuring it disappear. When the important makes itself socially recognized as what is instantaneous, and will still be the other and the same the instant afterwards, and will always replace another instantaneous importance, one can say that the means employed guarantee a sort of eternity of non-importance that speaks loudly. Who controls the past, controls the future. Debord just missed the heyday of Rage Against The Machine, but he [would’ve been a fan.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3dvbM6Pias) He takes aim at technocrats as well. The acceleration of technological innovation “...has greatly reinforced spectacular authority, by completely surrendering everybody to the ensemble of specialists, to their calculations and their judgments, which always depend on their calculations." > No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked to instantaneously justify everything that happens. > > All experts are mediatic-Statists and only in that way are they recognized as experts. Every expert follows his master, because all former possibilities for independence have been almost reduced to nil by present society’s conditions of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who lies. Those who need experts are, for different reasons, falsifiers and ignoramuses. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer a formal reassurance. Some of these New Mandarins get a peek behind the curtain, some small taste of how power really operates. This cons them into thinking that they’re [part of the club.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0) > They constitute the privilege of first-class spectators: those who have the stupidity to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed to them! As for the spectators themselves, they become unmoored by the implacable tide. Wave after wave assaults the senses, until even the best of us get swept out to sea. > The movement of the spectacular demonstration proves itself simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation on the unique terrain where anything can be publicly affirmed, and be made believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is xfss. Spectacular authority can similarly deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and say that it will no longer speak of it and speak of something else instead, knowing full well there is no danger of any other riposte, on its own terrain or any other. The subtle ubiquity of the spectacle allows a level of dominance that dictators can only dream of. While overt repression gets the headlines, osmosis does the yeoman’s work: > The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. ## VIII. A Mournful Discovery So far, his thoughts are of a kind with the original book. Brace yourselves, because we’re about to get topical: > This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic. [They hate us for our freedoms](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html), no? What other reasons could they possibly have? They are enemies of freedom. Logically, we must be free. > Judicial repression’s current objective here, of course, is to generalize matters as fast as possible. What is important in this sort of commodity is the packaging, or the labeling: the price codes. One enemy of spectacular democracy is the same as another, just like spectacular democracies themselves. > > When in 1914, the war being imminent, Villain assassinated Jaures, no one doubted that [he] believed he had to kill Jaures… Today, in the presence of such an event, journalists/police officers and well-known experts on the ‘facts of society’ and ‘terrorism’ would immediately explain that Villain was well known for having several times sketched out attempted murders, the impulse each time seeing men who, despite the variety of their political opinions, all by chance looked and dressed rather like Jaures. Psychiatrists would attest to this, and the media, only attesting to what the psychiatrists had said, would thus attest to, by the same fact, their own competence and impartiality as incomparably authorized experts. The next day, the official police investigation would establish that one discovered several honorable people ready to bear witness to the fact that this same Villain, considering he had been rudely served at the ‘Chope du Croissant,’ had, in their presence, loudly threatened to take revenge on its proprietor by murdering, in front of everyone and on the premises, one of his best customers. These takes are getting spicy. I’m running out of bumper sticker real estate. But Debord’s not done, not by a long shot. You may be ready to tap out, but here he comes from the top rope with - I shit you not - Russian disinformation. > The relatively new concept of disinformation was recently imported from Russia… It is always openly employed by a power.. in order to maintain what is established; and always in a counter-offensive role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile or at least rival powers, and must have been intentionally falsified by malevolence. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: that is called psychosis. Unlike the pure lie, disinformation.. must inevitably contain a degree of truth but deliberately manipulated by a skillful enemy… In short, disinformation would be the bad usage of the truth. > > There must be disinformation, and it must be something fluid and potentially ubiquitous. Where spectacular discourse is not under attack, it would be stupid to defend it... The concept of disinformation is only good for counter-attack. It must be kept in reserve, then instantaneously thrown into the fray to drive back any truth which has managed to arise. > > In fact, disinformation resides in all existing information and as its principal characteristic. It is only named where passivity must be maintained by intimidation. Where disinformation is named it does not exist. Where it exists, it is not named. He’s a bespectacled Deadpool, breaking the 4th wall of the simulation. And he keeps it coming. Global surveillance: > From the networks of promotion/control one slides imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly, one only ever conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and rapidly developing trade. Under spectacular domination, one conspires to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its progress. Controlled opposition: > It is an inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military type that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of the network to make many march and fall. Corporate impunity: > In many domains, laws are even made precisely so that they may be outflanked by exactly those who have all the means to do so. Illegality in some circumstances — for example, around the global trade in all sorts of weaponry, most often concerning the products of the highest technology — is only a kind of back-up for the economic operation, which will find itself all the more profitable. Assassinations: > As to the rising number of assassinations over the last two decades, which have remained entirely unexplained… their character of production in series has its mark: patent and changing lies in the official declarations; Kennedy, Aldo Moro, Olaf Palme, ministers and bankers, a pope or two, some others who were worth more than all of them. It doesn’t let up. He riffs on the Mafia, Big Pharma, false flags, faked autopsies… were he alive today, he’d be ranting about banksters and Hollywood elites on a podcast sponsored by Express VPN. But he’s working towards a point: > At the moment when almost every aspect of international political life and a growing number of those aspects that count in internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services, with decoys, disinformation and double explanations (one might conceal another, or may only seem to), the spectacle confines itself to making known a wearisome world of obligatory incomprehensibility, a boring series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels. ## IX. Fornever Wars Taken together, the Comments form a precise description of [Fifth Generation Warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare) [11], well before the concept was invented. [12] 5GW is basically [hybrid warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_warfare) without the kinetics. It is a war of information and influence, where conflict is never outright declared and cannot even be proved to exist. If “war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will”, 5GW is the most subtle and least violent way to conduct such a war; it relies on “...the deliberate manipulation of an observer’s context to achieve a desired outcome.” [13] As you’ll recall, monetization inevitably results in politicization. And what is war but the continuation of politics by other means? One of the consequences of our interconnected world is that individual opinions matter, at least in aggregate. What you think about an election or an insurrection is self-evidently political. But so is what you think about celebrities, catastrophes, and companies - all of your thoughts have economic (i.e. political) implications. Your assessment of the state of the economy directly impacts the actual state of the economy. And if that was already the case in 1987, it is exponentially more true now that the internet has made each of us a node in a global network. Consequently, every person on the planet is now a combatant, objective, and weapon in wars where the brain is the terrain. This is not a fantasy - this is your news feed. The U.S. is predicting [a false-flag attack](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-warns-russia-use-chemical-weapons-false-flag-operation-ukraine-rcna19391) by Russia in the Ukraine. Russia [accused](https://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-accuses-uk-of-backing-a-false-flag-chemical-attack-in-syria/) the UK of a false-flag attack in Syria. The U.S. [accuses](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037) China of genocide. China and Iran [claimed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) COVID was a U.S. bio-attack. It goes on and on and on. They all want us to trust them and no one else. Behold the future of international politics: And helping you sort through the propaganda and fake news are fellow travelers who may or may not be real people. Are you bickering in the comment sections with an idiot or a bot? How can you tell? I accidentally proved my point in the process of writing this. I planned to reference a story where a Chinese weatherman [was replaced by an AI replica](https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-reveals-ai-news-anchor-almost-indistinguishable-from-a-real-human_4207963.html) for months without anyone noticing. I saw it on social media a while back - it never crossed my mind to fact check it, because nothing about the reporting seemed suspect. Here I am months later, about to use it in a piece, so I did some due diligence. Turns out that The Epoch Times is not a reliable publication. Cool, glad I checked, let me find a mainstream link… four search engines later and all I found was a couple random blogs and an InfoWars video, all pointing back to this one unassuming article. This stuff is scary, when you stop and think about all the thousands of random falsehoods and skewed impressions we accumulate while scrolling on the toilet. Of course people buy into things like [Dead Internet Theory](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/). Of course everyone’s flailing about, falling into rabbit holes that get more and more bizarre. Conspiracy theories are [modern myths,](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-conspiracy-myth/) blooming in the fertile soil of the spectacle. The mainstream news itself is little more than ceaseless conspiracy-mongering at this point. Look at the parade the last few years - Russiagate, Pizzagate, COVID, 2020 election, Jan. 6th… Whatever you might think about those highly controversial topics, many millions of people vehemently disagree with you. They live in an alternate universe. Many millions of other people agree with whatever your stance is - but for reasons so insane and illogical that they also inhabit a totally different reality. We have jumped the shark as a species. Some of this is organic. Some of it isn’t. We have no way of knowing which is which. Take QAnon, possibly the most clear-cut case of [guided apophenia](https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5) on record. Was it a troll-job of epic proportions, or a psyop enacted for unknown purposes? You have priors, they are leading you to conclusions, and you are wrong either way because you don’t possess a tenth of the information required to make an educated guess. That’s what makes the spectacle so terrifying. No matter how hard we try to get it right, rationality often isn’t enough. You can’t identify a forgery if you don’t have The Real to compare it to. ## X. An Animal So Lost What to make of all this? The spectacle undoubtedly exists, to a greater or a lesser extent. It is an important lens, a necessary perspective on where humanity is and where it is headed. But it is only one way of viewing the world among many. It is not the end-all, be-all for sociopolitical analysis. Yes, the Internet has lost its new car smell, and we have learned that technological innovation is always a double-edged sword. But it is still amazing that my parents can read bedtime stories to their grandkids from another time zone. As for the economics, nb4 the comment section turns into a referendum on capitalism. There is a big difference between capitalism at the individual and the macro level. In my experience, those who get their knickers twisted on the subject tend to conflate the two. It is undeniable that our system has ennobling facets. If you work hard, work smart, and take calculated risks, you can elevate your quality of life to a nearly unlimited degree. That is a marvelous thing, and shouldn’t be downplayed or dismissed. That said, organizing all of existence around the bottom line is probably less than optimal. Capitalism is natural selection for profit, with no regard for human suffering or flourishing. Is that the best we can do? I’ve taken to calling myself a post-capitalist, which is a fancy way of saying that I want a better arrangement but don’t have any better ideas. That may sound like a distinction without a difference from everybody else - after all, few people this side of Ben Shapiro fall asleep fondling themselves to the free market. I guess it just means that I greet anti-capitalists with sympathy instead of snark and scorn, even if I disagree with their proposed solutions. That, and when others offer alternatives, I’m all ears. Now for some takeaways. I’ve grown much more forgiving towards conspiracy theorists and idealogues of all stripes. I used to judge harshly what I perceived to be moral and intellectual failings. These days, I view misinformation and propaganda in the same predatory light as gambling and opiates. It’s not fair to expect folks to take up independent journalism in their spare time. Even views that I consider hateful or repugnant bother me less, now that I see their purveyors as victims of memetic contagion and spectacular dissonance. The flip side of that coin is that I’m much more aware of the log in my own eye. [14] It never hurt anyone to reflect on how crude is the Map and how vast the Territory. I’m continually astonished by the sheer variety of ways I manage to arrive at ‘Here Be Dragons’. It's disturbing how often I open my mouth and someone else comes out. ['Strong opinions, weakly held'](https://commoncog.com/blog/strong-opinions-weakly-held-is-bad/) used to be an appealing heuristic. Unfortunately, I keep noticing that the stronger my opinion, the more likely it is that I'm missing something.15 If ignorance is bliss, incertitude is wisdom. Finally, after making my peace with the state of the world, I’m feeling much more connected to humanity and history. Debord drove himself into the grave despairing for the future of mankind, but that was a choice. I think about this meme a lot: Debord lived and died as the guy in the corner, but we don’t have to. There is much that is new and unnerving about the spectacle, but in some ways it is merely a return to an earlier paradigm. Delusion is the natural state of man. There is no exit to Plato’s Cave. It was only conceit that we ever thought we were more enlightened than our forebears. True, our incomprehension is somewhat different in kind. In the past, it was nature itself that served as obstacle and enigma. Our knowledge amassed, and we gained hope - all the mysteries of the universe were only puzzles, certain to be solved in time. However, as the scope and scale of human endeavor expanded, our ignorance was returned to us by the very means we sought to eliminate it. Technology colonized our lives and our minds, reintroducing unfathomable complexity into realms we once had mastered. Our world becomes increasingly manmade, and as a consequence is more susceptible to human iniquities never found in the natural world. Even so, the experience of powerlessness and perplexity is our mortal heritage, shared by each and every one of our ancestors. Who are we to deny it? We seem set to learn the meaning of that [apocryphal Chinese curse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times) for ourselves. The future is uncertain in a way we’ve never felt before. It’s up to each of us to make something of it. Me? I’ll be in [the van](https://dailypopulous.com/2021-10-07-morning/birds-arent-real-conspiracy-theory-van-parked-in-lawrence-kansas.html). --- Endnotes 1: I suppose it would be in poor taste to make a Bon Jovi reference, so I won’t. 2: [The Uruk series](https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/) by sam[]zdat is an excellent companion to this book, and I’ll reference it several times. The relevant piece here comes from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: “Polanyi calls the tendency to judge the world solely financially the economic prejudice… A market society is one based entirely around a market. Any damage to the market damages the entire society.” All modern nations are market societies in some fashion, and fall prey to the economic prejudice. 3: If you’re holding out for Scott’s review to get into Girard, Alex Danco has [a great introduction](https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dangerous-introduction-to-rene-girard/) to tide you over. He is embarrassingly off-base regarding Trump supporters, but he sums up the basics well. 4: [Metis](https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-uruk-machine/) “...is a kind of accumulated, experiential knowledge. It’s the background process for whatever makes local knowledge work, and also the reason it’s hard to express in technical language. I tend to use it as shorthand…for the accumulated local knowledge of any given community.” 5: Episteme - “Any nation-building requires a top-down view of the society it wants to organize. It’s either impossible or inefficient to draw a map with the same precision that local communities use. Because of this, certain details are elided, ignored, misplaced. This categorization process is ‘epistemic’, where episteme (or epistemic rationalism, or just rationalism) means abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge." 6: “An important aspect of metis is that it’s essentially a ‘worldview’. Metis is deeply interwoven – performing one action also affirms the others, inasmuch as planting according to [ritual] tends to include much broader social and political and religious elements, all of which are affirmed and related… The fact that metis is often explained…by ‘folksy’ reasoning at best means that epistemic knowledge rarely listens to it. The net result of this is that states tend to overrule metis with episteme, and that protesting citizenry cannot even express why this is bad. The net result of that is generally inefficiency, anger, and confusion.” 7: Art was a major part of the Situationist movement - they would probably be mortally offended that I just glossed over it. I did so for two reasons. First, I only have a highschool understanding of the relevant topics, so I don’t have much to say. Second, I was thoroughly unimpressed by what I understood, and apparently [I’m not alone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#Criticism): “Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical.” 8: Final Uruk reference, this time from [his piece](https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/) on Hoffer: “Mass movements are not the result of calculated thought, nor of a genuine interest in the ideology, but of frustration… Frustration is, ultimately, about the inability to achieve a personal goal or a group goal…A corollary of this is that mass movements are less about achieving anything meaningful than about fostering frustration. A ‘good’ movement – not as in ‘taking power’ (which plenty do), but as in completing goals, bettering the life of its adherents, making them more active, making them powerful – will leave them less frustrated. The movement will then disband – can’t have one without a frustrated mass.” 9: Neil Gaiman has [some thoughts](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/477087-remember-when-people-tell-you-something-s-wrong-or-doesn-t-work) on the subject. 10: Debord addresses Boorstin by name in The Society of the Spectacle, but I couldn’t fit it in. His critique in one sentence: Boorstin's views "...amount to blaming the spectacle on modern man's excessive inclination to be a spectator." 11: The Handbook Of 5GW is a truly terrible, poorly formatted, endlessly repetitive collection of essays. Nevertheless, it has some gold among the dross: > "The problem with using a narrower definition of war is that the enemy may fight you with a form of war that you not only can’t see, but, even worse, don’t even believe in. If the enemy uses a broader definition of war than you, any attack on that portion of the spectrum where you are defenseless may inflict a decisive defeat. The worst part of such a defeat may be that: > > · You never knew you were at war. > > · You never saw what hit you. > > · You never knew there was a chance for victory. > > · You never knew that you were defeated. > > · You don’t believe in any of the above. > > A successful fifth-generation war would be one that an opponent never even realized he lost." 12: Many experts consider the generational model of warfare outdated, preferring a gradient framework (sometimes referred to as xGW). Depending on your definitions, you can find examples of counterinsurgency and hybrid warfare throughout history, which invalidates the notion of successive generations of war. Instead, warfare exists on a spectrum, with Hobbesian total war at one end and fifth generation/gradient warfare at the other. 13: Both quotes from The Handbook Of 5GW. 14: Shut up, I like mixing metaphors. 15: From the link: “The failure mode is that ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ turns into ‘Strong Opinions, Justified Loudly, Until Evidence Indicates Otherwise, At Which Point You Invoke It To Protect Your Ass.’”	Scott Alexander	65242740	Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle	acx
# Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism I. The voters wanted [Anti-Politics Machine](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics) to be a Book Review Contest Finalist this year, and I listened. But I wasn’t happy about it. I hate having to post criticism of EA. Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing. “Please, tell me again how naughty I’m being!” I went to an EA organization’s offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don’t quote me on that - and the whole place was strewn with the most critical books you can imagine - Robert Reich, Anand Giradharadas, that kind of thing. Can’t remember seeing Anti-Politics Machine but I’m sure it was there. Probably three copies per person. One for their office, one for their home library, and one for the spot under their mattress where other people would hide porn mags. (I’m deliberately not expanding the acronym “EA”. If you don’t know what it is, think of it as a variable, like “X”. In fact, do this even if you do know what it is.) Many of the highest-upvoted posts on the EA Forum are criticism. The more critical, the more upvotes. A typical careful well-thought out post by a community leader gets 25, maybe 50 upvotes. A case against RCT-driven development aid, somewhat related to the one in Anti-Politics Machine, got 389. It was the #6 highest upvoted post of all time; the only reason it wasn’t higher was because stronger criticisms of EA beat it out. There are 147 posts tagged [criticism of EA](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruism), 59 tagged [criticism of EA organizations](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruist-organizations), 35 tagged, [criticism of the EA community](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-the-effective-altruism-community), and 66 tagged [criticism of EA culture](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/criticism-of-effective-altruist-causes) - including 4 posts criticizing EA for being too unwilling to solicit and listen to criticism. In the most EA thing to ever happen, some people have launched [a $100,000 prize for the best criticisms of EA](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8hvmvrgcxJJ2pYR4X/announcing-a-contest-ea-criticism-and-red-teaming) (don’t bother writing in to criticize the contest, it’s already been done). At this point I think it would be cheaper to just hire professional dominatrices. At this point, reading an article like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be. Despite Their Superficial Openness To Criticism, People In EA Are Only Willing To Engage With A Narrow Selection Of Critiques That Flatter Their Preconceptions, While Truly Threatening Criticisms Are Excluded From The Window Of Acceptable Discourse. People Who Are Able To Speak The Language Of Power And Criticize EA Legibly In Its Own Terms Get Flattered And Rewarded With Trivial Changes, While People Who Genuinely Challenge The Establishment Are Dismissed As Beyond The Pale Of “Respectable” Criticism And Ignored Or Punished. (while I was editing this essay, [someone wrote](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qjMPATBLM5p4ABcEB/criticism-of-ea-criticism-contest) this inevitable thing, but I don’t think you should update too much on the details, any more than you would update on who in particular picked up a $20 bill on the ground, or what kind of bending motion they used) The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted. Even more important, if the abstract egregore of EA has a humiliation fetish, that last paragraph - the one with “Despite Their Superficial Openness To Criticism, People In EA Are Only Willing To Engage With A Narrow Selection Of Critiques…” is at the exact center of the fetish. That’s the one porn video that they keep coming back to, the one where they hope nobody opens their computer and notices the “You viewed this 5,946,728 times” caption in their browser history. This makes me suspicious. II. Psychiatry has its own stock criticisms of itself. We rely too much on pills. We don’t get to know patients enough as individuals. We only treat the symptoms, not the real disease of [insert wild speculation]. We are probably systemically racist somehow, details to be filled in later. Something something Thomas Insel’s RDoC program. Non-psychiatrists in the popular media have stolen these criticisms and made them dumber, but we had them all first. In 2019 I reported on [the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/22/the-apa-meeting-a-photo-essay/). Here is a small fraction of the seminars on offer: * Disrupting The Status Quo: Addressing Racism In Medical Education And Residency Training * Grabbing The Third Rail: Race And Racism In Clinical Documentation * Treating Black Children And Families: What Are We Overlooking? * Revitalizing Psychiatry – And Our World – With A Social Lens * Gender Bias In Academic Psychiatry In The Era Of the #MeToo Movement * Making The Invisible Visible: Using Art To Explore Bias And Hierarchy In Medicine * Navigating Racism: Addressing The Pervasive Role Of Racial Bias In Mental Health * Racism And Psychiatry: Growing A Diverse Psychiatric Workforce And Developing Structurally Competent Psychiatric Providers * Sex, Drugs, And Culturally Responsive Treatment: Addressing Substance Use Disorders In The Context Of Sexual And Gender Diversity * Intersectionality 2.0: How The Film Moonlight Can Teach Us About Inclusion And Therapeutic Alliance In Minority LGBTQ Populations * Child Welfare – A System Psychiatrists Should Scrutinize * Inequity By Structural Design: Psychiatrists' Responsibility To Be Informed Advocates For Systemic Education And Criminal Justice Reform * But I'm Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry Disruption! Grabbing the third rail! Asking about what we’re overlooking! It seems that psychiatry, like EA, is really good at criticizing itself. Even better: these aren’t those soft within-the-system critiques everyone is worried about. These are hard challenges to the entire paradigm of capitalism or whatever. And it’s not just the APA as an institution. Go to any psychiatrist at the conference and criticize psychiatry in these terms - “Don’t you think our field is systemically racist and sexist and fails to understand that the true problem is Capitalism?” and they will enthusiastically agree and maybe even tell you stories about how their own experience proves that’s true and how they need to try to do better. Is there any criticism that can touch these people at all? Here’s my proposal: ask [why they prescribe s-ketamine instead of racemic ketamine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/) for treatment-resistant depression. If you say this, psychiatrists will push back. If you say it in a confrontational way - maybe you hint that they’ve outsourced their thought processes to a handful of regulators and pharmaceutical companies even when this severely disadvantages patients, because thinking for themselves is hard and scary - they’ll get offended. The world is full of psychiatrists who will confess to systemic racism with a smile on their face, then get all huffy when you ask them about esketamine. Here are other criticisms that I think can actually start fights: should tricyclics be higher on our treatment algorithm for depression than atypical antipsychotics? Should we use levothyroxine more (or less) often? And my nominee for “highest likelihood of people actually coming to blows” would be asking if they’re sure it’s ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows. All of these are the opposite of the racism critique: they’re minor, finicky points entirely within the current paradigm that don’t challenge any foundational assumptions at all. But you can actually start fights if you bring them up, instead of getting people to nod along and smile vacuously. The racism critique doesn’t imply any specific person is doing any specific thing wrong. Certainly not you! It doesn’t demand any specific response except maybe more awareness, saying the right slogans, and maybe having some other person form a committee to make meaningless changes to some set of bylaws. But the esketamine critique actually demands that you in particular go out and learn about a different medication which is kind of scary and could get you in trouble if you use it wrong. It implies that you personally are failing patients, in a way that some other doctors aren’t failing patients. Maybe it means those other doctors are better than you! And so the knives come out. III. This is also how I think about EA criticism. I’m going to give an example of criticism I don’t like. I hate doing this, because all the criticism pieces are heartfelt and people worked hard on them. But I have to pick on someone in particular, so I’m going to pick on [Some Blindspots In Rationality And Effective Altruism](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism) (disclaimer: I appreciate the work that went into this and like the people involved). It tries to get ahead of any “this isn’t paradigm-busting enough” by making extremely general and abstract points, like: * EA assumes people are individuals, but actually, they are interdependent. Instead of swallowing western individualism, we need to be better at thinking within communalist and collectivist paradigms. * EA’s “views are built out of structures”. That is, we use semi-Aristotelian logical reasoning when in fact the world is a complicated inter-related whole. Traditional cultures “foster a process-based view” and we should also learn to think in those terms. * EAs seek impartiality and objectivity, but actually those things are illusions, and the observer is firmly planted within the world that he/she is observing. * We use dualist thinking, whereas many enlightened people have claimed that reality is non-dualist. This is just a selection and I don’t claim I’m being fair or representative. I’m having trouble expressing why I feel so uneasy about this. Part of it is emotional: I feel less enlightened than preached at. Do we really not think of the interdependence between individuals? Does this really make us less effective in some way? Or is this just a sort of stock criticism with such a storied tradition that everyone has agreed to nod their head to it and agree to do better later? Are we sure that becoming less individualist would be a better use of our energy than becoming more individualist? How did we achieve that certainty? It sure seems like more individualist countries are richer and better places to live. And that within those countries, the most individualist regions and social networks are the richest and best. Aren’t more intelligent people generally more individualist when you do the psych tests and surveys? I don’t know, if I thought it was a good use of our resources to move some direction on the individualism spectrum, I would be kind of interested in trying to figure out how to move even more towards the individuals-are-independent side than we are now. But realistically I don’t think this is a good use of our resources because I personally am not sure how to do that, I personally am not interested in singlehandedly inventing the science of shifting position on the individualism spectrum, I don’t think trying to invent this science is a great use of anyone else’s time, and if someone did claim they invented this science, it would take a lot of evidence for me to believe them. (again, I think I’m being terribly unfair here to the author, who was genuinely worried about these blindspots, but I’m using this as an example of my reaction to different types of criticism) What’s the EA equivalent of the s-ketamine critique? [A Critical Review Of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h2N9qEbvQ6RHABcae/a-critical-review-of-open-philanthropy-s-bet-on-criminal) argues that one of a major EA funder’s programs was substantially less effective than their other programs, that this had been easy to notice for a while, and that despite this they continued the program instead of changing it or cutting their losses (for a while; they did eventually stop). Everyone in EA is very nice, so all of the responses were phrased as “thank you for this constructive criticism, but having said that I wanted to raise…” But subtracting out the usual niceness level, I get the impression it actually hit a nerve. There was some pretty deep discussion about whether the criticism was fair, whether it was excessively hostile to identifiable individuals, and (of course) nitpicking all the math. Here are some differences I noticed between the experience of reading the more specific criminal justice criticism vs. the more paradigmatic structures-and-individualism criticism: * Before reading the specific criticism, I wouldn’t have been able to predict its conclusion. Was this program more effective than other programs? Less effective? But before reading the paradigmatic criticism, I could predict its conclusion pretty well. “We are all more interconnected than we think” is a typical piece of Profound Wisdom, and nobody ever says the opposite. * I can name several people who gain/lose status from the specific criticism, and I expect those people to be upset, push back, or otherwise have strong opinions. I can’t think of anyone like that for the paradigmatic criticism. * The specific criticism carries an obvious conclusion: cancel this one program! (in this case it had already been cancelled, so maybe the conclusion is more like reform various processes to make that happen sooner later on). The paradigmatic criticism is less actionable. This isn’t to say that paradigmatic criticisms are always bad and useless, and specific criticism is always good. But the specific claim at the end of Part I above - that the people in power prefer specific to paradigmatic criticism, because it’s less challenging - seems to me the exact opposite of the truth. IV. But we’ve got to change paradigms sometimes, right? How do we do that without soliciting paradigmatic criticism? I don’t know, man, I don’t know. [Thomas Kuhn seemed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/08/book-review-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/) to think of paradigm shifts as almost mystical processes. You don’t go in some specific direction carefully signposted “Next Paradigm”. Anomalous information comes in from the blue, someone happens to be in the right place to detect it, everyone agonizes over it for a while, the enigmas pile up higher and higher, and at some point the free energy becomes unbearable and everything does some multi-dimensional conformation shift and now you have a new paradigm. By the time ordinary outsiders hear about a paradigm shift, it’s already well into its lifecycle. Then it looks like a hidebound establishment refusing to go in the direction marked “Next Paradigm”. This is a fun situation, because on these rare occasions only you can be a bold pioneer who’s infinitely far ahead of the experts just by following signposts. It’s so fun that it can be hard to resist the temptation to believe you’re in it: just as economists have predicted ten of the last two recessions, so science journalists have predicted ten of the last two paradigm shifts. These are two different phases: waiting for anomalies and inspiration, vs. yelling at the hidebound establishment to accept the new order. And they require different virtues. The virtue of the first phase is looking for anomalies. These aren’t vague, sweeping, and ideological. The anomalies with Newtonian gravity weren’t things like “action at a distance doesn’t feel scientific enough” or “it doesn’t sufficiently glorify Jesus Christ” or even “it’s insufficiently elegant”. The one that ended up most important was “its estimate for the precession of the orbit of Mercury is off by forty arc-seconds per century”. I don’t know if it’s meaningful to talk about EA needing “another paradigm” - this whole discussion conflates scientific theories, ideologies, and methods for producing change. But if it does, it will come from complaints like the criminal justice criticism, which record boring ways that EA-as-it-exists-now made bad decisions on some specific point. If we had a hundred such complaints, maybe we could figure out some broader failure mode and how to deal with it. The virtue of the second phase is changing your mind and getting on board with the new program. But the new program has to exist first. If you can’t name a specific new program to get on board with, you’re still in the first phase, and you should be meticulously recording the orbit of Mercury instead of making sweeping statements including the word “hidebound”. What happens if you demand a new paradigm before enough anomalies have built up? If you incentivize people to preach at you, they’ll do that. But they can’t preach the tenets of the new paradigm, because they don’t know it yet. And they can’t preach the implementable tenets of the old paradigm, because you’ve already implemented them. So instead, they’ll preach things the old paradigm says are good, which haven’t been implemented because they’re vague or impossible or not worth the tradeoff against other considerations. Listen too hard, and you’ll go from a precise and efficient implementation of the old paradigm, to a fuzzier implementation that emphasizes trying to do vague, inefficient, or impossible things. This isn’t just a failure mode of EA or psychiatry, it’s a failure mode of whole societies. Sorry to everyone I had to implicitly attack in order to make this point. I felt like this of all essays needed to be specific and offend nameable people.	Scott Alexander	58139252	Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism	acx
# Open Thread 233 1: Instead of asking me “Why isn’t effective altruism spending its money on X?” all the time, consider entering Open Philanthropy Project’s [Cause Exploration](https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/) contest, where they will give you up to $25,000 for thinking of Xs they should be spending their money on. 2: Continued thanks to everyone who commented on my posts on the homicide spike. The only comment that’s actually made me doubt my thesis is the one linking [this article on rural homicides rising almost as much as urban ones recently](https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251) - given that rural areas seem too conservative to react to BLM protests much, this seems like potential counterevidence. I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this. 3: Congratulations to [Data Secrets Lox](https://www.datasecretslox.com/), the unofficial ACX-related bulletin board, on their second anniversary. I’ve been reading a lot recently on the decline of Web 2.0 and its system of decentralized BBSs in favor of the corporate web of today, and I’m proud of our community for managing to very slightly buck that trend. I can’t remember everyone involved, but thanks especially to Cassander and Johan Larson for their work founding and moderating it, and to Obormot for doing the technical work. 4: Thanks to everyone who applied last week to Spencer Greenberg’s grants round. It is closing soon, and I won’t be doing another ACX Grants for at least a few months, but if any of you want to pursue urgent opportunities in AI alignment, biosecurity, or similar fields before then, and find that some 4-5 digit amount of money would help, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I will try to connect you to relevant funders.	Scott Alexander	64564001	Open Thread 233	acx
# Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ## Introduction I didn’t read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don’t get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he’d read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I’ve read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he’s listened to that week. I’ve listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven’t listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I’m sure I’ll get round to it within the year. This is to make the point that I’m starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn’t be very interesting, because I’d kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don’t know very much about yet. I don’t mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don’t tend to use books for that. I had a general feeling that The Righteous Mind sits in the background of a lot of the political or meta-political content that I know and love. It had the aura of a sort of foundational text for the loose family of political views and affiliations I have. I don’t consider myself a centrist, which I think is how Haidt identifies himself, but I do share his disdain for tribal partisan politics and general sense that so much of what passes for political debate is just people yelling foundational definitional disagreements past each other mostly for the benefit of their own fans. I felt like I’d probably picked up most of its insights further downstream, and wouldn’t get much out of reading it. I was completely wrong. I found The Righteous Mind to be a frustrating book, caught up in a disastrous confusion about what its central points were. I regularly found myself thinking I could make its arguments better than it was, leaving me with that awful feeling of listening to someone else make weak arguments for a position you hold and feeling the people around you being unconvinced. I think if I were among the people against whom it mainly seems to be arguing, I would find it unconvincing. Most of all, though, it just feels horribly outdated only a decade after it was published, and that’s a real death blow for an attempt to get beyond the ephemera of partisanship and talk about political differences in a more fundamental way. At its core the book is an attempt to go beyond the surface partisanship of R vs D, and dive into the underlying moral psychology that Haidt thinks drives those differences. Unfortunately, just ten years from writing, his underlying structure looks almost as disposable and skin-deep as the latest scandal or wedge policy issue. This means I enjoyed reading it a lot more than I expected! Reading it made me think harder about a whole bunch of topics. Working out exactly what I think is wrong with it was a really interesting and worthwhile experience. I spent a lot of the time I was “reading” it just staring out the window, working through things in my head. I ended up with a lot to say about it, which is what led to my writing this review. ## Run through the three sections For all I thought its argumentation was muddled and unclear, the way the book is structured is very clear and helpful. It’s divided into three sections, each of which has clearly stated main points it sets out to prove. Within those sections, each chapter ends with a brief summary that makes it clear what Haidt wants you to focus on and take away. I’m a big fan of this. I read a lot of political or philosophical writing that seems almost designed to make it unclear what the author is trying to say, and I find it extremely wearing. I appreciate an author who will just state the claims and then try to back them up, rather than meandering about between anecdote, argument, autobiography, and rant and hoping you stitch together something out of the vague vibes. Haidt isn’t as unbelievably rigorous about this as Plantinga or Parfit, whose numbered key statements make piecing together their arguments and examining them in detail a pleasure, but the chapter summaries and clear three-part structure are great. I’m going to run through the three sections fairly briefly, making what I think are the key points in outline format. ### Intuitionism The first part of the book lays out some history of moral psychology and then makes the case for Haidt’s intuitionism. At its core, this is the idea that human beings don’t naturally reason their way to moral decisions, but make them pretty much based on instinct, then cobble together whatever reasoning they need in order to explain their decisions to others and justify them internally. This is the “rider and elephant” analogy that’s seeped well into rationalist thought, so a lot of it was familiar to me. It’s nicely written in order to gradually guide someone who might be fairly new to the idea that people might not be fully rational agents through the arguments, using Haidt’s own career working in moral psychology as a framework for doing so. ### Moral Foundations After making the case for intuitionism, the middle section of the book focuses on the core of Haidt’s research, his moral foundations model. By analogy to taste receptors, the idea is that we don’t have just one intuitive impulse producing our snap moral judgements that we then rationalise, but five (later this is expanded to six, but I’ll follow the book’s process of introducing that one later, as it was added later in Haidt’s own research). The five foundations are: * Care: Basic utilitarian idea that suffering is bad; * Fairness: Desire for equality and freedom, and the urge to punish free-riders and defectors (if this seems like a messy category at best, and a contradictory mess at worst, don’t worry, Haidt refines this one in time); * Loyalty: Basic in-group/out-group alignment; * Authority: Respect for those in positions of power/prestige, and the idea that they can determine what is right and wrong and instruct accordingly; * Sanctity: Religious-seeming (though not always explicitly so) ideas of purity vs profanity, not violating the sacred, and so on. The idea is that these are five fundamental intuitions humans have that come together to create our instinctive moral judgements, but that they are weighted differently in different people. Haidt then goes on to claim, based on his research, a strong correlation between the extent to which people feel these intuitions and the US partisan groupings of conservatives and liberals (Haidt is aware that the term “liberal” means all sorts of things around the world, but is working in a US context so uses it that way throughout, as I will), with liberals mostly responding to care and fairness, and conservatives to all five. Haidt then proposes that conservatives have an inbuilt advantage in moral persuasion, because their wider collection of moral intuitions allows them to tell a greater variety of stories and justify themselves in a way that generates broader appeal, whereas liberals are mostly stuck justifying everything through care and fairness. Haidt clearly struggles with the fairness foundation and its somewhat grab-bag nature. He eventually splits it in two, leaving the free-rider punishment part (which he calls proportionality) in the foundation called fairness, and spinning off a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression. The revised political division is then that liberals mostly respond to care, fairness, and liberty, libertarians to liberty above all, and conservatives to all six. ### Group Selection The third part of the book then tries to work out why we’d have these intuitions at all, rather than just being self-interested, as evolution would seem to suggest we should be. This turns into an impassioned defence of group selection. According to Haidt, group selection was a part of evolutionary theory from the start, but gradually got more and more abused by people reverse-engineering group selection just-so-stories for pretty much anything, until a backlash in the 60s and 70s consigned group selection to the academic graveyard and insisted that evolution worked entirely by individual selection. Haidt believes this to be a mistake, and sees himself as part of a movement to cautiously return some degree of group selection to the academic mainstream. He draws heavily on E.O. Wilson, approving of his proposed synthesis between the biological and social sciences, and makes a strong case, based on studies of the emergence of hive behaviour in insects, among other case studies, that group selection is possible and has been observed in other contexts. He’s clearly aware of the dangers of loose applications of group selection and the interpretive freedom this would give to explain almost anything as in some way a product of evolution, but works hard to establish when we might expect group selection and when we might not, and to make sure that individual selection always stays in frame as the main driving force of evolution. This is necessary for his central idea because the moral foundations he claims are innate (he does a good job of explaining how innateness does not require that something be present from birth) can be explained as group adaptations but not individual adaptations. Haidt is positioning himself against the idea that evolution would drive humans to be selfish (with exceptions for close genetic relatives), so any other behaviour must be the result of explicit reasoning on our part. He claims instead that that some degree of non-selfish behaviour arises naturally through group selection, and that this is expressed through our moral intuitions, with moral reasoning mostly serving as a post-hoc justification for this. ## Aside on replication Before diving in to my own thoughts on all these arguments, it’s worth mentioning that, as it positions itself well within the “people don’t actually behave rationally” line of psychological, sociological, and behavioural economic research, the spectre of the replication crisis in those fields looms over the book. In the period Haidt was doing a lot of his work, there was an explosion of interest in the myriad ways that human behaviour might depart from the perfectly rational, and countless experiments purported to show all sorts of biases and irrationalities of varying degrees of plausibility. Sadly, much of this work was of low quality, and large swathes of it have failed to replicate or simply come to be viewed as unconvincing due to tiny and/or unrepresentative sample sizes, or poor practice of some other sort. This makes reading this sort of book pretty difficult if you need convincing one way or the other on the underlying science. It really isn’t enough now to just wave at some behavioural studies showing people exhibiting some bias and move on. You’ve got to do quite a bit better than that these days. This wasn’t a huge problem for me reading through, because I already believed the basic ideas of moral intuitionism: The way most people make most moral decisions most of the time is on instinct, and then retrospectively justified by argument if necessary. Had I not, I don’t think I’d have found the case made convincing. I spotted a few things as I went through that I knew had failed to replicate since the book was written, and there is also a fair bit of leaning on the work of Dan Ariley, who turned out to be actively fraudulent. The rest of it, well, I don’t know. I haven’t gone and read all the papers describing the studies the book refers to in order to see if I think they’re of reasonable quality, or checked if they’ve replicated or if there’s been a meta-analysis that agrees or disagrees with them. I didn’t need to be convinced about this aspect either way, but it was an uncomfortable experience to read about it and feel how unconvinced I’d be if I weren’t already on board, and I don’t really know what the solution is. It’s hard for popular science books to work with the kind of rigour that’s needed to play in these domains, but I don’t want popular science to die out completely. I could get very distracted going down this route, so I just want to say “the replication crisis is clearly an issue for this sort of thing; deal with that how you will” and move on. When Haidt is presenting his own work on moral foundations in the second section of the book, it’s clear he’s working with huge sample sizes over a long period and he explains his methods in some detail, so the key issue of “might this just be a tiny, awful study that’s shouldn’t convince me of anything” that plagues some of the first section of the book isn’t present. I have my own concerns about Haidt’s methods, but those are of a different kind. ## The fundamental MaB In this rudimentary form, I think there’s nothing particularly objectionable going on in Hadit’s main theses, and it is in this form that I’d heard most of the ideas before. However, as I read through the book, I started feeling increasingly uncomfortable with a sort of implicit motte-and-bailey that was developing. This was never stated outright, certainly not in the helpful summary sections, but I felt it, particularly in the first of the three sections. It was expressed more in the narrative sections – in the bits where, instead of firmly stating hypotheses and marshalling arguments, Haidt allowed himself a bit more of a classic pop-sci writing style, linking together the development of his views with autobiography, and expressing frustration with the shortcomings of his chosen foils, most notably Kant, Bentham, and Kohlberg. I was starting to feel like this might be a very difficult thing to explain, that I might have to quote extensive parts of the book to make the point that I felt he was implying some much more expansive bailey than his nicely confined and well-justified motte statements in the summaries. I thought I’d have to then make some sort of appeal that it was consistently implied by his tone, and by what he disagreed with or expressed frustration with, rather than being explicitly stated. I thought it was going to be a drag. But, then, late on in the book, Haidt produced a single paragraph that encapsulated the issue so perfectly, that it can stand for the whole thing: > I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject “intelligent design” as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don’t embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the “intelligent design” of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view. Darwin and Ken Ham aren’t making competing claims about whether evolution by natural selection is a morally upstanding or desirable way for species to have arisen, they’re arguing (not directly but you get the point) about whether it actually happened that way. Conversely, a modern socialist in the US is not “embracing intelligent design” in the sense of claiming the current US economy must have been intelligently designed based on some study of its history or current state, but arguing that it would be better if it were so – that a planned economy is morally desirable (and a libertarian is arguing that a free market is more desirable, not that they currently live in a free market). One debate is about the facts of what has already happened, the other is about the morality or in some other sense the desirability of different plans for the future. There’s absolutely no analogy here and no contradiction or hypocrisy in someone favouring natural selection as the correct explanation for the origin of species, but favouring “intelligent design” via a planned economy as the correct prescription for a flourishing economic future. Similarly, there’s no contradiction in believing that biology is the product of intelligent design by God, but believing that the best prescription for economic policy is “natural selection” via market mechanisms. There are just some similar sounding words in these two debates, one of which is normative (how should the economy be run) and one of which is descriptive (how did species evolve), but Haidt latches on to it seemingly because he cannot reliably distinguish the normative and the prescriptive (and because he can’t resist a dig at New Atheists, many of whom favoured somewhat left-leaning economic policy). When Haidt is forcing himself to be explicit, he knows the normative/descriptive distinction and in fact belabours the point. On more than one occasion he’s at pains to point out that he is making descriptive, not normative claims. At one point he sits down and tries to lay out his own normative moral theory, “Durkheimian Utilitarianism” as a well-separated exercise from his descriptive work. His “Durkheimian Utilitarianism” is utilitarianism but with an understanding of sociology and game theory. In its conception of what is fundamentally right and wrong, it’s just pure and simple care foundation, just like Bentham would have it, but Haidt then attempts to justify heuristics based around the other foundations by showing how following them, in aggregate, can often lead to better utilitarian outcomes than naive utilitarianism. It’s nothing that wouldn’t be familiar to people involved in the rationalism or effective altruism communities and their discussions around morality, though it’s a little bare-bones, and lining it up with the other five of his foundations is a bit tortured for reasons I’ll come back to. Importantly, it’s treating the moral foundations as descriptive, and then taking a completely separate approach to morally normative questions. But, in the very same book, Haidt then cautions us to be suspicious of normative moral systems based around just one moral foundation, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he has just laid out such a system. When he slams Kant and Bentham in a really silly bit of the book where he goes on a tangent about how they were autistic (complete with a really laughable graphic that adds nothing to the text), he slams them for “reducing” morality to just one thing. When he belabours a metaphor about taste receptors, he very much seems to be analogising to normative morality, not psychological description. When he describes his time in India and the affect it had on his approach to morality, he’s seemingly talking about normative morality, not descriptions of how intuition works or where it comes from. I think that he really wants to be more normatively pluralist than he actually is. When pushed, he’ll say his normative morals are based on the care foundation, and that all he’s doing is trying to get other liberals to understand that other people have other moral intuitions, and that these might have arisen by group selection. But it seems to irk him that he doesn’t actually agree with any of the people he’s trying to get us to sympathise with. So, when he’s being metaphorical, autobiographical, or slapping down those he sees as insufficiently worldly to empathise with a wide enough universe of moral tastes, he absolutely talks as if he believes that these other five moral foundations are normatively important as ends in themselves, not just instrumental heuristics for care. It’s like he wants the aesthetic of being non-judgemental, relativist, and well-read in the wisdom of the east or whatever, and cringes at systematising/autistic reductionists trying to make everything about a cold hard utils calculation, but he can’t actually sustain that aesthetic when being explicit, because at bottom he’s actually a normative utilitarian, and only really disagrees with his model of Bentham in terms of application. He’s only not a utilitarian in that he isn’t one in the most limited, naive fashion that I don’t think anyone, even Bentham himself, actually is. This back-and-forth runs throughout the whole book, and made it a frustrating read. I would regularly find myself feeling mocked and panned for believing things that, a few pages earlier or later, Haidt himself would explicitly endorse. There’s quite an intense whiplash involved in being told at one point that only an autistic nerd would be cringe enough to think morality boiled down to one axis, only to then read an attempt to boil morality down to one axis involving a bunch of extremely nerdy argumentation about game theory, group selection, and sociology a few pages later. His inability to separate the normative and descriptive goes hand-in-hand with a frustrating inability to be clear about instrumental versus terminal values. At some points Haidt is almost mocking his interview subjects for their attempts to justify one moral foundation as an instrumental good based on the care foundation as fundamental, for instance by straining to find victims in anecdotes about disrespecting the flag, but he doesn’t take this idea any further. He doesn’t attempt to separate out belief in a moral foundation as terminal from an empirical belief that it functions as a decent instrumental guide to another foundation, or look at these as separate contributors. It’s therefore really hard to tell what parts of the differences he’s seeing are different empirical beliefs about what causes harm as opposed to different beliefs about what matters morally. ## Poor steel-men of conservatism and religion This confusion lies behind another frustrating aspect of the book: Haidt seems to think he’s offering a refined steel-man of conservative beliefs and, through this, is able to negotiate political disagreements in a less partisan way. Unfortunately, his picture of conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, is pretty weak, and not actually that different in substance from the naive partisan liberal view of conservatives he’s setting himself up against. In my mind, there are two ways to go about steel-manning conservative positions. Obviously conservatism is vast and multifaceted, and this will be a horrendous simplification, but I think it’s actually reasonable as a starting point and would be recognisable to many conservatives, unlike Haidt’s model. One way is to meet the rank and file conservative where they are, taking their views at face value. The other is to dive into the world of conservative intellectualism, which tends to take extremely different routes to similar practical politics. I grew up a religious conservative, surrounded by religious conservatives of two quite different traditions as my family life straddled the (often acrimonious) divide between Fundamentalist Evangelicalism in the Southern Baptist tradition and Charismatic Pentecostalism. I can assure you, I did not hear a word about multilevel selection, punishment of free riders in game theoretic equilibria, or Schmittian notions of that which it is advantageous for society to collectively believe. Homosexuality was wrong; God said so in the Bible; end of discussion. I could rarely get firm answer as to whether it was intrinsically wrong and God was helpfully letting us know this through providing guidance we could absolutely trust, or that God himself made it wrong by decree. I couldn’t actually get people to understand that these were different concepts. I also created a great deal of acrimony by questioning whether God actually had said this in quite so many words (it did seem that you weren’t really meant to actually read the whole Bible yourself, which I went ahead and did, then annoyed everyone by quoting it all the time) but that’s somewhat beside the point of this discussion. Point is, nobody talked about it being beneficial for society to have some collective set of beliefs about behaviour even if they might at the fundamental level be somewhat arbitrary. Nobody chastened my picking around the edges of their certainties with sociological concerns that such independent thought threatened a shared reality that allowed people to predict each other’s behaviour with low cognitive overhead and therefore better co-ordinate. People genuinely thought that at a base, normative level, there could be no morality without explicit instruction from God, and that an atheist could not justify refraining from mass murder. Tim Lambesis of the metalcore band As I Lay Dying, one of my Christian childhood heroes (explicitly on the Pentecostal side; the Evangelicals considered him obviously satanic all along due to the metal and were quite smug about how it turned out) actually hired a hitman to kill his wife after becoming an atheist on exactly these grounds. In this view, fundamentalist normative religion wasn’t a co-ordination system to make society function, it was the literal truth. Haidt mentions that, after spending a while in India eating with his right hand and wiping his ass with his left, he could start to see why you might consider the right hand sacred and the left hand profane, and want to handle communal objects of religious significance with the right hand. Then, given the chirality of hands, you want this to be a shared norm. We will leave unexamined, as Haidt does, why you can’t just wash your hands, and how much this sucks for left-handed people and just take it as read that this broadly works as a co-ordination norm. I am confident, given my experience of religious conservatism, that Haidt understands the cause and effect exactly backwards here. The people he’s attempting to empathise won’t have derived it this way round. They will wipe their ass with their left hands and eat with their right hands because the left is profane and the right is sacred, not the other way round. This just seems to be out of Haidt’s conceptual framework, and I think that’s for the same reason that, even when seeming to believe that he has a pluralist moral system, that when he actually explains it, it’s just non-naive monist utilitarianism. This is really damning for a book that’s meant to be about understanding each other better and reaching across partisan divides. Haidt is witheringly harsh about simple-minded liberal partisans, exemplified in his telling by the New Atheists (the fact that the New Atheists are the ultra-partisan liberals is a whole other kettle of fish I’ll explore later) and simple-minded utilitarians, but his actual understanding of conservatives is basically the same as that of those he’s criticising, just with individual level selection replaced with group level selection. He’s mad at New Atheists for being simple-minded enough to think that religion is nothing more than the product of natural selection predisposing the individual brain to think in magical ways and that therefore we can discard it as no longer useful. No, Haidt claims, in fact religion is the product of group selection predisposing whole cultures to build communal rituals around magical claims. I’m pretty sure the average religious conservative feels like these two positions are both pretty offensive ways of just not engaging with their actual beliefs but talking around them like they’re non-agents. The difference between them is pretty technical, and crucially Haidt’s position leads just as surely to the possibility of “and therefore we can discard them as they’re no longer adaptive to the current environment” as does that of his New Atheist foils. In practical terms, I think I’m much more of a partisan liberal (at least on the partisan divide he’s identifying back in 2012) than he is and very much the subject of his condescension for my lack of bipartisan empathy, but I think I actually have a much better model of my ideological opponents, and one they’d find a lot less offensive, than he does. Of course, it can be true that conservatives (or anyone) are predisposed to think something for some psychological or sociological reason, and that the reasons they actually give for their beliefs have nothing to do with those drivers. The object-level debate is different from the meta-level psychologising. Haidt mixes up these levels a lot, and it makes it hard to see what he really thinks, but I think it’s pretty clear he doesn’t really engage with conservatives’ claims on face value. Problem is, he doesn’t steel-man them at the next level up of “these are useful things for society to believe and people should just sort of get on as if they’re true and not question them too much lest our shared reality collapse and our social norms with it” either. This is, I understand, what a lot of conservative intellectuals end up thinking on some level, and is my second way of steel-manning the conservative position. We could, therefore, see Haidt as engaging only with this type of claim, and that would be broadly fine as an approach. He’s an academic and engaging only with the academic version of his opposition would be a reasonable path, though it would achieve less sweeping results than engaging directly with the objects of his curiosity themselves. But he doesn’t really lay out this kind of position in detail or in a convincing way either. There’s a staggering sort of teleological evolution thing going on where he seems to assume that, if we can identify how some conservative morality has evolved through group selection, then that’s equivalent to some normative argument for its force in a moral realist sense, or at least some empirical argument for its validity as an instrumentalist rule-of-thumb in his “Durkheimean Utilitarian” framework. But this is even more shaky for group selection than for individual selection. At least individual selection is optimising for the reproductive fitness of the individual, which has at least some correlation some of the time with the welfare of that individual. Even then, this is far from a great correlation (particularly for any individual that won’t reproduce any more, or at all), but for group level selection it’s much, much worse. Aspects of a social group that make it compete well with other groups for resources, win wars with other groups, resist internal takeover or subversion by individuals within the group, and therefore be more reproductively fit at the social level are often aspects that make that social group incredibly unpleasant for almost all or even all of its constituent individuals. To get from identification of conservative forms of morality as the product of group selection to where Haidt seems to think he’s ended up (more sympathetic to these claims either as normative claims about morality or instrumental claims about what really actually produces the best utilitarian results – again it’s tough that he can’t seem to tell the difference), you need to talk about reduction in cognitive overhead and how the average person has some combination of neither the ability, inclination, or resources to reason everything out in utilitarian terms. You need to go into robustness to extremely bad outcomes. You need to chat game theory and how conservative norms might make a better approximation to optimal play in situations where naive causal decision theory leads to defect/defect equilibria or to two-boxing predictably in Newcomb problems and thus poor results. Haidt just sort of seems to tacitly assume something like this must be true, occasionally paints an outline of it, but mostly just barely seems to even understand that these are the terms of the debate if you’re going to be arguing about whether conservative approaches to morality actually work out better even from a utilitarian perspective than raw individual utilitarianism plus causal decision theory. His steel-man seems to be “evolution is teleological, even group selection”, which is an absolutely awful steel-man of the intellectual conservative position. As a result, he engages with neither rank-and-file God’n’guns religious conservatism nor the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”. He doesn’t really seem to realise that either of these positions exists, and “steel-mans” conservatism into some sort of superposition across “group selection informs us as to normative ethics” and “group selection is teleological towards utilitarian human flourishing”, both of which are utterly insane positions that I think almost nobody actually holds. ## Aside on Categories and Axes I now want to dive off into the thorny world of the “realness” of categories and measurements. This is a ludicrously fraught area in which lots of people don’t really define their terms and/or are inconsistent in their standards. Almost all of the common issues I can think of along this line come up in my analysis, so I want to get a few statements about categories out of the way first in order to have a clear framework for what I mean when I start complaining about Haidt’s categories. Some things are actually categorical. Things can be one thing or another and there isn’t really a sense of degree, or of in-between-ness as an option. Particles are either fermions or bosons. The distinction is discrete, and it’s not really clear what it would mean for something to be part fermion and part boson. An atomic nucleus is a hydrogen nucleus if it has one proton it’s a helium nucleus if it has two (and on to lithium and the rest). There’s no sense in which something could be “between” being a hydrogen and a helium nucleus by having “between” one and two protons, because a partial proton just wouldn’t be a proton at all. You could get pedantic and say a nucleus can be in a superposition of having decayed and not decayed into another nucleus, and so that’s in some sense a violation of this. However you could never interact with that nucleus while keeping it in that superposition and see it behave partially like one nucleus and partially like another, because doing that would bring you into the superposition and you’d then be in the Everett branch with one nucleus or with the other (or “the wavefunction would collapse if you did that and then it would be one or the other”, whatever that means). So for the purposes of our interactions with them, nuclei are categorically of one element or another. Totally unrelated to the rest of the review but I’d be keen to hear from physicists if I’m wrong about this example, as I am a chemist by training so flying somewhat by the seat of my pants here. Regardless of my grasp of the physics example, I hope the concept is clear. Other examples I could think of were all conceptual maths or logic stuff that didn’t have a clean real-world implementation and I wanted to show that such tight category distinctions can in principle exist in messy reality as well as in thought. Then you get bimodal or other multimodal clustering about some measurement. Most people have one strongly dominant hand; normally it’s the right hand but a good 11% or so have it on the left hand. If you graphed “right hand dominance” on some normalised scale of -1 to +1 that you devised based on some standardised measurement of relative ability to do fine tasks with one hand or the other, you’d find most people clustered over near +1 with some variation between them, an order-of-magnitude or so fewer people clustered over near -1 in the same way, and maybe an order-of-magnitude fewer people again spread out in the middle. You’d call these right-handed (RH), left-handed (LH), and ambidextrous (AD). This wouldn’t be completely clean. You might not be able to draw a firm line between LH and AD that didn’t seem a bit arbitrary, or between RH and AD, but you’d be able to confidently classify most people as either LH or RH without much argument. Perhaps my imagining of how this would work is a little off, and actually there would be a third cluster around 0, giving a bit more structure to the AD grouping and allowing it to be more rigorously and unambiguously divided from the other two. These two possibilities would be bimodal and trimodal distributions, respectively. In these cases, most people can be unambiguously categorised without much controversy, but there will be edge cases: One “group” of edge cases in the bimodal case, which would be the whole AD category, which would have hard-to-define edges, and two in the trimodal case, which would be the areas between AD and LH/RH, which you might want to give names to and which would then work like AD in the bimodal case in that they wouldn’t have well-defined edges. I’ve chosen this example precisely because I don’t actually know if AD is its own cluster or just the name we give to the bit between LH and RH that just gradually bleeds into each. In each case, the term “AD” refers to something, but in one case it refers to something quite woolly, and in the other case to something more like LH or RH. I want to make clear that AD is a useful category in both of these situations, but it would need to be treated quite differently in each. Then there are just pure smooth distributions. Height is the classic example. Some people are taller than others but there’s only one cluster. There’s an average height; some people are tall, other people are short, but that doesn’t mean anything like what RH and LH means. You can define the difference between tall and short at the median, if you like, to get you two groups, or you can make three groups by using the 1-standard-deviation lines either side of the mean to give you an average-ish height group then tall and short groups. These are all reasonable things to do if you define your terms, and in these cases your choice of bins isn’t particularly dictated by the underlying distribution as it would be in the handedness cases, so your classification isn’t so unambiguously reality-driven, it’s more conventional, and your categories are more subject to debate and scrutiny – they’re a bit less “real”, but still useful. Indeed the fact that we could talk about ambidexterity even in a world in which the handedness distribution is bimodal is instructive. In that case, RH/AD isn’t a non-arbitrary distinction, and neither is LH/AD, but RH/LH absolutely is. In the trimodal handedness scenario, all three are non-arbitrary distinctions. There are just varying degrees to which a categorisation system is driven by the underlying reality of the situation versus just being a convenient way to divide up the world and talk about it, and which distinctions are of which nature really matters when critiquing those concepts and connecting them to other concepts. All of this has just been with one undisputed axis on which to graph a distribution, but in the world of psychology things are almost never that simple. Psychological concepts are normally bundles of more fundamental concepts that have been lumped together to create some higher-level abstraction that can then be measured and correlated with other things. There’s a similar distinction to the height vs handedness distinction at play in terms of how firmly implied such groupings are by underlying reality. When two smooth distributions correlate neatly, like foot size and hand size, they can easily be combined into a single measurement and talked about like they’re a single thing when discussing them. They might have to be pulled back apart for causal purposes (a footballer’s large hands don’t causally impact their play, but large feet do, for instance) but there’s a very meaningful sense in which foot/hand size is a useful concept in a way that a bundle of uncorrelated things like foot size and degree of short/long-sightedness isn’t. The degree to which the components of a composite measure correlate with each other compared with the degree to which they correlate with things outside the composite measure is generally taken as an indication of how useful the composite might be in a classification system (though this is, I’m keen to stress again, not a statement about internal causation or external co-causation). People go on at length about how different psychometrics systems are or are not “real” based on vague invocations of this as well as unimodal vs multimodal distributional along these composite axes, and often really don’t define their terms well, which is why I’m going on about it at such length here. I’ve heard people complain about Myers-Briggs based on the unimodality of distributions along each of its four axes of classification, but all that shows is that Myers-Briggs properties are more like height than like handedness. Yes, some T-type people are more like some F-type people than they are like some other T-type people. Some people under 6 foot are closer in height to some people over 6 foot than they are to some other people under 6 foot. That doesn’t mean height is a myth or even that the particular threshold of 6 foot isn’t sometimes really important (for instance in determining whether you’ll fit through a certain doorway without having to duck). The more thoughtful criticisms of Myers-Briggs I’ve heard claim that the individual measurements (generally questionnaire answers) that the process bungs into its calculations to produce its E/I, N/S, T/F, and P/J axes don’t naturally form those four clusters at all, that they’ve just been arbitrarily added together and thus aren’t really internally predictive of anything. These critics will say that you can’t know that just because someone has some N-type attributes, that they’re more likely than chance to have other N-type attributes, so the idea of an N-type is as pointless as category as large-footed-long-sighted. To imagine this taken to the limit, imagine the facebook personality quizzes that ask you if you prefer parties or staying in, then ask you if you’re more interested in fashion design or motor racing, then based on your answers “reveal” that you’re the type of person that prefers staying in and watching motor racing to the other three combinations, or whatever. It’s just reflecting your inputs back at you and not saying much else. This can be saying something if you’re then correlating it with something else external, but still it’s probably then just better to study those two correlations separately to avoid confusion. It’s this layer of useful vs useless bundling that I have a problem with in Haidt’s work. I don’t think his categories are particularly “real”, or “fundamental” or whatever, but that’s such a misused criticism across the board and against psychological research in general that I wanted to spend over 1,500 words making sure I was being exactly clear what my criticism was, and that it couldn’t be confused with the criticism where you just demand that every distinction be as pure as that between a fermion and a boson and declare everything else some flavour of nonsense. Haidt doesn’t show his work in the book at all. He does comment on how much data he’s got from his moral foundations questionnaires (it’s a lot), and that removes any concern that he might just be mining noise from tiny samples, but there’s no explanation of how he got from his data to his moral foundations. That’s sort of to be expected in a pre-popular-knowledge-of-replication-crisis popular science book, but then there’s a lot of discussion that strongly suggests that the bundling is pretty arbitrary, and that makes me worries that Haidt just arranges the data in a convenient way that just reflects his own categorisation system back at him. It’s important to remember that if you enforce a categorisation system on the data, then the fact those categories then act like they’re fundamental in your summary analysis, and can be said to go up or down or correlate with certain things, might tell you something, but it absolutely doesn’t tell you that your categorisation system itself was a good idea. It tells you it wasn’t such a startlingly bad idea that it destroyed all the information in your data, but it certainly doesn’t tell you that the underlying structure of the distributions suggests that categorisation in particular. Unfortunately, Haidt very much acts like it does, like the very fact he can add up different bits of his dataset that he’s called “Purity” and it seems to be higher for conservatives than for liberals tells him that there’s some underlying causal thing driving that variation which has a structure similar to his Purity foundation, or even that captures it as a distinct part of the larger dataset in a robust manner. The way he messes around with the Fairness foundation makes me very suspicious that this is all pretty arbitrary. ## The botched fairness foundation In the initial five foundations (no liberty), the fairness foundation is a complete mess. Haidt defines it as being the urge to punish free riders, which has obvious game-theoretic benefits in policing prisoner’s dilemma situations. But then he also wants it to include equality. He then seems to realise these aren’t the same thing, and tries to chalk this up to the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. I could go on at length about how I think “equality of opportunity” is almost never a useful term, is almost never used consistently, and doesn’t really make sense outside a completely scientifically illiterate blank slate view of human nature. Thankfully, I don’t have to, because this framing then gets abandoned as the fairness foundation is split. Explicit free-rider-punishment gets to keep the name “fairness” and it’s sort of suggested that this is sort of equality of opportunity in some way. A new foundation, liberty, is created, sort of to cover equality of outcome, but it’s operationalised as freedom from oppression, which is then taken to refer to things like racial justice, but also get-off-my-land libertarianism. This re-organisation is left unjustified on anything but its own very shaky top-level idea of those categories being sort of natural political terms, which doesn’t make the slightest shred of sense to me. No attempt is made to show anything like whether the underlying data aggregates more helpfully in the new system. It’s just that “fairness” was clearly making no sense so he re-organised it into something else that sparks slightly fewer intense feelings of “hang on, that makes absolutely no sense; what are you doing and can I see the data, please?” Liberty is the most obvious example of a related problem in that he sometimes talks about how each foundation gets expressed in conservatives vs in liberals in a way that makes it clear they’re very different things – in this case in conservatives as “get off my lawn” and in liberals as “the government must intervene on behalf of oppressed groups”. But what’s the justification for treating this as one foundation that both partisan groups care about in very different ways, rather than just splitting it again into two foundations, one of which republicans have and one of which democrats have? I fear the answer is that too much splitting would make it obvious that Haidt’s conclusions about the differences between conservatives and liberals are baked into the structure of his analysis and not really telling us anything we didn’t already know. He’s reaching for a higher level, a more “foundational” layer of ethical reasoning he thinks is causally driving partisan differences under the surface, but the way that he’s constructing those in his analysis can clearly be fairly arbitrarily tweaked to get you anywhere from “conservatives and liberals have the same underlying moral foundations, but operationalise them completely differently” to “conservatives and liberals have very different underlying moral foundations”. Fully going for the latter in the only way this analysis can support would just be bald-facedly reflecting the inputs back as outputs – he’d have essentially just described the differences, and obviously provided no explanatory power. He’d just have listed what things conservatives obviously care about (at that point in US political history) like freedom from big government, and things liberals care about (at that point in US political history) like harm reduction and racial equality, in a way that clearly added nothing and predicted nothing. But if he’d gone fully the other way and found some way to call everything two sides of the same coin, so that each foundation was well-balanced between the tribes but they expressed it very differently (like his liberty foundation) then he wouldn’t have found any juicy differences at his foundational level, so it also wouldn’t have seemed so interesting. By not being principled about how he draws his categories, he makes it all look a lot more complicated than it really is, and a lot more like it might have predictive value rather than just being a summary of how people answered political questionnaires. Is this extremely unfair? Maybe, but we never get to see the underlying calculations that are justifying his category distinctions and analysis choices. This means that, given the fairness/liberty jiggery-pokery, I’m inclined to just think it’s nothing. Of course, that’s just scepticism on my part of what’s essentially an untested hypothesis. Whatever magic Haidt pulled behind the scenes, if it produces a model that predicts things accurately, then there’s something useful going on. The whole point of the system is that these foundations are more real and more persistent than mere partisan squabbles and the latest news cycle, that they actually causally drive how different political tribes interact with issues. If it’s predictive, it’s predictive, regardless of my methodological scepticism. So how does the model hold up ten years after the book came out? Do conservatives and liberals still line up the way Haidt saw in 2012, with liberals focusing on harm, with some fairness and liberty thrown on top in a way that’s quite hard to explicitly lay out, while conservatives focus on a wider selection of moral foundations including authority, sanctity, and loyalty? The short answer is that they absolutely do not. The longer answer is that it’s difficult to even answer the question, because Haidt’s theory doesn’t just fail to predict current political trends in terms of who scores where on his axes, but fails to even have axes that capture the majority of what’s going on these days. Fairness/Liberty may have been a bit of a mess as the time of writing, but it’s an absolute disaster now. There’s a whole major strand of political identification that just doesn’t fit anywhere in his foundations: Socialism. ## Where are the socialists? There are just no socialists in Haidt’s world. Anyone who cared about equality in the socialist sense would find themselves, in his first draft, being lined up as indistinguishable from those who cared a lot about punishing free-riders. Bernie Sanders would have looked the same as someone going on talk radio to complain about welfare queens, as they would have both prioritised “fairness”, along with people who wanted the government to get out of their ammo safe and out of their kink dungeon, and people who wanted massive government intervention to equalise racial differences in elite society. Haidt’s revised six-foundation model isn’t quite that loopy, but socialism doesn’t find any more of a home in it. Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, or income, or welfare, or something, and that therefore it’s probably good for the government to redistribute wealth pretty aggressively along those lines, or stop anyone from getting too rich or powerful? It either has to show up the same as welfare-queen-punishment, which is its polar opposite, in the fairness foundation like before, or find a home in the liberty foundation along with liberal social justice and, somehow, Ron Paul. I realise that, at this point, I’m sounding extremely negative. It’s key to remember that there’s a lot of this book that’s well-argued and making an important case that I think a lot of people could do with hearing. The defence of group selection is one of the best I’ve read, as is the attempt to re-ignite Wilson’s “new synthesis” between biological and social sciences. The scientific would could do with a lot more of both of those things, and the message is as important now as in 2012, if not more so. Similarly, when firmly in moral psychology territory, the first section on intuitionism is, if something that’s very much “in the water” in many communities by now, still lacks the mainstream acceptance it deserves. If you can ignore the odd attempts to cast it as an enemy of or even alternative to both Kantian deontology and utilitarianism, and skip entirely the bit about how Jeremy Bentham was autistic or something, and treat it just as psychology unmoored from normative morality, it’s great stuff. But the political side of the book is just really bad. He makes such a song and dance of how pluralist and open-minded he is, and how we need to reach across partisan divides and understand each other better, but as well as sort of mangling his understanding of religious conservatism and treating social justice warriors as a type of libertarian somehow, he just doesn’t seem to have ever come across a socialist in his travels, or his reading, and that’s a monumental blind spot. There’s one point in the book where he mentions contact with Marxism, and that’s when he was travelling to Brazil to get some data on the moral intuitions of people outside the US. He mentions that he went to a conference but people were all Marxist so he left and went somewhere else. This was in the sense of their approach to psychology, and to be honest I’ve heard what I think is the kind of “theory” he’s gesturing at hearing there and I’d leave as well, but it’s a real weakness that this is the only time that any sort of Marxism or socialism really turns up in a book that’s supposed to help liberals understand challenges to their ideology and empathise with other points of view, and supposed to provide a sort of “theory of everything” for political differences. Indeed, the part of the book that’s explicitly written as a steel-man of challenges to liberal thinking takes a religious conservative and a libertarian as its opponents. I’m not claiming Haidt needed to cover every political ideology that’s ever been devised. I don’t mind that in the course of his field work he didn’t track down Curtis Yarvin, spend ten careers deciphering exactly what that man is trying to say, and then introduce a seventh moral foundation called “based and blackpilled” or something. Eventually you’re just cataloguing, not making enough generalisations to predict anything. But socialism seems like a big thing to just completely ignore. Maybe in 2012 (and I need to remember that even if the book was published then, most of the work that went into it comes from the noughties or even earlier) there were so few socialists that it would have been like including neoreaction to bother to include them? Maybe those sentiments were so rare that an axis for them would add little to the analysis? I was at university in 2012 and I was sort of a socialist, to the extent that I hung out with the socialist activists a lot, and there were, like, five of us, and we mostly focused on organising against censorship (our biggest event that year was a “Free Speech Day” – wow 2012 is ancient history) and against things like Sharia arbitration courts, state-funded faith schools, and female genital mutilation. I think everyone realised there was very little traction for the economic parts of the agenda, so focused on social stuff where there were live fights to be had. The nature of those probably seems insane from a US perspective but things are a little different in the UK. We have issues with things like even normal state schools running Religious Education lessons that teach Islam or Christianity as fact, and there are schools (though I’m not sure any of them are state funded, but the line isn’t clear and the systems intermingle) that advocate the death penalty for homosexuality and stuff. It’s wild, but that’s a different conversation. Being as kind to Haidt as possible, maybe having to fit socialism into his system seemed as ridiculous as having to fit divine right monarchy into it. Altogether, it comes across as an attempt to dramatically reach across the ideological divide between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and therefore unify all political thought, but then, well, that’s quite literally what the divide was in 2012, so maybe I’m being unfair by calling him out on this kind of limited scope. But I’m not. The whole deal here is meant to be that partisan politics is fickle but the moral foundations are, well, foundational. If just one decade on from publication, large amounts of mainstream politics are dominated by an idea that doesn’t really even fit into these foundations, then that’s quite a strike against the theory. I suppose Haidt would argue that is does fit, but I can’t work out how to guess whether he’d try to jam into fairness (that sounds most plausible from the name, but it really doesn’t work at all with what that foundation is supposed to be about) or liberty (making it into even more of a catch-all for everything he couldn’t capture in round one). But if the theory can be stretched that far, it isn’t really predicting anything. If this were the only problem, we could perhaps chalk it up to “nobody expected Bernie 2016” and conclude that politics is pretty hard. We need to have a look at the things he’s more explicitly dealing with – differences between conservatives and liberals on the six foundations he wants to work with – and see if they’re stable over time and therefore perhaps useful predictive tools. They are absolutely not. I don’t think you’d get anything like the same distributions of moral foundations between political tribes nowadays, and therefore that they’re only slightly less ephemeral than the partisan issue of the day. Moral foundations were supposed to be the stable thing in the background driving political differences. If anything, I think the last ten years suggests the causation flows the other way. ## Morality doesn’t drive tribalism; tribalism drives morality Probably the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals in Haidt’s view is that the former value sanctity, loyalty, and authority, whereas liberals don’t really care about these at all. So, explain Trump, please!. Trump is the embodiment of the profane. He offends basic notions of the sacred, of dignity in political debate and in human conduct in general, and of respect and decorum, at such a rate that the outrage just can’t keep up. And that outrage is not just the classic outrage of liberals towards conservatives that Haidt would predict: the outrage on behalf of those harmed (because harm is what liberals care about above all else in his model). Outrage against Trump was often outrage against the violation of the sacred. The very human being of Trump was cast as disgusting and dirty. He revelled in it and conservatives lapped it up. Conservatives luxuriated in violations of the sacred experienced as liberation, like it was a Sex Pistols concert in the 70s. And as for how liberals treat sacredness now? I don’t need to go on at this point with a bunch of examples of how the exemplar crime in the eyes of the average liberal is now offence against some sacred taboo, like conservatives of the past when someone swore in a sitcom. This is probably the most commented-on aspect of the political realignment of the 2010s and needs no further elaboration. And who took the side of national loyalty in 2016? Clinton’s nomination drowned in the US flag and other patriotic regalia, while Trump was cast as essentially a Russian spy, an enemy of the state, an infiltrator. And, as if to rub Haidt’s face in it, he was supposed to be in hock to the Russians (putting liberals on the side of loyalty) because of some alleged candid photos of him getting urinated on by prostitutes, or something (putting liberals firmly on the side of sanctity). Many conservatives ended up lionising Russia as superior to the USA (or at least many aspects of the USA), in a complete reversal of their Bush-era nationalism and in rejection of the whole cold war framing (though this has understandably got a little quieter in many quarters as of 2022). And, though liberals maintain their anti-authority flavour in some ways, as relating to sticks-and-stones authority like that of the police, it’s now liberals who demand respect for the authority of all the great centres of prestige – universities, broadsheet newspapers, the judiciary, teachers, the bureaucracy, scientists. Liberal discourse is saturated with appeals to hierarchy and demands for deference, with detractors urged to stay in their lane, not question the experts, and respect those with the prestige to demand such respect. Even the demands for justice for oppressed groups have over time taken on less and less of a “reduce material harm” flavour and begun to be expressed more and more in a “give prestige and deference” manner. Though the socialists talk about material conditions a lot, the liberal mainstream almost seems to view that as vulgar these days, and talks in terms of prestige and respect – hierarchical terms I associate more with Haidt’s authority foundation – because that’s the currency they work with now. In short, the political world Haidt describes is unrecognisable in 2022, and for more reasons that just the unexpected return of socialism to the world of polite conversation and the routing of the New Atheists from their position as the bleeding edge of cultural liberalism. I wouldn’t say that conservatives and liberals have switched places, it’s far more complicated than that, but certainly the dynamics he describes, where liberals focus almost all their messaging on utilitarian appeals to the greater welfare, while conservatives deal with a more complex and nuanced approach to morality involving respect for authority, a focus on defending the sacred, and loyalty to the nation and flag, are shot to hell by now. It is not good for a theory of what lies behind politics to look completely foolish after a decade of politics has passed! I can’t see how anyone, looking at events since The Righteous Mind was published, can put any stock in its theories of how differences in moral intuition drive political divides. Clearly the differences between people in different political tribes as to what moral intuitions they have are not foundational at all, but contingent on something else. Something was making conservatives all sanctity/loyalty/authority in the past, but is doing the same to liberals now. If moral foundations are not foundational at all, then what is driving them? Can we just look one link back up the chain and find a foundation of moral foundations, deeper in the recesses of the mind? Sadly, I fear it’s worse than that for Haidt’s theory. Rather than just thinking he’s failed to find the source of the causal chain, I think he has it entirely backwards: I think that political differences are what drive our differences in moral intuition. Think through all the examples I’ve given of how the conservative/liberal divide he describes has changed with respect to emphasis on different moral foundations. Every single shift is politically convenient. Liberals were anti-authority freedom fighters until they controlled a whole bunch of prestigious institutions and sources of authority, and then suddenly experts were not to be questioned, all sorts of elite prestige factories like Harvard were suddenly to be treated with the utmost of reverence, and liberals started using phrases like “the adults in the room” to refer to themselves. But they never got the police, so be as anarchist and punk rock as you like around those pigs (whereas Conservatives still ostentatiously show deference to the police). Conservatives clung to an image of resisting the corruption of the sacred by the profane, of wholesome family values and smiling rows of identikit suit-wearing children with biblical names like those from all the best homeschooling families I knew as a child, until their movement somehow ended up headed by a brash, shock-and-disgust-to-dominate real estate brawler with a disreputable sex life, and all that got quietly dropped. None of this is particularly controversial or insightful stuff when it comes to the last decade of political evolution “everyone actually a total hypocrite; tribalism rules all” isn’t exactly new or interesting. My point here is that this clearly drives the moral intuitions Haidt thought he’d identified as the prime mover in the equation. People don’t become conservatives or liberals because they have different moral intuitions. People develop the moral intuitions they require in order to support their political tribe, and those intuitions can change quickly. That’s because they’re all just downstream consequences of the most fundamental intuition, the ultimate unthinking flinch reaction upstream of all the post-hoc moral philosophising Haidt quite rightly views as secondary, the most basic elephant-in-the-brain: “My side is justified”. ## Conclusions Overall, I’d recommend The Righteous Mind. If that seems nuts given the preceding 10,000 words then that’s only because the ways in which it messes up are extremely interesting. This is not the kind of book you get mad at and want to throw at the wall. This is the kind of book you keep finding yourself “reading” with a thumb in the page, gazing out the window, thinking about politics or meta-ethics or the replication crisis. Particularly given when it was written, it’s a solid contribution to the world of popular social science. It does deserve its place as part of the turn towards empiricism and rigour in that world, and part of the “perhaps think a bit more about politics than how everyone else is obviously evil” genre. Its three main problems are that it’s hard to know exactly what to think about it replication-crisis-wise, that Haidt can’t distinguish between normative and descriptive claims even though he tries really hard to be good about this, and that its attempt to find an underlying driver for partisan differences is completely and utterly backwards. These might seem like damning criticisms but they’re really not. Nothing in this vein is free from the stain of the replication crisis. If you threw out every book that referenced even just the absolute bottom tier stuff like Dan Ariley and John Bargh, you wouldn’t have a discipline left. This whole discipline is crawling out of a huge hole of fraud, wishful thinking, and appalling lack of rigour. People like Haidt, even though I may be quite sceptical of his category formation, are broadly pulling it upward. It makes thinking about this area hard but it does not make it impossible or useless. Similarly the normative/descriptive confusion is far from unique and it doesn’t matter to a lot of the book’s content. You can take the moral intuitionism as a descriptive theory, as Haidt in his more sober moments would insist you should, take his attempt at “Durkheimian Utilitarianism” as a good starting point for how to think about utilitarianism in a less naive way, and leave out the awkward bridge idea in which somehow the existence of a moral intuition implies it’s either normatively true or instrumentally useful. There’s a lot of good thinking in there but you just have to follow Haidt very carefully and know when to let go of his hand as he powers off into his pluralism aesthetic, ranting about how New Atheists suck while producing almost identical arguments at a slightly different level of natural selection. The political stuff is the most obviously wrong on its face, but it’s wrong in a really enlightening and interesting way. It’s a good idea to understand that not everything is a simple disagreement over how to maximise one agreed value, but neither is the disagreement that the other side hates your value and wants it to be minimised just to spite you. A staggering amount of political discourse even now still takes place on one of these two absolutely ludicrous sets of terms. Haidt is a solid rebuttal to that, showing how different people have quite different moral intuitions, and how political debates often run aground on the problem of orthogonal values. His attempt to then treat those intuitive values as he found them in the war-on-terror era USA as personality fundamentals specific to the people that formed the conservative and liberal political tribes is completely wrong, but it represents a good first step away from what he’s positioning it against. If anything, he just didn’t go far enough and see that so much of what he saw as fundamental was a contingent expression of tribal alignment, and could be jettisoned quite easily, or built up from scratch, as political realities demanded. Perhaps the real lesson is that, viewed tribally rather than nationally, the loyalty foundation actually rules all? I hope not, and I’m not really that cynical. But I do think that sanctity, authority, and loyalty (in a nationalist sense) in particular are likely just contingent expressions of political convenience. If you have the power to determine what’s sacred, you’ll develop the sanctity foundation. If those who do so use it to keep you down, you’ll feel drawn to the profane. And so on. One counter-argument to this recommendation is perhaps that the best bits, like the elephant-and-rider idea, has seeped onwards into the broader culture where you can find it without the baggage of having to think about Dan Ariley, wrestle with a confusing and contradictory approach to meta-ethics, and work out how anyone could bundle Ron Paul style libertarianism and Ibram Kendi style social justice into one supposedly foundational pole of morality and call it a day. But, as I said at the start, I knew a lot of what I was already steeped in was downstream of The Righteous Mind, and most of what was unexpected on reading it was bad, but I still immensely enjoyed it. Few things I’ve read have been such good mental exercise. I guess it depends what one would want out of a recommendation. I would never recommend The Righteous Mind to someone who wanted to know what I think is the state of the art in thought on moral psychology, ethics, or politics. It’s so flawed. But I absolutely recommend it if you’re interested in those areas and want to find out more things to consider, and be primed to think hard for yourself. It’s by far the best largely wrong book I’ve read.	Scott Alexander	64253212	Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind	acx
# Impact Markets: The Annoying Details I said last year that I’d like to try running this year’s [ACX Grants](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results) through impact markets. Since then, some people have expressed interest in the technical implementation, and - to nobody’s surprise more than my own - it’s starting to look like it could happen. A reminder: impact certificates are like a VC funding ecosystem for charity. Charity founders with good ideas sell shares in their proposed projects. Profit-seeking investors buy shares of (“invest in”) projects that they expect to succeed. This funds the project; if it does succeed, altruistic people/foundations (“final oracular funders”) buy the impact, compensating the investors. For example, suppose I come up with a great idea to end malaria in Senegal. I need $1 million to make it work, and when it works it will be worth $5 million in benefits to the Senegalese. Ordinary charitable foundations don’t appreciate my genius, so I pitch it to VCs with biotech experience. They like it and buy 100% of the shares for $1 million. I take my million dollars, do the project, and cure malaria in Senegal. Foundations see that I have done a great thing with $5 million in benefits, so they give me $5 million. I pass this along to my investors, who make $5 million on a $1 million investment. They’re very happy, and incentivized to do more things like this in the future. Why is this useful? Try running a grants program and you’ll find out! You, a person who is presumably very altruistic but not necessarily an expert in epidemiology, will be asked to make decisions about which diseases to cure how. If you get it wrong, you’ve wasted your donors’ money. You can ask epidemiologists for help, but it turns out there is no easy way to get in contact with a consensus of all the world’s epidemiologists - let alone with the all the developmental economists, political scientists, etc who might have useful insights. Very large charitable foundations will have hired these people or built relationships with them, but even they don’t always feel confident in their decision-making process. In the current system, your job is to predict which charitable projects will work. In an impact market, you (as the final oracular funder) only need to figure out which projects did work, which is much easier: for example, penicillin obviously worked, and flying cars obviously didn’t. Then you buy the shares of those projects, and your job is done. Private investors still have to do the prediction behind the scenes, but they’re only risking their own money, not charitable dollars, and they’re properly incentivized to get the right answers. This is how I’ve always explained it before - and you can read other explanations like [Paul Christiano’s](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/certificate-of-impact) or [Vitalik Buterin’s](https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c). This post isn’t about the theory. It’s about the annoying implementation details. It may not be very interesting to people who are neither effective altruists nor institution design wonks, sorry. ## 1: What Is The Basic Format Of The Market? A: Simple Retroactive Funding Some charitable funder announces they will give money to good things that they like. If somebody does a good thing, the funder might give them money later. There isn’t necessarily any investing, certificates, or tokens. Advantage: This is very simple, and can be done right now: in fact, a team [is already doing this](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YdaugCRoko7ac4QCL/experiment-in-retroactive-funding-an-ea-forum-prize-contest) for good Effective Altruism Forum posts. Disadvantage: This is a good start, but really just equivalent to giving prizes to good EA Forum posts. Absent someone else setting up an auxiliary structure, it doesn’t help useful projects get funded. At best, it encourages a few marginal people to do cheap things they might have done anyway. B: Block Impact Certificates A charity offers a single impact certificate representing a project. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they sell a single certificate representing that project for $1 million. Then, when an final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they give $5 million to the holder of the certificate. Advantage: Again, it's simple. Disadvantage: Someone needs to have the entire $1 million in order to fund the project. There’s no way to split the costs, which makes it worse than eg stocks. When Tesla needs $1 billion in new funding, it doesn’t just ask billionaires. It sells (eg) one million shares of stock for $1000 each, and then people with much less than $1 billion can bet on their success. C: Fractionalized Impact Shares A charity offers splits its offering into many shares or tokens. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they could sell 10,000 tokens for $100 each. Then, when a final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they compensate each token holder with 1/10,000th of the final reward, so $500. Advantage: this allows people with much less than $1 million to invest, and creates a secondary market in tokens which people could probably do interesting things with. Disadvantage: Suppose the charity wants $1 million because it will take $500,000 to build a medicine factory, and then they want to make $500,000 worth of medicine. If only $400,000 in tokens are sold, they can’t even build the factory, and the whole project is worthless. So an investor wouldn’t want to invest $400,000 unless they were sure that someone would produce the other $600,000. But since nobody can know that, people might not invest. Or they might invest, then get very angry when their investment turns ends up useless. D: Fractionalized Impact Shares With Assurance Contract As above, except instead of buying a token, investors commit to buy a certain amount of tokens if all tokens get bought. For example, Alice might say “I commit to buying $400,000 of tokens, if eventually we get to $1 million”. Bob might say “I commit to buying $300,000 of tokens, if eventually we get to $1 million”. Carol might say “I commit to buying the final $300,000 in tokens”, and then everyone’s commitment “activates” and they all have to buy the tokens. You might be familiar with this as the mechanism behind Kickstarter campaigns. Advantage: This solves the problem discussed above. Disadvantage: It’s more complicated - but I think most people capable of buying certificates at all should be able to understand this, especially if it’s explained well on the marketplace’s website. My thoughts: The fractionalized shares with assurance contracts seem clearly the best. Some reviewers noted that in real venture capitalism, VCs are able to talk to each other to coordinate funding without a formal assurance contract. I think our market will involve smaller and less savvy players (at least at first), which would make the contract more useful. ## 2: What Is Being Sold? A: Full Credit For The Impact Of The Project This is the traditional solution. If I cured malaria, and you previously bought an impact certificate equal to 100% of my “equity” in the project, then in theory you have the right to say you cured malaria, and I don’t. Advantage: Elegance, everyone knows what's going on. Disadvantage: It’s hard to enforce from a common sense point of view. “The credit for” doing something partly takes the form of accurate costly signals about my personal characteristics, which can't be transferred. For example, suppose I cure malaria by inventing a novel antimalarial drug. Part of “getting the credit” for this is people understanding that I am a brilliant biologist. They might use me as a role model for young scientists, ask my opinion on important science policy questions, or make me chair of the biology department at Harvard. There's no credible way to sell these benefits - just because I sell you the impact certificate for curing malaria, doesn’t mean Harvard would be willing to make you the department chair instead. This is also going to make a lot of people mad when some photogenic kid from Kenya sweats and toils to builds a water pump for his community or something, and then some billionaire says no, I built that water pump. B: Credit For Funding The Project I think this is what Ben Hoffman writes about [here](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/minimum-viable-impact-purchases/). Both the people who do the project (ie the founder who gets people to build the bednet factory, the scientist who discovers the malaria cure) and the people who fund the project deserve some share of credit in the success. In this model, impact markets would distribute the funding-related credit only. That is, I might pay $1 million for the impact of a project to cure malaria; when they succeed, I can sell it to a big foundation for $5 million. So long as I have the shares, I can claim that I funded the project; once the foundation has the shares, they can claim this (even though causally they were not the ones who give the project the funds). In either case, the founders and scientists retain the credit for founding the project and doing the science. C: Rules Around Equity We might (for example) say that in an average project, the actual team involved deserves half the credit, and the funders also deserve half the credit (or some other distribution). Then we might have a norm that the team can sell half the equity (representing the funding credit) but not the other half (representing a sort of inalienable moral credit that attaches to their hard work). Advantage: Matches common sense Disadvantage: More complicated, less elegant, founders can't sell as much equity. My thoughts: There are good arguments for all of these. See below for more. ## 3: How Should The Market Handle Projects With Variable Funding Needs? Suppose a charity says “For $1 million, we can cure malaria in Senegal. But if we had $10 million, we could cure malaria in all of West Africa!” This is a bad match for the token impact certificates with assurance contract discussed above; do we active the assurance contract at $1 million, or at $10 million? A: Activate The Contract At $1 Million, Then Keep Selling More Tokens This has the following problem: suppose that you are an investor who believes that the plan to cure malaria in Senegal will succeed (produce $5 million in value), but the grander plan to cure it elsewhere in Africa will fail (produce $0 in value). You buy the $1 million in original tokens, activating the contract. Then other, less savvy investors buy the $9 million in remaining tokens. You turn out to be right about everything. The first project succeeds and produces $5 million in value; the second project fails and produces $0. A final oracular funder pays $5 million, distributed evenly among all token-holders. Your 1/10th of the total token supply gets you $500,000. So even though you were right about everything, you have turned a $1 million investment into only $500,000, and lost half your money. Since this was your original prediction, you will never invest your original $1 million, even though you correctly predict that will be good! In other words, under this method, proposing a grander secondary plan might prevent people from investing in your primary plan, even if your primary plan is good, which seems like a bad feature. B: Activate The Contract At $1 Million, Then Sell A Different Token For The Other Plan IE the charity sells $1 million worth of “cure malaria in Senegal” tokens. Then, if that contract activates, they offer another $9 million of “expand the plan to all of West Africa” tokens. Everyone knows which kind of token they are buying. Advantage: This avoids the problem mentioned above. Disadvantage: More complicated. One extra advantage: it can handle different levels of needing assurance contracts. For example, if the plan is “$1 million to start off, and then for each $1 we get after that we can produce one additional bed net”, then you don’t need any assurance contract on the secondary tokens. If it’s $1 million to start off, and then for each additional $500,000 we can open a factory in another African country”, then maybe there should be an assurance contract on each extra $500,000, or - if this would get too complicated - on the full $10 million. My thoughts: Reviewers brought up that real venture capitalists solve this problem by having multiple funding rounds where they sell off different parts of their equity. For example, you might sell off 10% in the first round, achieve some amount, and then sell off another 10% for your next big expansion. I am nervous about this because I want to be able to pitch impact certificates to non-savvy people who may not be able to make good decisions about equity. One possible solution reviewers brought up would be to offer a “standard deal” like Y Combinator does. If you don’t want to think about impact certificates, you take the standard deal, convert some pre-arranged percent of your equity to certificates, and never think about it again. Then if you want to do something more complicated later, you can look into your options further. ## 4: Should Founders Be Getting Rich Off Impact Certificates? A: Yes Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, sold off some of his equity for seed funding, and kept some other equity for himself. As Amazon grew, the equity appreciated in value, making him very rich. We could imagine impact certificates working the same way. I start a charitable project, sell 50% of the impact equity for seed funding, and then succeed. My investors can sell their impact certificates to a final oracular funder for more than they paid, making a profit. But I can also sell off my remaining equity to the same funders, making me a profit, potentially a very big one. For example, if I have a project that uses $1 million in funding to produces $5 million of value in the form of malaria cures, I can sell 50% of my equity to investors to get the $1 million I need. When it succeeds, a final oracular funder can pay $2.5 million to my investors, and an additional $2.5 million to me. Now I’m a multimillionaire for coming up with such a great charitable scheme. Advantage: This encourages people to start charities; the more good they could do, the more it encourages them. Disadvantage: This redirects at least some of “the surplus” from charities and beneficiaries to founders. That is, right now if a charitable project that costs $1 million produces $100 billion in value, then the founder gets some normal salary, and the funding charity and its beneficiaries have gotten an amazingly good deal. This is good for charities and beneficiaries. But if we allowed founders to capture more of the surplus, then maybe the founder would end up with $50 billion, and the charity and its beneficiaries would only get $50 billion, which seems much worse for them. Given that our goal here is to help beneficiaries (and by implication charities, since any money charities save goes to the beneficiaries eventually), this seems pretty bad. Or to put it another way, if someone makes $50 billion off charity and uses it to buy a yacht, then some of your charitable donations are going to yachts, which seems worse than them going to feeding the hungry or curing the sick. Or to put it yet another way, if founders generally kept 50% of their equity, all charitable projects would be twice as expensive - the normal $X to fund the project, and then an additional $X to pay off the founder. If founders generally kept 75% of their equity, all projects would be 4x as expensive, and so on. And to bring things closer to home: a reviewer mentions an certain excellent AI safety researcher. Given how much money is in this field, and how few excellent researchers there are, the big foundations might plausibly consider this person to be worth $10 million per year (that is, they would be happy to fund a program that spent $10 million per year to create another researcher of the same quality). But right now this person just earns an ordinary six figure AI engineer salary. If impact markets were “a success”, they might have to more than dectuple the amount they pay this person, with no change to their output. B. No Impact certificates could be used only to fill projects; need for funding, the same way grants are used now. Social norms would mandate that founders only ask for as much money as they needed for their project. This might include paying themselves a fair salary, but they wouldn’t be getting rich. Advantage: Avoiding the problems mentioned above. Disadvantage: There might be some situation where an especially brilliant person considers for-profit vs. charitable work and goes with for-profit because they won’t be able to internalize the value produced by their charity. My thoughts: Extremely split on this. Part of the point of impact markets is to spend some of the surplus on incentivizing more charity to exist. There are some innocuous ways to do this. For example, suppose that there are an unlimited number of malaria charities that want $1 million, and 25% of those will succeed and produce $5 million in benefits, with the other 75% producing nothing. So one way to produce $5 million in expectation is to spend $4 million funding four of these charities. Another way is to buy an impact certificate for a successful project from an investor. So suppose a savvy investor is twice as good at picking projects as the final oracular funder; she can pick a winner 50% of the time. So she pays $2 million to fund two projects, producing in expectation one successful impact certificate representing $5 million in benefits. Then it would seem that the investor and final oracular funder should agree to a price somewhere between $2 million and $4 million for the certificate; whatever number in this range they choose, both will make a profit over their next-best option. They can use normal negotiating tactics to figure out where in that range they fall, but nobody should lose money relative to the no-impact-certificates world. But if there are projects that everyone recognizes as good, then an impact marketplace will shift the surplus from final oracular funders (who are forced to pay prices more commensurate with their benefits) to someone else. If we let founders get rich, it shifts the surplus to founders. If we don’t let founders get rich, it shifts the surplus to fast investors who may not have added any value - that is, to the first people who snapped up the obviously-underpriced certificates. See Section 7 for more on this problem. I don’t have a good solution to this latter issue other than either not using impact markets, or allowing founders to get rich. I sketch a hack-ish solution in Section 11C. ## 5: How Do We Kickstart The Existence Of An Impact Market? How do we get an impact market to exist? Investors will only buy impact certificates if they expect that a final oracular funder will buy them, but we'll have a hard time convincing them when this has never happened before. A. Retroactive Prizes First, Then Impact Certificates Someone who wants to be a final oracular funder gets in the habit of giving out retroactive prizes. For example, out of the blue they find someone who helped fight malaria, and award them $1 million. They make it clear that if someone sells an impact certificate, they will give the prize to the certificate-holder rather than the original charity. Eventually this happens enough that people grow to expect and predict it, and they can sell impact certificates around it. Advantage: It's simple and would probably work. Disadvantage: It takes a long time, and a lot of granting prizes to projects that don’t need them (ie they would have been done anyway even without the prizes). Also, it kind of elides over the part where the impact certificate market gets set up. Is someone else doing this behind the scenes? What if they don’t? B: Committed Pot Of Money (aka The Original ACX Grants Plan) In the original ACX Grants plan, I solicit grant proposals, and probably get ~500 like last year. I promise to be Final Oracular Funder and give out prizes in one year’s time, and I commit a specific sum to this purpose (let’s say $1 million). I link everyone who’s interested to a market where people can buy shares in the project, and they do this, competing for my $1 million. Advantage: This sure does set up a marketplace. Disadvantage: Investors will have to predict (and maybe be sabotaged by) the behavior of other investors. If people only buy a total $1 million in tokens, then on average every investor will break even. Not every investor will in fact break even, because the whole point is that money will flow towards the good investors and away from the worse investors. But on average they’ll break even. But suppose you invest when there are $1 million of tokens sold, thinking that you are a slightly-better-than-average investor and so can probably do better than break even. Then later some other people come in and buy $9 million more worth of tokens. Now there are $10 million in tokens chasing $1 million in prizes, and on average each investor will only get 10% of their money back. Although some great investors could still come out ahead, it would be an unpleasant surprise to start out expecting to break even, only to learn later that you should actually only expect to get 10% of your money back. C: Pot Of Money Plus Cap As above, except that the amount of tokens that can be bought is some multiple of the amount of money in the pot - for example, only $1 million in tokens can be bought, so everyone knows they can on average expect to break even. Advantage: Solves the problem above. Disadvantage: It’s pretty limiting. Also, investors don’t have a god-given right to break even. Also, if every project produces massive value, some of them will necessarily be under-rewarded - and knowing that makes them necessarily under-invested-in. D: Market Kickstart Plus Semi-Unlimited Pot Of Money Here we would kickstart the supply side of the market with a set of grant proposals as above, but the final oracular funder would be a very large charitable organization (eg Open Phil or the Future Fund), operating at a scale so far beyond the size of the market that they could commit to funding every project that was good enough to deserve it. Advantage: Solves the problems above. Disadvantage: It places a lot of the buy/don’t-buy decision in the hands of a single oracular funder. For example, suppose that OpenPhil agreed to do this, but a few years later they got a new CEO who was more conservative than the previous CEO, and only funded about 2/3 as many projects. Now the chance of getting a return on your investment has gone down by 2/3 for a reason unrelated to its fundamentals. Or suppose someone invested in a malaria project, but OpenPhil pivoted away from tropical diseases and now there was no hope of getting any return. Seems like the sort of uncertainty that would discourage people from investing. E. Market Kickstart Plus Multiple Unlimited Pots Of Money This is more of the ideal. Have so many people making open-ended commitments to buy impact that changes in one or two of them don’t matter as much. This is how the stock market works: you can buy a stock with good fundamentals because there are so many people who buy stocks that you can abstract out concerns like “Warren Buffett is pivoting away from that industry”; there will always be someone around to offer you a fair price. Disadvantage: This seems less like a way of starting an impact market, and more like a final desired end state. My thoughts: I think the lower-down options are clearly better, but they’ll depend on how many people are willing to commit giant pots of money to this project. ## 6: Should The Market Use Cryptocurrency? A: Centralized impact certificates and fiat currencies We could have a standard online marketplace where people buy impact certificates (block or fractionalized) from the site with dollars (or other fiat currencies). The site would track all purchases, and in the very unlikely event that the site ever got erased, everyone would remember it anyway (eg the charity would remember who funded them). Advantage: Easy to set up and use. Disadvantage: We don’t get the “coolness” boost of using crypto. B: Impact NFTs/token and cryptocurrencies Or we could have a crypto marketplace, like eg OpenSea’s NFT marketplace. The impact certificates could be NFTs (if block) or cryptographic tokens (if fractionalized), and people could buy or sell them using cryptocurrency. Advantage: We're asking people to spend thousands of dollars on meaningless tokens with no direct personal use value, this is usually a hard sell, but people get excited about this kind of deal when you call it an "NFT". Also, many cryptocurrency users have lots of money and like investing it in experimental projects. Also, EA is friendly with FTX and they might be able to help set this up. Disadvantage: This is harder for the technical people to set up (unless they’re FTX), harder for users to use unless they’re already familiar with crypto, and has a reputation for including scams. I’m not concerned about environmental issues because we can just use a blockchain without those problems, but other people who don’t understand crypto might not understand that, and it might be bad PR for a charitable project. My thoughts: Crypto-literate reviewers say that crypto exchanges take fiat and handle transactions within themselves in a non-crypto way - but then the crypto exists in case someone wants to bring it to a different exchange. This seems like a best of both worlds scenario. ## 7: How Should The Market Price IPOs? A: Sell Certificates/Shares for Exactly The Amount Needed To Fund The Project For example, if a project needed $1 million, it might sell 10,000 shares and price them at $100 each. Whoever was the first person to pay $100 for a share would get it. If all the shares sold out quickly, and someone else wanted one later, they would have to buy it from an existing owner (probably at a higher price). Advantage: It’s easy to price shares, and project founders will get exactly the amount of money they want. Disadvantage: All surplus goes to fast people. For example, suppose there is a $1 million project that will create $5 million in value, and everyone knows this. The first few people to see the shares will buy up all them at $100, then immediately sell them for $499 (or whatever), making a huge profit without doing any work. Note that this isn’t just a question of “the project should have priced their shares higher”. It might be common knowledge that this project with $1 million in costs will create $5 million in value, but if we're asking project founders to honestly report their funding needs, then they will honestly say they need $1 million. In this model, there's no way to get the cost to $5 million without the founders lying. B: Auction Off The Certificates/Shares Certificates/shares would get auctioned off for some period of time, kind of like how NFTs are sold now. I don't know how to use an auction process with fungible shares, although someone has probably solved this problem. A very easy version would be that the share price starts at $100, and if I try to buy 25 shares for $2500, instead I begin an auction with that as the starting price, which lasts some amount of time. Advantage: Founders and projects deserve the surplus more than lucky/fast investors. Disadvantage: Might be technically harder. If the founders get the surplus, then they might get rich, which has advantages and disadvantages (see Section 4). The project getting the surplus would be less morally fraught, but not all projects have room for arbitrary amounts of extra funding. My thoughts: Split on this one. I think the answer will depend on how we resolve the earlier question, “should founders be getting rich off impact certificates?” If yes, then clearly auctions are the way to go (or implied auctions where founders sell off impact at a high price). If no, I can’t think of a good solution to the “fast people get rich” problem. ## 8: How Should The Oracular Funder Buy Successful Projects? A. By Buying A Certain Number Of Shares The same way as in the usual stock market. An investor who owns (for example) 10% of a project can negotiate a sale to the funder. Advantage: Everyone understands stocks, and this is very simple. Disadvantage: oracular funders might be semi-monopsonists who can play investors off against each other. This sounds like the kind of process that gets an impact certificate-related fight featured on Money Stuff. B. By Creating A Funding Floor Vitalik Buterin’s idea. A final oracular funder states that they value the project at (let’s say) $5 million, and as long as they continue to do so, they will buy any share in the project for $5 million/percent of the project. Under this model, somewhat might “apply” to have a funder value a certain project. The funder will come up with a valuation, and then anyone (including the original applicant, or other shareholders) can sell their shares at that price. Advantage: Makes people less concerned about monopsony. Disadvantage: Might be slightly more complicated. ## 9: What Should The Final Oracular Funder’s Decision Process Be? How does a final oracular funder decide how much money a successful project is worth? A: Fund Based On Regular Charitable Decision-Making Procedure Presumably final oracular funders already have grantmaking procedures, and can ask themselves questions like “How much would we have paid to prospectively fund a project like this one, knowing that it would succeed as much as it did?” Advantage: Easy (?) Disadvantage: Opaque to everyone except the funder. If you’re paying $1 million for a project to cure malaria in Senegal that you think has a 50% chance of success, it matters a lot to you whether the oracular funder would pay $500,000 vs. $5 million upon successful completion. But there might not be enough of a published history of grants for you to know this, and it might not even be a question with a fixed answer: it might depend on which of several different grantmakers got it, or on whether they were in a good or bad mood that day, or any of several other confounders. Although in theory oracular funders and investors are aligned insofar as the funders want to encourage future projects by paying fair prices for current ones, the alignment might break down - for example, the particular employee charged with evaluating how much money to pay for a successful project might be rewarded for “keeping costs down”, but not be punished for this having a vague long-run negative effect on impact markets. Even if this isn’t true, investors might worry that it’s true, and so under-invest. One reviewer suggested that final oracular funders go through a long list of past grants (for example, the 2021 ACX Grants) and publish how much money they would have paid for each; future investors can check the list and get a rough idea of what gets how much money. B: Fund Based On Some Sort Of Clear, Quantified Schedule For example, “we will pay $1000 for every life saved”. Advantage: this is clear, objective, and removes investor uncertainty. Disadvantage: Only works for highly legible projects. How do you quantify the lives saved by lobbying to prevent future pandemics (especially if the lobbying is successful, and a counterfactual pandemic quietly fails to happen)? How do you quantify the success of a CFAR-style educational intervention to "raise the sanity waterline"? These aren't an unsolveable problem: final oracular funders could easily say "We will pay $500 for each person who has been successfully educated about rationality". But unless they specified every possible outcome, this would shift incentives in favor of commonly-considered, easily-specified outcomes. And outcomes they do specify risk Goodharting - a self-interested founder with these incentives will "educate" people the smallest amount possible to still qualify for the award. C: Fund Based On Some Kind Of Very Vague Schedule For example, “we will pay $500,000 for what we think of as an important insight into AI alignment, similar in magnitude to X or Y previous insights. We will pay $100,000 for what we think of as a minor but still useful insight, similar to Z previous insight.” Or “we will pay $500,000 for what seems like a major decrease in malaria prevalence in this country. We will pay $100,000 for what seems like a smaller but still measurable decrease.” Advantage: Strikes a balance between the previous two methods. Disadvantage: The oracular funder won't be able to predict all the different good things that might come out of charitable projects, and so it will either have to commit to making some things up post facto (as in A) or subtly discourage people from doing unusual things that can’t be measured on the usual metric (as in B). D: Offer Consultations On Funding Schedules The final oracular funder could have an officer who takes calls from potential investors and explains the amount of funding they would get for different levels of success. For example, you might say “I’m funding a project to save the endangered blue leopard, how much is that worth to you?” and they could answer “$500 per leopard saved, plus an extra 200% bonus if you save more than 1,000 of them”. Advantage: this makes investment payoffs clear without preemptively demanding too much legibility. Disadvantage: requires more work from final oracular funders, and is especially vulnerable to Goodharting ("But you promised you would pay us $500 per leopard!") E: Have So Many Potential Funders That It Converges To A Market Price This whole system is partly predicated on the idea that funders will like knowing that they funded useful things - both because they are genuinely altruistic, and because they want to gain status and credibility by showcasing their charitable successes. If there are many oracular funders willing to buy impact certificates, then (absent collusion) they could potentially converge on a “market price”. That is, if the impact certificate cost an absurdly low amount, like $1, then people could buy “curing malaria in an entire country” for $1, and I (who would love to be able to brag about saving an entire country at parties) would outbid them and buy it for $2. But if the price were absurdly high - let’s say $100 billion - then nobody would buy it, because you could do more good some other way with that much money. So buyers and sellers will converge on a market price for impact certificates, people could mostly predict what that would be, and it would be fair in some sense. Advantage: this is how we do everything else under capitalism, and it usually sort of works. Disadvantage: This will require many independent funders and high liquidity, which might not be realistic while kickstarting a market (or ever). The EA ecosystem is tightly-knit, and even if oracular funders didn't explicitly collude, they would be starting from such similar values and such a cooperative stance towards each other that the equilibrium would probably feel collusive. My thoughts: Guess this one is up to the final oracular funders. ## 10: Who Are We Expecting To Have As Investors? A: Institutional Types And VC Firms These are who we would eventually be hoping to attract, given that we are trying to encourage the creation of institution-level expertise in charity-picking. Also, they have the most money. Disadvantage: We probably couldn't get them right away, and there aren’t that many who really understand effective altruism yet. B: Ordinary People Not too ordinary - we still need for them to make more than $200,000/year and so qualify as accredited investors (see I-A below) - but random Google engineers who are interested in EA, that kind of thing. Advantage: there are lots of them, including in EA. Some of them probably have a hidden talent in charity selection and it would be very useful to learn who those are. Disadvantage: They would bring less intellectual firepower to the problem per entity than large firms. They would have less money, meaning that only smaller projects could get funded, and we would need to be more concerned about moral hazard (ie they lose all their money and then are sad). My thoughts: Institutional types probably won’t bite for a little while, so we'll need to be prepared for ordinary people. ## 11: Conclusion: What Kind Of Impact Market Should We Have? At this point after talking to reviewers I am leaning towards a fractionalized-share-with-assurance-contract design, implemented through a mixed fiat-crypto market, aimed at relatively ordinary people, kickstarted by a few very large oracular funders who come up with their own decision procedures. I’m most uncertain about how to handle issues of founder equity, moral credit, founders getting rich, and splitting surpluses. Here are some designs I’ve been thinking about: A: The “Maximum Capitalism” Design Founders start with 100% equity, representing all the credit for their project. They can sell however much equity they want to investors, for however much money the investors are willing to pay. They can spend some of that money funding their project, and if they have any left over, they can keep it as profits. If they sell off 100% of the equity, then in some sense that we will have to hammer out socially, they “get no credit” for their project, no matter how hard they worked on it or how good a job they did. The main advantages are elegance, ease of use insofar as everyone knows how capitalism works, and potential for good charity founders to get rich. The main disadvantages are that it requires some financial savvy (unsavvy people can potentially lose all credit for their project in a way that will make them very unhappy), and it diverts a lot of the surplus to founders and investors rather than funders/beneficiaries. B: The “Project Funding Only” Design Founders sell off an amount of impact shares equal to the cost of their project / constant, where the cost of their project includes paying themselves a fair salary. Investors speculate on these. The investors may get rich if they are unusually good at spotting promising projects, but the founders won’t. The main advantage is ease of use for non-financially-savvy founders, plus people feeling more comfortable knowing that charity founders aren’t getting rich and buying yachts with their donations. In some cases, the oracular funders and their beneficiaries will keep more of the surplus. The main disadvantage is that in cases where projects are very beneficial and everyone knows this, whoever snaps up the shares first will get most of the surplus. This is clearly unfair. C: Hybrid Design: Some Kind Of Scaling Of Investor Equity I dislike both A and B enough that I am trying to think of hybrid designs that avoid both extremes. Consider our typical example: a malaria project that requires $1 million and will produce $5 million in benefits. If we know that the desired solution is to sell $1 million worth of equity, but we want people to be “bidding” for it instead of just snapping it up and “scalping” it, we could have them bid for smaller quantities rather than higher prices. For example, Bidder A could say “I’ll pay the $1 million for only 25% of the equity!”, and Bidder B could counter “No, I’ll pay it for only 21%!” Then Bidder B would win, pay $1 million, and when the final oracular funder bought it for $5 million, the investor would get $1.05 million - enough to make a fair profit, but most of the surplus would still go to the funder and beneficiaries. The key would be that the original founder keeps 79% of the equity but - by agreement/collusion among oracular funders - can’t sell it. They can just keep it as moral credit for their hard work on the project. I don’t like the fact that it’s important they want to keep as much as possible but they have no real incentive to do so - maybe funders could give them 1% of what their equity entitles them to as a bonus, as they are buying other equity? I’m not sure; it’s kind of a hack. The other problem would be the math. If there’s only one block certificate worth $1 million, it’s easy to imagine how the bidding works. If there are 1000 tokens for $1000 each, then bidding on an equity amount for each token sounds more complicated. This would be up to auction theorists and programmers to figure out a fair way to implement. My thoughts: I really hate all these options, and I’m posting this partly to see if other people have better ideas. Some reviewers who are also potential final oracular funders feel like they might be able to solve the all-surplus-goes-to-making-people-rich problem with A by just not paying that much money; I haven't fully thought through the downstream effects of that. --- ## Appendix I: Legal Issues A: Issues Around Unregistered Securities The lawyer I consulted on this project says that impact certificates are unregistered securities. But he also says that in the US, it’s legal to sell unregistered securities to accredited investors - meaning (more or less) people who make more than $200,000 a year. Any impact certificate market could probably operate legally in the US as long as it screened buyers to make sure they were above this number. I’m not sure about other countries. B: Issues Around Tax-Deductability The same lawyer said impact certificates would never be tax-deductible. That makes investing in impact certificates less financially efficient than donating to a regular charity, from a would-be investor/donor’s point of view. One possible retort is that potential investors and potential donors are different people, plus it’s more financially efficient because you might make money off of it, which you never do with normal charitable donations. Maybe a better way to look at this is abstracting out the investor and comparing “final oracular funder donates directly to charity” vs. “final oracular funder gives money to investor, causing charity to get funded”. Here it becomes clear that it’s the oracular funder who’s losing out on the tax benefits. But do oracular funders (eg OpenPhil, Future Fund) pay taxes at all, or benefit from tax-deductability? I’m not clear on this. C: Issues Around Oracular Funders’ Nonprofit Status. Government bodies might think it’s weird for a tax-deductible charity, organized for the public good, to spend lots of its money in payouts to venture capitalists who are not themselves engaging in charity. As far as I know there’s no legal precedent on this issue and we would just have to try it and see. D: Issues Around Governance And Principal-Agent Problems Suppose I invest $1 million in a project to cure malaria, on the assumption that it will work and an oracular funder will pay me back - and then the people involved are lazy and don’t even try to work on the malaria cure? Realistically this is no worse than the current situation, where eg OpenPhil can fund someone to cure malaria and they can just not do it. If they deliberately embezzle the funds, it’s embezzlement and you can sue them. If they’re just really bad at their job, that seems like part of the risk you take in normal charity and normal investments. In normal investment, stocks (sometimes) grant a right to control a certain amount of corporate governance. In theory, impact markets could work the same way. I’m against this because it would be extremely hard to enforce; we would need to get Congress to pass laws about it or something. Also, sometimes shares in a company don’t connect to governance, and that usually seems to go fine. E: Issues Around Middlemen Holding Money If there is an impact marketplace, probably it would take investors’ money (or maybe their credit card details, if it’s using assurance contracts), then shortly afterwards give it to the charitable projects. Does the step where the marketplace acts as a middleman between the investor and the charity give it any legal responsibilities? For example, are these two transactions both separate taxable events? (I think no, but would like confirmation). ## Appendix II: Ethical Issues A: Accidentally Encouraging High-Risk Negative-In-Expectation Projects Suppose I have a project where I spend $1 million to cure everyone in Senegal of malaria, creating $5 million in value. Also, there’s a 25% chance it has terrible side effects, giving everyone cancer and costing $100 million in lost value. So on average, the project produces $5 million + 0.25 \* -$100 million = -$20 million in value: its expected costs are greater than benefits. A regular charity would avoid funding this, because they are altruistic and clearly don’t want to fund something that (in expectation) makes the world worse. But a smart-but-amoral VC would fund it. In 75% of cases, it produces $5 million in value, and charities (who just a see a happy malaria-free country) pay them that money. In 25% of cases, it creates -$100 million in value, and nobody buys the impact certificate, for a total value of $0 (they’re not obligated to pay the negative value; how would you force them?) So in expectation, they will make 0.75\5 = $3.75 million on a $1 million investment. So they do* invest in this net-negative project. You could object that this is no worse than the situation with business investing now, but actually there are quite a lot of bad businesses that make the world worse, and since charities are explicitly trying to make the world better, they should hold themselves to a higher standard of not doing that. [Ofer and Owen Cotton-Barrett have discussed this here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74rz7b8fztCsKotL6/impact-markets-may-incentivize-predictably-net-negative). Their conclusion is that final oracular funders should take this into account when deciding who to grant impact certificates to. This kind of softens the benefit of impact certificates - their whole point was supposed to be that funders shouldn’t have to be smart people who can figure out the results of various plans - but at least figuring out whether there were potential bad effects sounds like a somewhat easier problem than figuring out whether something will work. This could also be handled at the market level, by refusing to list certificates/tokens in projects that were especially likely to be high negative-impact - although, again, this requires market officials to be smart, which is a strong requirement. B: Incentivizing Reward-Hacking Once an impact certificate marketplace is established, decisions of final oracular funders will determine whether savvy private investors get millions of dollars or not. That means that savvy private investors - who are very good at influencing things! who might have entire departments whose whole job it is to influence other large savvy organizations! - will want to gain power over organizations like Future Fund and OpenPhil and influence their grantmaking. A worst-case scenario for this might look like the current relationship between the US military and its defense contractors, where outright bribery is banned but the contractors use many other forms of soft influence to sway military decision-makers. I have trouble imagining this really working with OpenPhil and Future Fund in their current forms, but part of the problem is that this provides a long-term incentive for private industry to try to twist them into other forms that are less resilient. C: People Could Lose A Lot Of Money The typical statistic is that nine out of ten startups fail. Of the 656 ACX Grants applications, I was only able to fund 38 (6%), though a few others got funded through other means. Future Fund has mentioned [only funding 4%](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/paMYXYFYbbjpdjgbt/future-fund-june-2022-update) of its “open call” applicants. Unlike investing in regular stocks, where on average even if you can’t beat the market your stock will stay the same or even go up, the default outcome in buying impact certificates is that you lose all your money. This is bad both because we don’t want people to lose all their money, and because this might create moral hazard on the part of final oracular funders to recoup some of people’s losses if they seem like an especially pitiful case. I think we should promote a norm that people shouldn’t invest any money in impact certificates that they don’t want to lose. Otherwise, I’m not sure this is any worse than eg crypto, which already lets small investors lose all their money quickly. D. Using Impact Certificates For Evil For example, what if people use this technology to incentivize assassinating political figures they don’t like? This concerns me least out of all the issues in this section. There is no advantage of retrospective assassination funding compared to prospective assassination funding. In fact, there’s a significant disadvantage: the prospective funding requires a conspiracy of two people (assassin and funder), whereas the retrospective funding requires a conspiracy of three (assassin, investor, and final oracular funder). Most investors would assume that most oracular funders wouldn’t support assassination, and on the very slim chance that an oracular funder publicly communicated the opposite, they could be immediately arrested for promoting assassination, the same as anyone else who publicly broadcasts “I WILL GIVE YOU $1 MILLION TO ASSASSINATE SOMEONE”. Legal political movements that we disapprove of may eventually be able to use this technology, but this is a general side effect of any attempt to make charity more efficient, and most charity is not political. --- (there’s another copy of this post at <https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6LppWMdN2NLHceGTr/impact-markets-the-annoying-details> to catch different potential readers; you might be interested checking the comments there too)	Scott Alexander	63311485	Impact Markets: The Annoying Details	acx
# Book Review: The Man From The Future John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”. [The Man From The Future](https://amzn.to/3ywbZM0), by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived. By age 6, he [could](https://gwern.net/doc/math/1973-halmos.pdf) divide eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish ([sometimes](https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5.pdf) he joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”. A group of scientists encountered a problem that the computers of the day couldn’t handle, and asked von Neumann for advice on designing a new generation of computers that was up to the task. But: > When the presentation was completed, he scribbled on a pad, stared so blankly that a RAND scientist later said he looked as if “his mind had slipped his face out of gear”, then said “Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer.” While the scientists sat in stunned silence, Von Neumann reeled off the various steps which would provide the solution to the problem. Do these sound a little too much like urban legends? The Tale Of Two Cities story comes straight from the mathematician involved - von Neumann’s friend Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in [The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann](https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Pascal-von-Neumann/dp/0691023670). The computer anecdote is of less certain provenance, quoted without attribution in a 1957 [obituary](https://books.google.com/books?id=rEEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89) in Life. But this is part of the fun of reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure of such mythic proportions. This is not really what Bhattacharya is here for. He does not entirely resist gawking. But he is at least as interested in giving us a tour of early 20th century mathematics, framed by the life of its most brilliant practitioner. The book devotes more pages to set theory than to von Neumann’s childhood, and spends more time on von Neumann’s formalization of quantum mechanics than on his first marriage (to be fair, so did von Neumann - hence the divorce). Still, for those of us who never made their high school math tutors cry with joy at ever having met them (another von Neumann story, this one well-attested), the man himself is more of a draw than his ergodic theory. And there’s enough in The Man From The Future - and in some of the few hundred references it cites - to start to get a coherent picture. Where Did Von Neumann Even Come From? The canonical answer is “Mars”. Technically he was born in Hungary. But we’ve already been through this. A few years ago [I wrote about](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) “The Martians” - a sudden spurt of Hungarian supergeniuses born around 1900. People low-key noticed this phenomenon almost as soon as it started, but it really became obvious during the Manhattan Project, when several of the project’s leading lights (including von Neumann) reconnected in the deserts of New Mexico c. 1940 and realized they’d gone to high school together in Budapest. Leo Szilard joked that “Hungary” was a front for Martian spies, and the group has been called “Martians” ever since.. In my post, I was able to track down a few clues to the mystery. All of the Martians were Jewish, which linked the puzzle to the general puzzle of Jewish overachievement (for example, 36% of US Nobel Prize winners are Jews, compared to only 2% of the US population). Greg Cochran and others suggest [a genetic explanation](https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf), with Daron Acemoglu and others suggesting [a cultural/historical one](http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/9/3/why-the-jews-are-so-educated.html); unsurprisingly, I side with Cochran. Granting that this is a Jewish phenomenon, it’s not too hard to explain why it happened at the turn of the century in particular - too long before then, and anti-Semitism prevented European Jews from getting a good education; too long after then, and they all died in the Holocaust. That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe. Although most of the weird overachievement comes from Ashkenazi Jews in particular - those from Eastern Europe - there were Ashkenazim in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, etc. So why Hungary? In the last post, I came up with a few theories. Places too far east (eg Russia) had more anti-Semitism and less education. And the rest of Central Europe actually did have have lots of Jewish or half-Jewish geniuses during this period - Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example. Still, I wasn’t too happy with this explanation. Many of the Eastern European Jews eventually fled to America, where there was less anti-Semitism and they could get good educations. They did very well for themselves - see the Nobel Prize statistic above. But the Manhattan Project, which you would expect to draw disproportionately from Americans, was still disproportionately Hungarian. There are now 15x more Jews in the US than in early 1900s Hungary, but we still admire and envy those few 1900s Hungarian supergeniuses as a breed apart. Why? I couldn’t find a satisfying explanation. Bhattacharya quotes von Neumann’s own explanation: > [He] attributed his generation's success to "a coincidence of some cultural factors" that produced "a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction. In other words, [the Jews’] recognition that the tolerant climate of Hungary might change overnight propelled some to preternatural efforts to succeed. I know you’re the smartest person in the world, but come on. Hungarian Jews did especially well because they felt like terrified outsiders who could be exterminated at any moment? That’s all Jews everywhere! This bothered me enough that I turned to a second von Neumann biography, Norman MacRae’s [John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered The Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, And Much More](https://www.amazon.com/John-von-Neumann-Scientific-Deterrence-ebook/dp/B01H4IREWC). I was delighted to find that MacRae had a completely straightforward explanation I had never heard before. > In 1870-1914 Budapest and New York were the two cities in the world to which the brightest Jews seemed wisest to immigrate. In them — but in few other places — an intelligent Jew of the 1890s could rise in income and status nearly to the level permitted by his ability. In Budapest Jews quickly became the professional (doctor and lawyer) as well as merchant class […] > > As a consequence, there was a flood of Jewish immigration into Hungary in the 1880s and 1890s as there was simultaneously into New York. > > By the beginning of the twentieth century towns such as Pecs (in which Max Neumann was born), on one of the main immigration routes for Jews into Hungary, were as much as 40% Jewish. Even Budapest, with its swelling Magyar bureaucracy, was more than one-fourth Jewish. Of Hungary’s total population of over nineteen million, only 5% were Jewish, but that was because there were few Jews in the rural areas. In the towns the Hungarian Jews had come to constitute an important middle and upper middle class — a distinction toward which the nobility still evinced no interest and the peasantry no aspirations. […] > > One can see why an intelligent Jew in 1870-1910 could well pick Budapest rather than entry through Ellis Island into America. Old Budapest at the turn of the century was a more sophisticated place than East Side New York. Budapest was creating the best high schools in the world, which New York was not. In Budapest immigrating Jews would soon employ domestic servants, which in New York they would not. They would be able to create an amusing dinner-table culture. There was no need of a long sea voyage to get to Budapest from the ghettos and pogroms of czarist Russia — or from Jews’ still-inferior citizenship in imperial Germany and even Dreyfus-era France. > > To America, after sea voyages became no longer frightening in the 1890s, fares suddenly became very cheap, but for the lowest classes only. The price wars between steamship companies in the 1890s were like those between airlines eighty years later: lots of bargain offers for the masses but not for the business classes. In these price wars the Hamburg-New York steerage steamship fare in the 1890s was halved from $20 to $10, but nonsteerage fares remained expensive, especially on unsinkable ships like the Titanic. More steerage-class Jewish families settled on New York, and more upper-class strivers on Budapest. In ideal high school circumstances, the latter bred the generation of geniuses. MacRae’s thesis is that, of the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, the upper classes disproportionately migrated to Budapest, and the lower classes to New York. This fits with my findings in [Contra Smith On Selective Jewish Immigration](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective), where I argued that (contra Noah Smith’s claim that US Jewish achievement might be due to selective immigration) everyone at the time agreed that it was mostly the poorest and least successful Eastern European Jews who came to the US. From [a paper](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/27563679?seq=1) I quoted there, describing a first-generation Jewish-American immigrant: > He recalls that as a young boy in Vaslui, Romania, he had the impression that America was a place for those who had gone into bankruptcy, for deserting soldiers, absconding husbands and the like - "an exile which men fled to only in preference to going to prison". Ravage's parents relinquished him [ie let him immigrate], albeit reluctantly, because their once middle-class standing had eroded to something resembling genteel poverty. His father still made an effort to send his boy on his way in some kind of self-respecting style, to keep up appearances, although it took the sale of the family cow to do so. > > Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years. So the most successful Jews went to Budapest, and the poorest to America. If past success correlates with future success (cf. [Plomin](https://www.nature.com/articles/mp20152), [Clark](http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf), etc), we would expect Budapest to continue to produce more talent. I think this clears up my remaining confusion around the Martians. For whatever reason, Eastern European Jews of the 19th century were unusually bright. The very brightest of this unusual group moved to Budapest, interbred with each other, and had one generation of totally unprecedentedly brilliant children before being wiped out. Everything about the Holocaust is so tragic that it’s hard to make it any worse, but credit to MacRae for his attempt. What Was Von Neumann’s Education Like? My wife and I are trying to conceive, and I found myself with a bit of an agenda when reading The Man From The Future’s early chapters. Was there anything special about von Neumann’s early years or education that helped him rise above his fellow Martians? What can interested parents do to improve their kid’s chances of becoming the world’s smartest person? John’s education started with ten years of seemingly haphazard home schooling; there was no tradition of organized primary schools at the time. Still, he was far from under-resourced during this time; his cosmpolitan governesses taught him every major European language, and he had access to his father’s spectacular library (this may have been when he memorized a 44-volume German-language history of the world, which he would later freak people out by quoting during historical discussions). The family patriarch was Max von Neumann, an extraordinarily successful lawyer - he made so much money that the Emperor of Austria-Hungary ennobled him for service to the national economy. Every night, Max would gather John and his two brothers around the dinner table. First, he would discuss his own day - the cases he had argued, the financial deals he had negotiated., any problems that had been on his mind. Then the children would present on what they had been reading about. The whole von Neumann family - father Max, mother Margit, and the three sons - would have protracted arguments on Henrich Heine’s poetry, or the trajectory of anti-Semitism in Europe, or the paradoxes of God’s omnipotence. Sometimes leading intellectuals would attend and join in, lured by Max’s continually growing wealth and reputation. One frequent guest was Rudolf Ortvay, director of Budapest’s Theoretical Physics Institute. Another was Sandor Ferenczi, a student of Sigmund Freud working on bringing the recently-founded psychoanalytic movement to Hungary. John’s brother Nicholas [wrote an account](https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/vonneumann.pdf) of these sessions, including slightly strained accounts of how they might have influenced John’s future development. For example, one of Max’s most important deals was buying an automated loom company; as a result, the whole family picked up expertise in loom technology. The looms of the time were controlled by inserting punch cards, later to become a standard in digital computing (though not AFAICT through von Neumann’s influence in particular). At age 11, John went to high school at Budapest’s Fasori Gymnasium. This school has since attracted historical attention for the number of geniuses it produced; along with von Neumann and fellow Manhattan Project physicists Wigner and Teller, its alumni included Nobel-winning economist John Harsanyi and poet George Faludy. The faculty, too, were top-notch: young John’s math teacher was Laszlo Ratz, later to be memorialized by the Laszlo Ratz Prize given yearly for excellence in math education. But despite this enviable environment, it is unclear how much attention John ever paid in school. His brother writes about “frequent complaints of his high school teachers to the effect that when he was asked what the assignment was for today, he did not know; but he then participated in discussions with full competence and knowledge of the subject." Even Ratz was not fully confident in his ability to teach von Neumann, and eventually recommended a private tutor (according to MacRae, the tutor - Gabor Szego - would later become “one of the half dozen most distinguished Hungarian mathematicians of the twentieth century” and end up as chairman of the math department at Stanford). Throughout all this excellence, Bhattacharya keeps coming back to the theme of precariousness. Max von Neumann didn’t teach his kids five languages just because he wanted them to be sophisticated. He was preparing for them to have to flee Hungary in a hurry. This proved prescient; when John was fifteen, Communists took over Hungary, targeting rich families like the von Neumanns. A few months later, counterrevolutionaries defeated the Communists - then massacred thousands of Jews, who they suspected of collaborating. The von Neumanns survived by fleeing the country at opportune times, and maybe by being too rich to be credibly suspected of communist sympathies. But John’s “feeling of extreme insecurity…and…necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction” certainly wasn’t without basis. This was, perhaps, an education of a different sort. So what’s the recipe for giving your children a von Neumann-level intellect? I can make four strong recommendations: 1. Be a Hungarian Jew 2. Be very, very, very rich, so rich that you get a noble title for it, and fill your home with multilingual governesses and top intellectuals and tutors. 3. Suffer violent upheaval - but not so much that you stop being very, very, very, rich. 4. Send your child to the Fasori Gymnasium, 17 Varosligeti Fasor, Budapest, Hungary - already [accepting applications](https://www-fasori-hu.translate.goog/jelentkezes/felveteli?_x_tr_sl=hu&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) for the 2022-23 academic year! What about those of us who, through poor planning and suboptimal life choices, have failed to do any of these in time? Here I am less sure. But I find myself charmed by the unstructured nature of John’s first ten years, and by Max’s nightly debates over the dinner table. Was Von Neumann A Nerd? No. You might expect someone who singlehandedly invented several fields of math to be at least a little aspie, but von Neumann defies the stereotypes. He loved parties, beautiful women, and fast cars. Especially the fast cars. According to Bhattacharya: > Von Neumann loved driving very much but had never passed a test. At [his wife] Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened “Von Neumann Corner” on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the streeting wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. "I was proceeding down the road,” begins one fabulous excuse. “The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!” The Man From The Future avoids mentioning a rumor, spotted on Wikipedia, that part of von Neumann’s problem was a habit of reading books while driving. Although John could get lost in thought, he was far from demanding perfect silence. He reported doing his best work in chaotic environments, [and](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann) at Princeton “he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work”. Most surprising, at least to me, John von Neumann was reportedly quite fun to be around - the life of the party. He used his prodigious memory not just for mathematical theorems but for an almost limitless amount of jokes and gossip. You can find a list of his favorite jokes in his brother’s biography. Here’s one: > Berlin street scene. World War I: man at corner yelling repeatedly: “The Kaiser is an idiot!” Out of nowhere two police agents appear and arrest him for high treason. “But I was referring to the Austrian Kaiser, not to our Kaiser.” “You can't fool us! We know who the idiot is.” Was Von Neumann A Psychopath? Granting that von Neumann was not a nerd, was he a psychopath? This has been a matter of more debate. His detractors called him “cold”, “calculating”, and “ruthless”, and pointed out that his game theory work, while brilliant, tended to focus on the most cutthroat scenarios (it was he who invented the term “zero-sum game”). While some of his Manhattan Project collaborators came to regret or at least agonize over their role in inventing the Bomb, von Neumann was disinclined to waste time questioning past decisions. Instead, he goaded the government to get to work building bigger, deadlier hydrogen bombs before the Russians managed the same. His most controversial opinion was urging an immediate pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia. And he meant immediate - he famously said “If you say why not bomb [Russia] tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?” People have criticized him a lot for this one, but reading the book I think I got a pretty good sense of where he was coming from. Von Neumann hated totalitarianism. Really hated it. From his daughter Marina: > Throughout much of his career, he led a double life: as an intellectual leader in the ivory tower of pure mathematics and as a man of action, in constant demand as an advisor, consultant and decision-maker to what is sometimes called the military-industrial complex of the United States. My own belief is that these two aspects of his double life, his wide-ranging activities as well as his strictly intellectual pursuits, were motivated by two profound convictions. The first was the overriding responsibility that each of us has to make full use of whatever intellectual capabilities we were endowed with. He had the scientist's passion for learning and discovery for its own sake and the genius's ego-driven concern for the significance and durability of his own contributions. The second was the critical importance of an environment of political freedom for the pursuit of the first, and for the welfare of mankind in general. > > I'm convinced, in fact, that all his involvements with the halls of power were driven by his sense of the fragility of that freedom. By the beginning of the 1930s, if not even earlier, he became convinced that the lights of civilization would be snuffed out all over Europe by the spread of totalitarianism from the right: Nazism and Fascism. So he made an unequivocal commitment to his home in the new world and to fight to preserve and reestablish freedom from that new beachhead. > > In the 1940s and 1950s, he was equally convinced that the threat to civilization now came from totalitarianism on the left, that is, Soviet Communism, and his commitment was just as unequivocal to fighting it with whatever weapons lay at hand, scientific and economic as well as military. It was a matter of utter indifference to him, I believe, whether the threat came from the right or from the left. What motivated both his intense involvement in the issues of the day and his uncompromisingly hardline attitude was his belief in the overriding importance of political freedom, his strong sense of its continuing fragility, and his conviction that it was in the United States, and the passionate defense of the United States, that its best hope lay. Bhattacharya expands on that “lights of civilization” phrase. Von Neumann was born to loving parents, in a super-rich family, during the Belle Epoque, in one of the most beautiful cities (with one of the most vibrant intellectual scenes) in history. He spent his youth flitting between the great German centers of learning, hashing out the foundations of quantum mechanics with a bunch of geniuses who all loved and admired him. Then the abortive Communist revolution in Hungary and the all-too-successful rise of Fascism in Germany destroyed all that. He had to watch, helpless, as his beloved universities were hollowed out into echo chambers for Nazi ideas. And then, after he escaped, Hitler killed many of the people he knew and loved. So yeah, he held a grudge. But also: von Neumann invented the minimax theorem. This is a game theory principle which Bhattacharya compares to the old trick to get a fair division of pie - one player slices it, the other player picks which slice they want. Generalized, it says “assume that your opponent will act in the way that best serves their interests at your expense, then plan accordingly”. In the late 1940s, there was no nuclear second strike capability. Whoever launched a nuclear first strike would just win totally with no downside. By minimax, as soon as the Soviet Union developed nuclear bombs, they would make the move that best served their interests - ie launch a nuclear first strike and win totally. So by minimax, America’s best option was to make the appropriate move given that that was true - which was clearly to nuke the USSR first, before they could get bombs themselves. Knowing what we know now, this proved unnecessary. Partly this was because it turned out to be possible to develop a retaliatory capacity to discourage first strikes. And partly it was because the Soviets weren’t perfectly rational game theoretic agents (predictable in retrospect given that at this point nobody except von Neumann and a few of his friends had even heard of game theory). “There was perhaps an inclination [for von Neumann] to take a too exclusively rational point of view about the cases of historical events”, said his friend Stanislaw Ulam, in his obituary. Outside of geopolitical conflict, von Neumann could show great compassion. He moved heaven and earth to further the careers of scientists he considered promising, with Alan Turing and Benoit Mandlebrot (among many others) benefiting from his generosity. A friend described him as “always gentle, always kind, always penetrating and always magnificently lucid.” And he was especially good with children, for whom he had seemingly unlimited patience. Edward Teller wrote that "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.“ What Is It Like To Be A Martian? So fine. He wasn’t a nerd and he might not have been a psychopath either. But, at the core, what was he? What was it like to be John von Neumann? To remember everything you’ve ever read? To be (according to rumor) the only person who has ever completely and straightforwardly understood quantum mechanics? Do you feel amazing all the time, like a god? Is it lonely? What is your internal experience? The only time in The Man From The Future where I felt like I got a real glimpse of this was near the end, when Edward Teller was eulogizing his sometimes friend, sometimes rival. He said: > I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed almost nothing else. The book actually has a story that touches on this point in a kind of hilarious way. Von Neumann’s friend, fellow European Jewish emigre, and fellow Manhattan Project physicist Stanislaw Ulam contracted a case of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. His doctors told him that he should “rest his brain”, ie avoid thinking too hard. A desperate Ulam tried to distract himself by playing solitaire, but couldn’t help wondering about the probabilities of winning. Failing to solve the problem with any statistical trick then known, he was unable to prevent himself from developing what is now called the Monte Carlo method, which proved instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb and much of modern statistics. Bhattacharya returns to the same theme more darkly at the end. Von Neumann lies in bed, dying of cancer at only 53 (potentially from attending too many nuclear tests). His friends, families, and colleagues sit vigil with him at the hospital, and he begs them to ask him math problems, to test whether his brain is still intact. At first, he answers with the confidence of a god, solving even the most difficult questions with impossible speed. As the disease progresses, his performance gets worse and worse, until finally he cannot handle basic multiplication. Says his friend/rival Teller: > When he was dying of cancer, his brain was affected. I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstance. Still, he had the presence of mind to make a last request: after a lifetime of culturally-Jewish atheism, he wished to be baptized. His daughter attributed her father’s “change of heart” to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small probability of gaining a better afterlife is worth the relatively trivial cost of a deathbed conversion. Even as his powers deserted him, John von Neumann remained a game theorist to the end. Did Von Neumann Think We Would Make It? The Man From The Future can seem a bit scatterbrained at times. Von Neumann revolutionized so many fields that it’s hard to find a unifying theme. What connects atom bombs and computers to climate, game theory, and self-replicators? Bhattacharya’s inspired answer is: existential risk. Von Neumann was not one to agonize about his own contribution to the world’s pending nuclear apocalypse, at least not publicly. But he deigned to offer his opinions in a 1955 article, [“Can We Survive Technology?”](http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf) The essay is tight and carefully-argued, with the lucidity of a mathematical proof. Under the circumstances, he devotes most of his space to nuclear war, although he briefly touches on other issues including global warming (in 1955!). He suspects there will be many more existential risks as time goes on, but does not waste time trying to name all of them (a few years earlier, he had coined the term “[technological] singularity”, meaning a point at which technology advanced so far that it became impossible to predict the details of what comes next). Instead, he gives generic advice: > In looking for a solution, it is well to exclude one pseudosolution at the start. The crisis will not be resolved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than a total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition. > > Also, on a more pedestrian and immediate basis, useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs. This is known to all who have so laboriously tried to separate secret, "classified" science or technology (military) from the "open" kind; success is never more — nor intended to be more — than transient, lasting perhaps half a decade. > > Similarly, a separation into useful and harmful subjects in any technological sphere would probably diffuse into nothing in a decade. Moreover, in this case successful separation would have to be enduring (unlike the case of military "classification," in which even a few years' gain may be important) . Also, the proximity of useful techniques to harmful ones, and the possibility of putting the harmful ones to military use, puts a competitive premium on infringement. Hence the banning of particular technologies would have to be enforced on a worldwide basis. But the only authority that could do this effectively would have to be of such scope and perfection as to signal the resolution of international problems rather than the discovery of a means to resolve them. > > Finally and, I believe, most importantly, prohibition of technology (invention and development, which are hardly separable from underlying scientific inquiry), is contrary to the whole ethos of the industrial age. It is irreconcilable with a major mode of intellectuality as our age understands it. It is hard to imagine such a restraint successfully imposed in our civilization. Only if those disasters that we fear had already occurred, only if humanity were already completely disillusioned about technological civilization, could such a step be taken. But not even the disasters of recent wars have produced that degree of disillusionment, as is proved by the phenomenal resiliency with which the industrial way of life recovered even—or particularly—in the worst-hit areas. The technological system retains enormous vitality, probably more than ever before, and the counsel of restraint is unlikely to be heeded. Then what does he suggest? > What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, along sequence of small, correct decisions. And this is not surprising. After all, the crisis is due to the rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to the reaching of certain critical relationships. Specifically, the effects that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as that of "the great globe itself." Indeed, they affect the earth as an entity. Hence further acceleration can no longer be absorbed as in the past by an extension of the area of operations. Under present conditions it is unreasonable to expect a novel cure-all. For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment […] > > The one solid fact is that the difficulties are due to an evolution that, while useful and constructive, is also dangerous. Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: > patience, flexibility, intelligence. This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he’s not sure what to do.	Scott Alexander	62533781	Book Review: The Man From The Future	acx
# Mantic Monday 7/11/22 ## Curtains For Trump? The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump’s career once and for all. Source: [KnowYourMeme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/id-like-to-see-ol-donny-trump-wriggle-his-way-out-of-this-jam) I thought of this last week while reading [Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump?](https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-conservative-media-breaking-up-with-ex-lover-trump) The Daily Beast argues that the revelations from the 1/6 Committee are so damaging that even previously-loyal GOP elites are starting to turn on their former master. And with DeSantis as such a tempting alternative 2024 nominee, maybe Trump is more of a liability than an asset. Is this finally the jam ol Donny Trump can’t wriggle his way out of? No. Absolutely not. [PredictIt’s estimate](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7053/Who-will-win-the-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination) of Trump’s chance of winning the 2024 GOP nomination is higher than ever. Ah well. Nevertheless. The immediate cause of the July 1 spike could have been [this New York Times article](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/us/politics/trump-republicans-campaign-2024.html), saying Trump was getting close to announcing his candidacy. So you could make an argument that the decline from 6/19 to 6/29 was a genuine effect of damaging insurrection revelations, and then the spike around 7/1 was an unrelated boost from people increasing their probability that he would run. If true, that suggests that P(Trump wins\|Trump runs) is pretty high, since even small revelations about his intentions move the market a lot. There is (inexplicably) no PredictIt market on whether Trump will run, but [the relevant Metaculus question](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6330/donald-trump-runs-for-president-in-2024/) is at 82% (and didn’t rise much with the NYT article). If the NYT article caused the big spike in Trump predictions on PredictIt, something is wrong either with their market or with this one. Related: [Liz Cheney says the Republican Party “can’t survive”](https://www.businessinsider.com/liz-cheney-trump-republican-party-survival-2024-presidential-campaign-2022-7) nominating Trump in 2024. This is exactly the kind of prediction I anticipate people walking back if they were asked to make it formally. Let’s say “conditional on Trump as 2024 nominee, Republicans won’t get >40% of the vote in either of the 2028 or 2032 presidential elections”. Would Liz Cheney - or anyone else - really take that bet, at any odds? Is there any formulation matching a commonsense notion of “not surviving” they would accept? ## Swift Centre Veterans For Truth Half of the promise of prediction markets and tournaments is using “the wisdom of crowds” to aggregate forecasts effectively. But the other half of their promise is that markets and tournaments reveal talent. We all know Berkshire Hathaway has good investors and the Golden State Warriors have good basketball players. Maybe we can identify teams of superstar forecasters (forecastars?) and make them available for people who need their services. The first group like this to catch my attention was [Samotsvety](https://samotsvety.org/), who describe themselves as “a group of forecasters with a great track record working on applying forecasting to impactful questions”; they released a [nuclear risk forecast](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KRFXjCqqfGQAYirm5/samotsvety-nuclear-risk-forecasts-march-2022) in March which sparked some [good debate](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822). In February, crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried donated $1 billion to the Future Fund, a rationalist-adjacent organization that kickstarts projects promoting the long-term future of humanity. When they couldn’t spend their money fast enough, they deputized friendly experts as “[regrantors](https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-our-regranting-program/)”, charged with the task of going out and spending their money to start organizations that should exist but don’t. One regrantor must have thought that good forecasting teams were in this category, because it looks like Future Fund [spent $2 million making this happen](https://ftxfuturefund.org/future-fund-june-2022-update/). The result is the [Swift Centre For Applied Forecasting](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/swift-centre-for-applied-forecasting) in London. They describe themselves as: > The Swift Centre will publish forecasts from a panel of highly experienced and accurate forecasters including Good Judgment Project Superforecasters and financial industry professionals, collated and explained to help you navigate the world. So far they have two reports, one on [monkeypox](https://www.swiftcentre.org/monkeypox-should-we-worry/) and one on [Ukraine](https://www.swiftcentre.org/ukraine-russia-outlook/). I’ll try to review this in more detail some other Monday. ## Curtains For Musk? Last week, Elon Musk announced he was withdrawing his offer to buy Twitter. His excuse was too many spambots, but nobody takes this seriously and it isn’t legally valid (see [Matt Levine](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-09/elon-s-out) for more). Twitter has promised to sue to make the deal go through. What are their chances? The most useful market I can find here is [Polymarket’s question](https://polymarket.com/market-group/will-twtr-be-delisted-from-the-nyse-by) on Twitter getting removed from NYSE (a natural consequence of Musk taking it private): 23% by December 30, but probably a trial would drag on long past then, so I don’t think that’s the final chance. [Metaculus lists](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10621/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-before-2025/) the chance of Elon Musk becoming CEO of Twitter by 2025 as 10%. I don’t know how to square this with Polymarket, unless they think that Twitter might get delisted for other, non-Musk-related reasons. ## A Dobbs Mystery Democrats are angry about the overturning of Roe. Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t. So plausibly the decision increases Democrats’ chance of keeping the Senate later this year: Source: [PredictIt](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7053/Who-will-win-the-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination) PredictIt shows Democrats’ chances increasing by about 5% in May when someone leaked the draft opinion, then about 15% in June when the decision was announced. This is a weird pattern, isn’t it? If the Roe reversal really improved Democrats’ chances by 15%, why did it take until the reversal happened for people to update? Why not update as soon as the draft came out? Sure, things could have changed between the draft and the decision. But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But [we saw earlier](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-5922) that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened? Metaculus is hard to read on this question - they really should make it easier to zoom in on their graphs, or at least give specific dates - but it looks like [they show the same pattern](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5632/gop-controls-us-senate-in-2023/): One possibility is that PredictIt and Metaculus forecasters are dumb. Maybe people who hadn’t used these sites in ages hear the news about Dobbs, think “this will probably harm the Republicans’ chances in November!”, and rush to the prediction markets without thinking very hard about how Bayesian updating works. (ironically, this might have been the right move: the Democrats’ chances did go up, so the first person to try this could sell for a profit a few days later) Or maybe it was something else that happened around the same time. On June 30, Nate Silver published his forecast [Why The Republicans Are Favored To Win The House, But Not The Senate](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-republicans-are-favored-to-win-the-house-but-not-the-senate/). Before that, conventional wisdom had thought Republicans were definitely favored to win the Senate (see above, PredictIt was ~75% on this). Silver said the right probability was more like 53%. If Silver’s right, even now the markets are overestimating the GOP. This would be a perfect explanation except that on the PredictIt chart the move clearly happened before 6/30 - the biggest daily change was 6/29. Maybe people were just dumb. ## Morecasting 1: [Ensemble models of COVID forecasts](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.16.22276024v1): if you aggregate a bunch of COVID forecasts to try to tap the “wisdom of crowds”, do they do better than individual forecasts? If you do a good enough job aggregating, then yes - this paper finds their “ensemble” outperformed 84-92% of individual models (h/t Nikos Bosse). 2: The race to replace Boris Johnson (source: [this British betting site](https://smarkets.com/event/886716)) 3: In my last links post, I talked about the East African Federation, a proposed merger of seven African countries. Now [there’s a Metaculus question on it](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11667/east-african-federation-before-2030/) (though it’s too early to have any results available).	Scott Alexander	63621027	Mantic Monday 7/11/22	acx
# Open Thread 232 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Spencer Greenberg is a former ACX Grants winner and generally great person. He is now running a mini-grants-program of his own. He encourages applications from “anyone who has a project or idea aimed at having a big positive impact on the future of the world (grant sizes starting at $10,000, but going up to a conceivable maximum of $500,000)”. Read more and apply [here](https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/apply-to-the-clearer-thinking-regrants-program). 2: Speaking of turning money into big positive impacts on the future, Sam Altman writes in to say he enjoyed the recent [book review of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion) [The Future Of Fusion Energy](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion), and that he predicts [Helion](https://www.helionenergy.com/) (the fusion startup he’s a leading investor in) has a 85% chance of Q > 1 D-T fusion by 2024, and a 65% chance of Q > 1 D-He3 fusion by 2026.	Scott Alexander	63477436	Open Thread 232	acx
# Your Book Review: The Outlier [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] I. I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting. John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole [pandemic meme](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv.html) about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration. Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan. But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to [The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter](https://www.amazon.com/Outlier-Unfinished-Presidency-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0451495241/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VCGBPY29U2PK&keywords=the+outlier&qid=1657324229&sprefix=the+outlier%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-1), by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical. Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect. Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience—but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war—he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill,” he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real. Naval Lieutenant Jimmy Carter: surprisingly attractive. Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis. In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness—a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary. The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia. Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.” The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants. II. And what he wants to do is… well, honestly, not all that much. Carter’s governing style is less “bold visionary,” more “competent manager.” He appoints more minorities to civil service jobs, starts an early childhood development program, and passes a reorg that streamlines a bunch of governmental agencies, but mostly he thinks about running for president. Governors in Georgia are limited to a single term, and Carter has national ambitions. He commits privately to a presidential run only a year into his time in the governor’s office. When he first enters the 1976 Democratic primary, Carter is a complete unknown, and the general consensus is that he’s the longest of long shots. (“Jimmy who?” one opponent asks.) But two things go very, very right for him. First, he’s one of the few people who fully understands the changes to the Democratic primary process that were implemented after the chaos of the 1968 convention [1]. He stakes his campaign on the now-familiar strategy of winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which is groundbreaking at the time. More importantly, the fact that no one has ever heard of him turns out to be a huge advantage in the wake of Watergate, when voters are hungry for an outsider. Despite the fact that his gubernatorial campaign was premised entirely on obscuring his actual beliefs, he opens his presidential campaign with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” He runs an Obama-esque campaign, emphasizing his personal background and outsider status rather than any specific accomplishments. By the time he wins the primary, he has a huge polling lead over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who’s unpopular thanks to his recent pardon of Richard Nixon and the memory of [that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One](http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1880208_1880218_1880225,00.html). Carter then proceeds to squander almost his entire lead via a series of poor campaign decisions. First, he’s so overconfident that he refuses to prepare for his first debate with Ford, and completely bungles it as a result. He then sits for an interview with Playboy weeks before the election and, completely unprompted, mentions that he’s “looked on a lot of women with lust” in his life and “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” There’s a growing perception that Carter is, in the infamous words of one journalist, “a weirdo.” He isn’t helped by the fact that “the Establishment” is still a real thing in 1976, and they don’t like Carter one bit. The Establishment consists mostly of northern WASP elites, who are openly prejudiced against Carter for being southern, born-again, and distinctly not of their world. Former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, who you can tell is a bastion of the Establishment because he just has an initial for a first name, sums up this view nicely when he says, “Carter can’t be president—I don’t even know him!” Although his lead shrinks consistently up through election day, Carter nonetheless manages to squeak out a narrow victory against Ford, 49.9 to 47.9%. Had just 10,000 voters in two states flipped their votes, Carter would have lost the electoral college. But they didn’t. And now, the weirdo has become the president. The electoral map of the 1976 campaign. The Democratic coalition was pretty different back then! III. You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout. Now, you’re the most powerful man in the world. What do you do next? The first answer is, you micromanage to a spectacular degree. Alone among all presidents since Truman, Carter refuses to appoint a Chief of Staff. He then immediately demonstrates why he needs one by involving himself in a comical number of minor decisions, including personally deciding which magazine subscriptions his speechwriting team should get, cutting down on the amount of food served at breakfast with congressional leaders, and canceling car service for his staff because it’ll save $92,000 of the $409 billion federal budget. Oh, and he also insists that all White House thermostats be set at 65° (55° at night), though this last mandate is eventually rescinded when the staff—some of whom are so cold they’ve been typing with gloves on—rebel. The charitable interpretation of these decisions is that, in the wake of Watergate, Carter wants to emphasize that he and his staff are servants of the American people. The uncharitable interpretation is that Carter is an obsessive egomaniac who believes there is no situation that won’t be improved by his personal involvement. The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing. Somehow, he does all of this while having one of the worst relationships with Congress of any modern president. Some of the conflict is personal: Carter is the anti-LBJ in that he hates dealmaking and is perpetually unwilling to compromise [2]. Deep down, he sees the dirty business of politics as inherently sinful, and he doesn’t understand why everyone can’t just do the right thing, especially when he’s explained to them at great length why it’s the right thing to do. He has huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but they relate to each other with barely veiled contempt. (It doesn’t help that Carter is the complete personal antithesis of Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a classic old-school Irish Democrat who loves back-slapping, cutting deals, and being a part of the Establishment Carter ran against.) Carter repeatedly vetoes bills passed by his own party because he has minor issues with them. At one point, he petulantly vetoes a $37bn defense bill because he thinks one specific item in it, representing less than 2% of the total, is a waste of money. But some of the conflict is structural. To his credit, Carter is one of the first politicians to see that the post-New Deal consensus is fraying. Economic growth is slowing, inflation is rising, union membership is declining, all of which means that the traditional Democratic way of doing things—launching new federal programs, catering to interest groups, and accepting some waste and inefficiency as a cost of doing business—is on its way out, even if the old-school Dems don’t realize it yet. Really, Carter is less of a Democrat and more of a 1920’s-style Progressive Republican in the model of Teddy Roosevelt: focused on efficient, rational government, non-ideological problem-solving, and ethical stewardship. Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient. The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal. To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite. Flush with confidence from his Panama Canal victory (his canalchemy? his Panamachievement?), Carter decides he should continue tackling foreign policy problems other people think are impossible. And there’s one obvious candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. Every single one of his advisors tells him this is a huge mistake and he definitely shouldn’t get involved, but knowing Carter, this only makes him want to do it more. His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way. At Camp David, as with the Panama Canal, Carter reveals himself to be a masterful negotiator, which only makes his constant inability to successfully negotiate with Congress all the more infuriating. When dealing with his own country, he’s disgusted by the horse-trading inherent in politics and continually shoots himself in the foot by refusing to get in the muck. But somehow, when dealing with other countries, he’s able to accept that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of dirty work involved. This biography doesn’t really try to provide a theory for this discrepancy, and I wasn’t able to come up with one either. Perhaps Carter holds his own country to a higher standard—or perhaps, as president, he sees himself as above Congress and expects a subservience he doesn’t expect from other countries’ leaders. Anyway, after two weeks of nonstop conversation between the three countries’ teams—during which negotiations almost fail more than once—they reach a deal. Essentially, the broad outlines are: 1) Egypt will officially recognize Israel and end the state of war between the two countries and 2) Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank and transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza [3]. The Camp David Accords, as they’re known, are a phenomenal success, putting the region on a path straight to the utopia it is today: a prosperous, conflict-free Middle East in which democracy and human rights flourish and the Palestinian people have full self-determination. Sike! Obviously, that doesn’t happen. The Camp David Accords are seen as a triumph at the time, but in the long run, the picture is more mixed. The first part of the deal holds up, even after Sadat—who ends up becoming quite close with Carter—is assassinated by fundamentalists just a few years later. But the Israelis immediately welch on the second part of the deal and continue building settlements. Today’s Israel has more than 20x the number of settlers as it did then, making the intensity of the Carter/Begin dispute seem depressingly quaint in retrospect. My hot take: this is bad Carter’s blissful focus on foreign policy is interrupted by deteriorating conditions at home. The economy hasn’t been great for most of his term, but now it’s starting to really decline, with inflation averaging 14% by the late 70’s. Paired with this high inflation are high unemployment and low growth—a set of conditions economists had previously thought was impossible. They’re so befuddled by the combination that they coin a new term for it: “stagflation.” If economic conditions during your presidency are so novel that economists have to make up a new word to describe them, it’s usually a bad thing. The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing. Carter’s approval ratings, never great to begin with, drop into the low 30s. Gas lines in 1979 A typical politician would see their unpopularity as the obvious result of the terrible economy. But Carter is perpetually tempted by the siren song of deeper explanations for simple problems, especially if he can interpret them through a moral or spiritual lens. Influenced by an obscure pollster—against, once again, the uniform advice of his entire team—he convinces himself that America is suffering not just from stagflation and gas lines, but from a spiritual crisis—perhaps like the one he himself suffered after his failed first governor’s race. If the cure for stagflation isn’t readily apparent, neither is the cure for a nationwide spiritual crisis. To find it, Carter does one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard of a president doing: he invites a mishmash of politicians, intellectuals, and religious leaders to a two-week summit at Camp David where they can tell him what’s wrong with the country and, by extension, what’s wrong with him. For day after day, from 9am to as late as 1am the next morning, Carter sits taking notes on a yellow legal pad while this group critiques him, often in strikingly personal terms. It’s an exercise in self-flagellation reminiscent of cult indoctrination rituals and Maoist self-criticism, and one it’s impossible to imagine any other president voluntarily taking on. The whole scene is so wacky that Vice President Mondale seriously considers resigning. Some of the advice Carter gets is good (like when the newly-elected 33-year-old governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, tells Carter he needs to be a leader, not just a manager), but, as you’d expect would happen when you ask fifty people to tell you what’s wrong with you, some of it is totally off the rails. A prominent rabbi tells Carter that the real problem is Americans’ “unrestrained consumerism” and “mindless self-indulgence.” A Berkeley sociologist adds that Carter needs to “come down from the mountain with some hard truths” to help the American people “achieve personal happiness that does not depend on the endless accumulation of goods.” Although this analysis is about as sophisticated as the kind of thing a precocious 19-year-old would tell you over bong hits, Carter eats it all up. Two days after the summit, he delivers a prime-time address to the country in which he claims that the real crisis isn’t the poor economy, but the American crisis of confidence. He draws a line from the Kennedy and MLK assassinations through the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate and all the way to the current energy crisis. It is perhaps the most unusual speech ever delivered by an American president—a wide-ranging, almost religious homily about America’s many failings. To the astonishment of every single person other than Jimmy Carter, the speech actually goes over well—at first. Carter’s approval rating shoots up 11% overnight. But the good feelings don’t last. Within a few months, the polls are back to their previous lows, and the general feeling among the public is that Carter has been trying to blame the American people for his own failings. Today, the address commonly known as the “malaise speech” (though he never actually uses that word) is widely considered a political blunder of epic proportions. IV. Nothing pairs better with an economic crisis than a foreign policy crisis. Luckily, fate has one at the ready. As usual for the 70’s, it starts in the Middle East. The origins of the Iran hostage crisis go back all the way to 1951, when the CIA led a coup in Iran to prevent the democratically-elected government from nationalizing their oil industry. As is usually the case with people who seize power in coups, the new, US-backed leader, the Shah, is a bit of a despot. (He infamously has gourmet lunches flown in from France on the Concorde.) By 1979, The Iranian people have had enough, and the Shah himself is overthrown by a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics, who still control Iran to this day. In conclusion, we totally nailed the situation and none of our decisions backfired in any way. Go America! Shortly after his escape from Iran to exile in Egypt, the Shah is diagnosed with cancer, and since he’s been a consistent American ally, lots of influential people think we should let him come to the U.S. where he can benefit from our best-in-class treatment. Carter is against the idea at first (in fact, he directly predicts that granting the Shah entry to the U.S. could lead to Americans in Iran getting taken hostage), but eventually he’s worn down by his advisors and gives in. Less than two weeks after the Shah arrives, Carter’s prediction come true: the American embassy in Iran is overrun and 52 citizens are taken hostage. Ironically, even the Shah ends up worse off, as he ultimately dies not from his cancer but from a series of avoidable medical errors made by his American doctors. Carter has no good options for freeing the hostages. A military operation would endanger their lives, but he can’t negotiate for their release without seeming like he’s cowing to terrorists. He waits the situation out for almost a year, until he finally decides to give the go-ahead to a risky helicopter rescue attempt that the military has come up with. But the mission is a complete calamity—it’s like the Mr. Bean version of a military operation. A series of mechanical errors followed by a fatal crash during what should be a routine refueling stop kills multiple service members, and they never even make it into Iranian airspace. The remaining participants return home in abject failure, where the public perception of Carter is only slipping further. V. Luckily, the President has an ace up his sleeve: the steadfast support of the last surviving member of the closest thing America has to a Royal Family, the beloved and inspiring liberal icon Senator Ted Kennedy. Just kidding! The ever-ambitious Kennedy senses weakness and decides to primary Carter instead. The Ted Kennedy of this book is not a sympathetic character. His primary challenge is driven mostly by his hunger for power and his personal dislike of Carter. Kennedy personifies the Washington establishment that Carter ran against; also, he’s a moneyed East Coast elite and he basically sees Carter as a southern hick. Kennedy had wanted to run for president the last time, in 1976, but that had been too close to the Chappaquiddick incident, when he drunkenly drove off a bridge with a woman he may or may not have been having an affair with, and left her to drown while he swam away [4]. (The affair is now mostly known for inspiring a similar plotline in Succession’s first season.) In the 70’s, you could send a woman to her death with your drunken negligence and get away with it—at least, you could if you were a Kennedy—but you did have to let it recede into everyone’s memory for a couple years before you ran for president. After a long, drawn-out primary, Carter has enough delegates to win, but Kennedy stays in the race all the way to the convention, dropping out only after a failed attempt to win via a last-minute rules change. He then gives a speech in which he pointedly fails to endorse Carter. Carter’s own speech just after is a comedy of errors: first, the teleprompter breaks, forcing him to ad-lib, which is not one of his strengths; then, a mechanical error causes the traditional parade of balloons to fail to rain down. Carter stands awkwardly on stage as just three or four sad balloons slowly float down from the ceiling. To top it all off, Kennedy, who has been getting drunk in his hotel room, is late to join Carter onstage for the scheduled display of unity, and in his inebriated state, he openly snubs him. Carter is the underdog going into the general election, and he knows it. This is the first race he’s ever run as an incumbent, so none of his previous strategies work: he obviously can’t present himself as an outsider anymore, and he can’t avoid taking stances on controversial issues. But he also can’t really run on his record, since he’s presiding over both a poor economy and an ongoing foreign policy disaster. His biggest accomplishments are either difficult to explain or outright unpopular. He also has the misfortune to be running against Ronald Reagan, who, in addition to being a once-in-a-generation political talent, is willing to fight dirty. Afraid that a last-minute hostage release deal (the possibility from which the term “October surprise” originates) will secure Carter’s reelection, Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey cuts an illegal backroom deal with Iran to ensure the hostages stay put until after the election. Or at least, it sure seems like he does—there’s no definitive proof, and many sources say otherwise, but a lot of highly suspicious circumstantial evidence has emerged in recent years. And not just from Reagan’s enemies—even James Baker, Reagan’s Chief of Staff, says that Casey probably did it [5]. To make matters even worse, Ted Kennedy comes back from the (political) grave to fuck with Carter one last time. One of his former operatives somehow manages to steal Carter’s debate prep book and passes it to the Reagan campaign. As a result, Reagan is prepared for every one of Carter’s attacks, and crushes him in the debate [6]. Though to be fair, Reagan probably would have crushed him anyway, as Carter is a terrible debater and Reagan is notoriously charming. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job,” he likes to say. “A depression is when you lose yours. And a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his!” In the end, Reagan wins in a 49-state landslide, the largest ever electoral win by a non-incumbent. The Democrats also lose the Senate for the first time since 1954. As a closing act, Carter’s team finally manages to secure a deal to release the hostages—but last-minute delays mean that instead of this being a capstone to his presidency, they go free just hours after Reagan takes the oath of office. On his way out, Carter gives a gloomy farewell address in which he warns against the risk of nuclear war in apocalyptic terms. The survivors—“if there are any,” he says—“would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide.” Hearing the speech, his wife says, “This kind of thing is why you lost.” VI. I think you can draw two, somewhat contradictory lessons from the story of Carter’s presidency. The first lesson is that you can’t help anyone unless you have power, so you should do popular things so that you can stay in power, even if that means making some moral compromises. Carter thought he was being ethical by taking principled stands, but all those principled stands meant he lost re-election, and Democrats didn’t hold the White House again for another twelve years. He probably could have done more good by moderating some of his unpopular impulses, thus allowing him, or others aligned with him, to maintain power for longer. Carter clearly understood this lesson when he pretended to be racist during his gubernatorial campaign, but he was seemingly unwilling to apply it to his actual presidency, perhaps because he saw a distinction between campaigning and governing. The second lesson is that your success as a leader is largely at the whims of fate. Since you never really know when you’ll lose power, you should do what you think is right while you still can. For all of his unpopular decisions, the biggest strike against Carter in the mind of the American public was the deteriorating economy, which was largely out of his control. Had he done what many of his advisors wanted and delayed most of his politically risky decisions to a hypothetical second term, he probably would have lost anyway, and would have ended up accomplishing even less. Reading this book, I kept imagining the alternate history in which Reagan succeeds in his 1976 primary challenge to Gerald Ford, which he lost narrowly in real life. Since Reagan is a much more talented politician than Ford, and isn’t tainted by Ford’s association with Nixon, he almost certainly picks up a couple points of the vote and beats Carter. Then he ends up presiding over stagflation and takes the blame for the poor economy. He loses in 1980 to Ted Kennedy, who ushers in a decade of liberal dominance until his presidency implodes in scandal amidst the revelation of his many drunken affairs. Although it may not be clear from this review, The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency. The author clearly admires Carter’s iconoclasm and moral backbone, and he interprets many of Carter’s decisions through the most positive lens he can—for example, by blaming failures like the hostage crisis on listening to the wrong advisors. His thesis is that Carter was a man ahead of his time: decades before today’s public debates over race, our use of natural resources, and government hypocrisy, Carter looked the country in the eye and forced us to confront the looming end of American exceptionalism. But we didn’t want to hear the message—so we shot the messenger. The book did convince me that Carter is somewhat underrated in the popular imagination (admittedly a low bar to clear), but I don’t think it fully succeeds in its overall attempt to rehabilitate Carter’s image. It depends on what you think the job of a president is. Is it to tell blunt truths to the American public and push us to acknowledge our country’s flaws? Or is it to implement policies that lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives? While the best leaders may do some of both, ultimately the latter is what really matters. Carter may have been ahead of his time, but being too far ahead of your time is just another synonym for being wrong. I also don’t think this book succeeds purely as a biographical portrait of its subject. After I finished Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I felt like I really knew LBJ. But even after finishing all 628 pages of this book, Carter remains a mystery to me. I can tell you everything he did during his presidency, but I still don’t feel like I really understand him. What motivated Jimmy Carter? How did he develop his seemingly unshakeable confidence? Why did he even want to be president in the first place? (Ted Kennedy’s [high-profile fumble](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TedKennedy/story?id=8436488) of this question famously contributed to his primary loss, but Carter never really answers it either.) In the author’s defense, some of this may be because he has chosen an impossible subject. Throughout his time in office, Carter was widely considered to be an enigma by a press and public that were obsessed with psychoanalyzing him. Unlike the voluble Lyndon Johnson, whose loquaciousness left behind a vast group of people who could later report back on what he’d thought and said, Carter rarely socialized and had almost no friends. He was, in the words of the author, “probably the most private and socially reticent individual ever to occupy the White House,” a difficult trait for a biographer’s subject to have. Nonetheless, the slipperiness of its protagonist ultimately left me unsatisfied with this book. In the end, The Outlier is a lot like the Carter presidency itself: easy to like and in certain ways admirable, but ultimately a missed opportunity. Footnotes: 1: During the convention, Chicago cops indiscriminately attacked not just anti-war protestors but also journalists, photographers, and even innocent bystanders, to the horror of those watching on TV. 2: Also, he never once expresses dominance over his aides by making them come into the bathroom with him and take dictation [while he takes a dump](https://knowledgenuts.com/lyndon-johnson-held-meetings-on-the-toilet/). 3: This is, of course, a grossly oversimplified summary of the actual deal; if you want more, [Wikipedia has a good overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_David_Accords) 4:It’s never been definitely proven that Kennedy was drunk at the time, but it seems pretty safe to assume he was given that he was leaving a party where he was seen drinking—and because it’s extremely uncommon for sober people to drive off bridges. 5: It also wouldn’t be unprecedented, as we now know for sure that the Nixon campaign [similarly conspired](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461/) to mess up LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks. 6: 20 years later, when someone steals George W. Bush’s debate prep materials and passes them to Al Gore, the Gore campaign immediately alerts the FBI.	Scott Alexander	63203109	Your Book Review: The Outlier	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike Thanks to the 750 of you who commented on [the homicide spike post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike) (as of last weekend when I collated these highlights). I don’t have enough space here to address everything, but here are some general themes: ## Was It Guns? Artifex0 on the subreddit [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie5nsbh/): > You mentioned that you haven't looked closely into the idea that increased gun sales were to blame. I haven't either, but that hypothesis immediately seems more plausible to me. [Here's a graph of gun sales](https://images.foxtv.com/static.fox10phoenix.com/www.fox10phoenix.com/content/uploads/2022/02/932/524/SafeHome-chart-no.-1.jpg) showing the pretty big spike around the same time as the homicide spike > > Guns are a much bigger factor in violent crime, which increased, then property crime, which decreased. Mass gun sales are a US phenomenon, with per-capita gun ownership in the US being the highest in the world, double the next contender and 5-10 times higher than Canada and Europe. If you're motivated to commit a murder, then whether you currently have a gun seems much more strongly and directly influential than whether you've briefly noticed a police car in the neighborhood in the past week or whether the police seem worried about being cancelled. > > [separated out unrelated paragraph here into a different section] > > If increased gun sales largely motivated by the 2020 riots were the most significant factor in the spike, that would be politically inconvenient for both the left and the right- I'd expect good reporting on that to be a bit slim. It would also be politically inconvenient for libertarians, though I hope you'll avoid the mistake of the journalists you criticize, and not allow politics to subconsciously shape how easily you reject hypotheses. I accept I should have put more work in the original post into ruling out gun sales as the cause. That having been said, I still don’t think gun sales were the cause, for four reasons. First, this argument confuses stocks and flows. The flow of guns went up by about 50% over 2020. The stock of guns went up much less. [Wikipedia says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership) there are about 400 million guns in the US. That means that in 2019, when people bought about 14 million guns, the total number of guns was going up about 3.5% (and murder was low). In 2020, when people instead bought about 22 million guns, the total number of guns went up 5.5%, so about 2 percentage points more than in a normal year. So this theory requires us to believe that number of guns increasing 3.5% every year from 2015 - 2020 had no effect on the murder rate, but that guns going up 5.5% in 2020 had a very strong effect on the murder rate. Specifically, an extra two percent increase in guns must lead to a 30% increase in murder rates. Why would we believe that? One reason might be if the people buying guns in 2020 were very different from the people buying guns in previous years. For example, if previous gun buyers were collectors who had 100 guns each, but 2020 gun owners were new buyers getting their first gun, then the share of people with at least one gun would go up by more than 2% over an average year. [Miller, Zhang, and Azrael](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8697522/) (2021) explores this question (thanks, [darawk](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie7pqvw/)) and find the opposite: The people buying new guns are mostly (~80%) people who have guns already. This varies a bit by time period but other periods (the beginning of the pandemic and the 1/6 insurrection) were more disproportionately new gun owners than the June period when homicides started to spike. This also shows that the largest month-over-month increases in gun purchases, both new and total, were March 2020 and January 2021. There was no sudden homicide spike associated with either of these months, only May/June 2020. Finally, guns are usually more correlated with suicide deaths than with homicide deaths… State by state correlation between gun ownership and murder rates (left), and between gun ownership and suicide rates (right). Source [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/). …but there was no spike in suicides at the same time as the murder spike: [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States) This is what you’d expect given that the number of guns only increased by 2% over trend - a completely invisible effect on suicide. Unrelatedly, homicides rose by 30%. So the gun hypothesis requires that: * Crime tracks the flow, rather than the stock, of guns. * …so a 2% increase in guns can cause a 30% increase in homicides. * …even when only a fifth of those guns are going to people who don’t have guns already. * For some reason, an earlier larger spike in gun purchases (March 2020) and a later larger spike in gun purchases (January 2021) failed to have any detectable effect on homicide rates, but the comparatively small spike in June 2020 immediately (ie within less than a week) caused homicide rates to rise 30%. * A secular 20-year tripling of yearly gun purchases also failed to affect the homicide rate, or was disguised by an exactly equal counter-trend. * Although usually rising gun ownership increases suicide somewhat more than homicide, this time and this time alone it increased only homicide. None of this seems very plausible to me. ## How Much Of A Racial Difference Was There? I had previously posted this graph: …apparently showing a much larger spike in black compared to white homicide rates. But [Artifex0 argued](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie5nsbh/) that because the black rate started so much higher, a similar relative change would look like a much bigger absolute one. He was able to track down the data and find that black homicide rate increased 33% and the white rate 22%. I think this is 2019 to 2020 data, which might mean that half of the 2020 data is before the homicide spike and it should be expected to minimize the differences by diluting them with 5 months of pre-spike data. So I acknowledge that there was a rise in white homicide and that my original graph minimized that. But the rise in black homicide seems to have been at least 50%, and possible more, larger in magnitude. I think this fits the idea of police pulling back especially from predominantly black areas. There will be some white people in predominantly black areas, and police will also pull back from other areas that aren’t predominantly black. ## Did The Spike Start Very Slightly Too Early? Quincy [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7422960): > Kind of feels like Scott came to his conclusion first and then is now reading the data to support that. But the data doesn’t at all look convincing to me. Clearly there was a spike around May, but the data shows it was starting in the middle of May? Floyd died on May 25, and while protests began the next day in Minneapolis, they really didn’t pick up steam across the country until a few days later. But, for example, the NYC chart shows a clear escalation that starts at the beginning of May. My first thought was that this is a natural result of superimposing a shock on a random trend. For example: The first image is some randomly varying trend. The second image shows (in red) some unusual shock in the trend, which we can see here starts around time 4. But since real events aren’t color-coded, we would just see the third image, where it looks like the shock starts around time 2.5. Here’s the NYC data Quincy was talking about: I am not too impressed by the increase in early May. If you look at the gray lines, you can see it’s still well within normal variation - other years had equal or greater increases in early May. The first time the red line gets above the level that’s been reached in other years is in early June. But maybe we don’t even need to deploy this argument! If you look at the image, it says “14 day rolling average of shootings”. Depending on how they calculate the rolling average, that could mean that shootings start showing up in the data a week before they actually happen (if they really calculated it a weird way, 14 days before they actually happen), which would amply explain the rise without having to bring in random variation at all. What about this Minneapolis graph? [The site it comes from](https://citycrimestats.com/covid/) also uses a rolling average, but [commenters](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7434115) tested it and find it’s retroactive; it moves events later in time rather than earlier. But here’s what you get when you un-rolling-average it. The black line marks Floyd’s death. I don’t know, this still looks to me like Floyd’s death was the breakpoint and there’s not very much going on before that. Also, what would be the explanation for why this trend would start on May 20 or something? There isn’t more pandemic that day. There aren’t more guns that day. It’s not even especially warm that day. I think it’s got to be an artifact. ## What Exactly Are Police Doing Differently? The post avoided getting into specifics here, but Graham writes: > For those who’d like coverage of the crime spike - specifically about \why\ police pull back - without the annoying “own the libs” angle, I will do something I try not do here and recommend myself: > > [The Graham Factor > > How depolicing happens > > Read more > > 5 years ago · 35 likes · Graham](https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/how-depolicing-happens?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) > > [The Graham Factor > > Why I'm cynical about police reform > > Read more > > 4 years ago · 37 likes · Graham](https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) > > Edit: A TLDR per request: > > 1. Police capacity is declining. Part of this is "defunding" and officers resigning, but part of it is the increased demand for statistics and reporting by "reform" advocates. For example, California requires all cops to fill out a Racial Identity and Profiling Act (RIPA) report every time they stop someone. When there are fewer cops and it takes longer to do basic police work, the volume of police work declines. > > 2. Police respond to changes in risk. Police are evaluated on whether what they do is "reasonable" - a rule which should allow for good-faith mistakes, but which is also subjective. When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty) police don't worry about it. However the trend now is to prosecute officers even for things which are arguably unreasonable - Chesa Boudin just lost an excessive force case against a cop in San Francisco. If you can't convince a San Francisco jury that a cop used excessive force, that case never should have been brought. Even when officers don't end up in prison - nobody wants to end up the target of a massive media smear campaign, like the officer in the Jacob Blake case. > > 3. Many large cities and states are now making it very clear that they literally do not want police to do proactive police work. Philadelphia, for example, banned police from doing traffic stops. Baltimore's prosecutor said she won't prosecute any cases for drug possession. Boudin refused to use evidence San Francisco police gathered during "pretextual" traffic stops. When political leaders tell officers that they should stop doing police work, police stop doing it. > > My second link above explains that these results are (in my opinion) a feature of police reform, not a bug. Summer 2020 was a mask-off moment, and the intellectual leaders of the "reform" movement in the ACLU and DOJ don't actually want police "reform." They want less policing, and that's what they are now getting. Graham also has a discussion of [the legalities of the Derek Chauvin murder case](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike). TL;DR: whether or not Floyd was on drugs or had pre-existing health problems, Chauvin’s actions qualified as felony assault and hastened Floyd’s death. In Minnesota, if you commit a felony that hastens someone’s death, that qualifies as felony murder, even if it was an “accident” or there were other contributing factors. JPodmore [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7437853): > There's an alternative explanation that fits the evidence here: the killing of Floyd itself caused the crime increase by damaging trust in the police, which led to an increase in retaliatory violence. > > <https://www.city-journal.org/retaliatory-gang-violence> > > I posted some of this as a reply but it occurred to me that it might be worth elaborating on as a main comment. The police arbitrate violent disputes. If your friend is shot and the police to deal with it, there's probably no further violence: the perpetrator is arrested and sent to prison, end of story. But if you don't trust the police to deal with it - because there has been an extremely prominent example of them being untrustworthy - you might decide to take matters into your own hands and seek violent revenge. > > This is just as compatible with the timing of the evidence you've described, including the pre-pandemic stuff in Baltimore and Ferguson. I don’t really think of this as an alternative explanation. I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected. ## Did The Media Get This Right? Matt Yglesias [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7422779): > I agree with almost everything in this post except for the media criticism parts. The conclusions seem very similar to this January New York Times article, for example: > > <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homicides-us.html> > > My sense is that (1) most people believe the spike in murders was related to the Floyd protests, (2) most people believe that because the theory has been widely aired in the media, (3) the people and the media are almost certainly right about this. > > What's much harder to say is exactly \how\ the protests relate to the murder surge and what could we do about it? The linked article says, in a sentence I would argue is as close to its thesis/conclusion as anything: > “All three [of the pandemic, the protests, and the rise in guns] played a role,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. “What’s difficult is to assign priority to one compared to the others.” My claim is that this is false. It is not difficult to assign priority. The protests were the primary cause, with the other two being minor contributors at most. When I say the media is getting this issue wrong, I mean that they’re saying things like this. ## What Does The Literature Say? KillerBee [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7439126): > Scott, you are wrong (about the original Ferguson effect, which serves as a robustness check of your more general claim of protests -> homicides)! And I can show you why. Why should you read this random comment among a sea of meshugas? Argument from authority: I'm a PhD candidate in one of the top criminology programs. In other words, I'm intimately familiar with both the content area and the issues of time-series analyses. I'm happy to privately verify this and/or share full text articles I source below if they are paywalled. Key points: > > 0) Begging the question and also not citing relevant literature that tests+disproves your claims > > Throughout this letter (which should be revised to become a mea culpa), you conflate two separate hypotheses: > > a) There is a POSITIVE ferguson effect (aka protest effect) on DEPOLICING (aka less 'active' or 'proactive' policing) > > b) There is a POSITIVE ferguson/protest effect on violent crime, PARTICULARLY HOMICIDE > > Hypothesis A appears true: police do pull back from policing when facing public scrutiny. The extent of this pullback is debated. For more info, see MacDonald 2019; Marier and Fridell 2020; Mourtgos, Adams, and Nix 2022; Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. However, you beg the question by showing hypothesis A is true, and claiming hypothesis B is also true! > > Hypothesis B is plausible and worth exploring! This is because at the extremes both 1) more and/or well targeted police(ing) reduces crime (Evans and Owens 2007; Sherman 2022) and 2) poorly targeted and/or no police(ing) increases crime (Loeffler and Braga 2022; Piza and Conneally 2022). Deterrence - particularly versus nothing - does exist (Nagin 2013)! > > However, the problem is that we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking! See the Criminology and Public Policy Volume 18 Issue 1 (2019), particularly Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. The issue is that there's an assumption that arrests (and other CJS interventions) have a UNIFORM marginal effect, but this may not be the case. Instead, imagine that the marginal effects of incrementing/decrementing a(n) arrest/imprisonment/search/stop etc. is conditional on the cumulative exposure, much like a laffer curve! In this case, it is not so clear that reducing police interventions would result in increased crime, as long as the reduction isn't 'too large'. See Owens 2019 for a very good short summary on this economic perspective on CJS interventions. > > So, TL;DR hypothesis A doesn't mean hypothesis B, and in fact we (criminologists) have already done this work and found hypothesis B lacking. There’s actually much more to the comment, and several followups, click the link for more. The main study mentioned here is [this one](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331981669_Did_de-policing_cause_the_increase_in_homicide_rates). I cannot follow all the mathematical details, but it does appear to show that the 2015 post Ferguson spike (not the more recent 2020 spike) doesn’t appear in the data as a city-by-city correlation between decreased arrest rates (as a proxy for depolicing) and rising homicide rates. I think I would just reiterate what I said about [a similar study](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292982674_Was_there_a_Ferguson_Effect_on_crime_rates_in_large_US_cities) in the post, which found no overall significant effect, but yes a significant effect when it limited the effect to a few large predominantly black cities with large protests. The data from eg Baltimore in particular: …seem pretty hard to ignore. If many cities were like Baltimore, okay - but if the effect was limited to a small number of cities, such that it gets washed out in the national data and the clearly visible 2015 spike doesn’t reach statistical significance, that’s fine too. (The particular way that arrests and homicides failed to be correlated here was that there wasn’t really a nationwide noticeable decrease in arrest rates after Ferguson and Baltimore. But there was a large decrease in arrest rates in Baltimore. So I think of this as showing that this particular shock wasn’t the main thing driving the relationship between arrest rates and homicides in US cities during that time) I think KillerBee wants to think of this as testing a hypothesis about mechanism: was it changing arrest rates that changed the homicide rate? I would want to hear more from people who understand the math of the model before updating too hard on this, but I guess it’s some contrary data. ## Was It Warm Weather? Several people argued that maybe the pandemic naturally increased people’s murderousness, but that it took until there was warm weather for the effect to show up. For example, [Alex Curtiss](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7423422): > You cite the timing of the homicide spike vs the beginning of the pandemic many times, but that's unconvincing to me. The beginning of the pandemic was characterized by widespread lockdowns and much less activity. It was also still pretty cold in many northern cities. As you said yourself, murder rates often spike with warmer weather--couldn't the pandemic plus warmer weather potentially explain the timing? (And yes ALSO the protests?) I have to admit, I find it hard to take this one seriously. I can’t find temperatures for 2020 in particular, but here’s average temperature in New York City over the course of the year. We would have to imagine that, as the pandemic started in March, nobody was committing extra pandemic murders, because of the temperature (they were still mostly committing their usual murders, though). As the temperature gradually rose through late March, April, and early May, murder did not rise at all above its historical baseline, because all the pandemic-dependent murderers were waiting for the temperature to hit some critical point. Then in late May, as soon as the temperature hit some critical point (78 degrees?) there was a large discontinuity with all previous years’ murder trends in a way that had never happened before. Then, as the temperature continued to rise into July and August, there was no further increase. Then, as the temperature declined into the winter months, there was no further decrease: all those murderers, having been activated by the key temperature of 78 degrees occurring once, remained in their new murderous form, no matter how cold it got. Mind you, this has never happened before in any other year, it’s just a feature of the pandemic x murder interaction. Which didn’t happen in any other country, even though those countries also had pandemics and temperatures. Except it couldn’t be 78 degrees exactly, because the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures. Maybe the murderers were actually waiting for a key solar angle? I guess I’m being a jerk now, but I do feel like there’s a sort of “fighting a rearguard attack against the evidence” here that I find tedious. I feel the same way about “it took a few months for people to get cabin fever from the pandemic” theories. I don’t deny that heat or cabin fever could have been a secondary factor that eg played into why the protests were so large this time. ## Even More Other Countries Some people objected to my using three European countries (plus a nod at China) as my baseline. European countries seem pretty stable, maybe they wouldn’t show a pandemic-fueled rise in murders in the same way as the US. At commenters’ request, I looked at Central American countries. These usually have lots of guns, high murder rates, and poor social safety nets. Here they are (sources for [Honduras](https://www.statista.com/statistics/984779/homicide-rate-honduras/), [Nicaragua](https://www.statista.com/statistics/312441/number-of-homicides-in-nicaragua/), [El Salvador](https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/), and [Guatemala](https://www.statista.com/statistics/984814/homicide-rate-guatemala/)): All four Central American countries I looked at had declines in homicides, rather than spikes, in 2020, despite also having pandemics and warm weather. If you have some clever reason why Central America is also a bad comparison, then please find me any major country besides the US that had a homicide spike in 2020 (bonus points for May/June 2020 in particular). I’m not saying that one will convince me; in two hundred-odd countries there might be one that had a simultaneously-timed homicide spike just by coincidence. But it would be a start.	Scott Alexander	61807332	Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike	acx
# Nobody Knows How Well Homework Works Yesterday I wrote about [bottlenecks to learning](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt). I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else. Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg [Cooper 2006](https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00346543076001001)) is terrible. Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t. One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense - it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it - but in the end we don’t know. According to [a Washington Post article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/26/homework-an-unnecessary-evil-surprising-findings-from-new-research/), students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework - maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught. But this is the least of our problems. This methodology assumes that time spent on homework is a safe proxy for amount of homework. It isn’t. Students may spend less time on homework because they’re smart, find it easy, and can finish it very quickly. Or they might spend more time on homework because they love learning and care about the subject matter a lot. Or they might spend more time because they’re second-generation Asian immigrants with taskmaster parents who insist on it being perfect. Or they might spend less time because they’re in some kind of horrible living environment not conducive to sitting at a desk quietly. All of these make “time spent doing homework” a poor proxy for “amount of homework that teacher assigned” in a way that directly confounds a homework-test scores correlation. Most studies don’t bother to adjust for these factors. The ones that do choose a few of them haphazardly, make wild guesses about what model to use, and then come up with basically random results. Both homework proponents ([Harris Cooper](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3700582)) and opponents ([Alfie Kohn](https://classtap.pbworks.com/f/Homework+May+Not+Be+A+Good+Thing.pdf)) briefly nod to this problem, then take these studies seriously anyway. If you do that, you find that probably homework isn’t helpful in elementary school, but might be helpful during high school (though some people disagree with either half of that statement). But why would you take these seriously? Are there any real randomized studies? Cooper finds six for his review article (page 17), none of which are published or peer-reviewed. Only one is randomized by students, and it contradicts itself about how random it actually was; the other five are cluster-randomized by classroom (which means they have very low effective sample size). Several are bungled in confusing ways. Still, these pretty consistently show a positive effect of homework with medium-to-high effect size. The one that might have been randomized by students (and so might possibly be okay) had an effect size of 0.39. Some of the cluster randomized ones that weren’t bungled too badly had effect sizes in the 0.9 range; the cluster randomization makes it hard to call this significant, but unofficially it seems impressive. Since Cooper wrote his 2006 review, I was able to find one actually good, individually randomized study of homework, [Nawaz and Welbourne](https://sparxmaths.com/pdf/Homework-length-trials-2018.pdf). They took 368 students taking algebra classes using a digital platform, and randomly assigned them either 0%, 50%, 100%, or 150% of the ordinary homework load (corresponding to 0, 15, 30, or 45 minutes/night). Results: The students with more homework did better, p < 0.0001. Looks solid. Probably 9th grade algebra homework is useful. But everyone already expected high school homework to be more useful than elementary school, and math homework to be more useful than other subjects. So it’s unclear if eg 4th grade reading homework would follow the same pattern. Still, this is the one firm fact about homework which we have managed to produce in several million child-years of assigning it. For everything else, just go with your priors, I guess.	Scott Alexander	62290136	Nobody Knows How Well Homework Works	acx
# Study: Ritalin Works, But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To Recent study, Pelham et al: [The Effect Of Stimulant Medication On The Learning Of Academic Curricula In Children With ADHD](https://ynet-images1.yit.co.il/picserver5/wcm_upload_files/2022/06/01/Sk3iwoV009/Pelham_et_al_2022.pdf). It’s gotten popular buzz as [“scientists have found medication has no detectable impact on how much children with ADHD learn in the classroom](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/uw2gtl/scientists_have_found_medication_has_no/)” and “[Medication alone has no impact on learning](https://news.fiu.edu/2022/long-thought-to-be-the-key-to-academic-success,-medication-doesnt-help-kids-with-adhd-learn,-study-finds)”. This probably comes as a surprise if you’ve ever worked with stimulants, ADHD patients, or classrooms, so let’s take a look. 173 kids, mostly Hispanic boys age 7-12, were in a “therapeutic ADHD summer camp” intended to help them learn focusing and attention-directing techniques (style tip: do not call this a “concentration camp”). The kids had two short classes each day, one on vocabulary and one on a grab bag of different subject matters. For the first three weeks, half the kids got Concerta (ie long-acting Ritalin) and the other half didn’t, then they switched for the next three weeks. As an additional test, there was a ten minute period each day when the kids were asked to do math problems as fast as possible. Here are the results: “OROS-MPH” is Martian for Concerta. The bottom left graph is how many math problems kids completed per minute. Kids on Concerta do math about 50% faster, and this difference is significant. Bottom right is number of classroom rule violations per hour. Kids on Concerta only cause trouble about half as often, and this is significant too. So the Concerta’s clearly doing something, and I think it would be fair to describe that thing as “making kids pay more attention”. The top two graphs are the test scores. The Concerta kids do slightly better on the tests; this is just above the significance threshold for vocabulary, and just below it for other subjects, but probably in real life it’s having a small positive effect in both cases. But there’s no test score x condition interaction. That is, having been on Concerta throughout the course doesn’t make kids do better on the post-test, beyond the small boost it gives to test-taking ability in general. In other words, it doesn’t look like it helped them learn more during the course. (to be clear, the problem isn’t that this is a bad curriculum that doesn’t help kids learn. The kids did do better on the post-test than the pre-test. It’s just that paying more attention to the curriculum didn’t improve that learning beyond paying less attention) This matches my general impression of the rest of the stimulant/ADHD literature, see eg [this old review by Swanson](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1018.5058&rep=rep1&type=pdf) and [this newer one](https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2010160). Stimulants often raise grades, usually by improving students’ ability to concentrate on tests, or their likelihood of finishing homework on time. But if you take care to separate out how much people are learning, it usually doesn’t change by very much. I’m not sure this says anything bad about Concerta. Concerta’s only claim was that it helps people pay attention better, and this study bears that out. Kids who take Concerta do better on tests, complete a homework analogue faster, and cause less trouble in class. But it does say something bad, at least weird, about the role of attention in school. For some reason, paying attention better doesn’t (always) mean you learn more. Why not? Maybe classroom instruction is redundant? That is, teachers say everything a few times, so if you miss it once, it doesn’t matter? But this doesn’t fit well with overall retention being pretty poor. The average score on the subject tests was around 50%; on the vocab, 75%. Maybe all students heard the instruction enough times for it to sink in, and their limit was innate intelligence - their ability to comprehend complicated concepts. Maybe some “subject area” questions were on more complicated topics than others, but this doesn’t make sense for the vocabulary tests. Surely all vocabulary words are equally complicated, and you just have to hear them enough times for them to sink in? But if this were true, we would have proven that it’s impossible for a student to get a score other than 100% or 0% on a test of novel vocabulary words that they spent equal amounts of time learning. But I took vocab tests in school - usually twenty words taught together as a single lesson, where we drilled each of them the same amount - and often got scores other than 100% or 0%. So maybe even among seemingly similar words, some are arbitrarily easier to remember than others, maybe because they sound like another word that provides a natural mnemonic, or because they seem unusually mellifluous, or have especially relevant definitions. So maybe there’s some hidden “difficulty level” of each word for a particular student, and if a word is below your difficulty threshold, then it takes very few repetitions to sink in, and if above, more repetitions won’t help. This is reminding me of an old post I wrote, [Why Do Test Scores Plateau](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/13/why-do-test-scores-plateau/)? It looked at student doctors (mostly surgeons), who took a test in their first, second, third, fourth, and fifth years of residency. The surgeons did much better in their second compared to their first year, a little better in their third compared to their second year, and then plateaued. The effect was so strong that there was only a 52% chance that a randomly-selected fifth-year surgeon would outperform a randomly-selected fourth-year surgeon. Yet there were no ceiling effects - smart fifth-year surgeons outperformed dumb fifth-year surgeons, and everyone was well short of 100%. So why weren’t they learning anything in their fifth year? At the time, I guessed that maybe intelligence determines how detailed a branching-structure of facts your brain can support. Difficult and detailed surgery facts build on simpler, more fundamental facts, but at some point you saturate your brain’s resolution and stop adding more details. (another way to think of this is via the [Homer Simpson Effect](https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/apr/24/the-homer-simpson-effect-forgetting-to-remember) - the tendency for learning one thing to make you forget other, similar things, presumably because your brain can’t consistently keep the two thoughts distinct and keeps the newer one rather than having them both interfere with each other all the time) Something like this must be true if we assume that it takes a certain intelligence level to learn surgery - or quantum physics, or whatever. Otherwise you could get a very dumb person, keep teaching them a little more quantum physics every day for twenty years, and eventually expect them to know as much as a smart person would after getting a four-year degree. I’ve never heard of someone formally trying this, but I predict it wouldn’t work. This is already irresponsibly speculative, so no harm in making even wilder leaps - I wonder if there’s a human equivalent of [AI scaling laws](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf). These are the rules about how AI performance increases when you add more parameters, training data, or compute. I don’t claim to understand the exact functions (see link for details), but the short version is that high performance requires not being bottlenecked on any of them. Continuing to be irresponsible: are there human equivalents of these? Parameter count might be related to intelligence (which probably has at least a little to do with [literal neuron number](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/); the remainder might be how good your neurons are at maintaining patterns that don’t interfere with each other). Training data is how much you’ve learned about a subject, and compute is spending time reviewing and re-reviewing things until you’ve mastered them. But how would you differentiate this for learning a single vocabulary word? There’s just one piece of relevant data - a flashcard with the word and its definition. All that’s left is how many times you review it - and maybe how much attention you’re paying each time? But this study suggests the latter has pretty small effects in a naturalistic setting. These students must be bottlenecked by some other resource.	Scott Alexander	62255963	Study: Ritalin Works, But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To	acx
# Open Thread 231 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Some corrections from Thursday’s links post: the SPLC poll on feminism must be flawed somehow, see [here](http://justthesocialfacts.blogspot.com/2022/06/too-bad-to-be-true.html). The Kiev city council probably did not un-found Moscow, see [here](https://telegraf.com.ua/ukraina/2022-06-10/5707474-moskvu-nado-udalit-v-seti-zabavno-potrollili-putina-ot-imeni-klichko). And although I condemned Hanania’s admission that he sometimes endorsed putting his personal aesthetics above objective utility, commenters brought up situations that don’t seem so clear-cut: for example, would you destroy a beautiful rainforest so farmers could raise pigs there? (assume the farmers get some money from it, which raises their utility, and that the rainforest doesn’t get enough tourists or novel-pharmaceutical-product hunters to be as valuable as the pig money). 2: Isaak Freeman asks me to signal-boost the [Future Forum](https://futureforum.foundation/), from August 4-7 in San Francisco, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Anders Sandberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowen. They are bringing together 250 people from EA, Silicon Valley, and related communities to “arm the world's brightest minds with the tools they need to tackle global problems” and to potentially offer funding and mentoring. Apply at the link above.	Scott Alexander	62453057	Open Thread 231	acx
# Your Book Review: The Internationalists [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] In [The Internationalists](https://amzn.to/3I6styI), Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro (H&S from now on) work to raise the profile of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, at the time the most-ratified treaty in history, in which 63 nations (unlike today, this was most of the world - 51 became founding members of the United Nations) came together to declare war illegal. Here is the Pact, in full. > Signatories shall renounce war as a national policy and; > > Signatories shall settle disputes by peaceful means I'll sum up the most common historical view of the Peace Pact with this quote from the [US State Department's history website](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/kellogg): > It had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II. Or maybe we can quote famed diplomat George Kennan: > The Cold War strategist George Kennan described it as “childish, just childish.” (Introduction) So, if the State Department says it didn't work, George Kennan is disdainful, and most people haven't even heard of it, why should you care? Well, let me ask you a question. Why didn't the death of Princess Diana in France because of a car chase with a paparazzo cause Italy to go to war with Canada? If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement. World War I happened before the Peace Pact, while World War II happened after, so one of the major differences between them could be the Pact, and H&S claim that it is. I’ve often assumed a false equivalence between them, that I notice others share. They're both World Wars, after all, and Germany's the bad guy in both cases. Our brains like to make morality plays out of the silliest little things, so why not enormous monumental ones too? The US and Germany were on the opposite sides in both wars, and Germany was evil in II, so clearly Allies good, Axis bad, right? [Germany's World War I Debt Was So Crushing It Took 92 Years to Pay Off](https://www.history.com/news/germany-world-war-i-debt-treaty-versailles) is a pretty good example of how history writers today often frame World War I in terms of a morality play, with Germany as the villain. > [The Treaty of Versailles](https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/treaty-of-versailles-1) didn’t just blame Germany for the war—it demanded financial restitution for the whole thing, to the tune of 132 billion gold marks, or about $269 billion today. The history classes I took didn't do a lot to clear it up either, explaining World War I in terms of things like "nationalism" and "jingoism", and a “web of alliances”. But these seem like fully general explanations, as we still live in a world that has plenty of nationalism and webs of alliances. Maybe jingoism is different now than it was then, but if so, I’m not really clear on how. Imagine, for a moment, if you were to make a fundamental change to a game like basketball. In your new basketball, each team from the league sends a representative to a poker table, and the two first teams to run out of chips are forced to play basketball to showcase their shame at being the worst in the league at poker. One day, commentators reviewing old basketball videos start cutting together a massive highlight reel about how bad Michael Jordan must have been at poker. This is the chasm that H&S are attempting to help readers cross - from the current world, where we expect war to be illegal, back into the time before the Peace Pact, when war was expected and normal, the usual instrument of international conflict resolution. Why did World War I start, again? It wasn’t just because of the assassination, and it wasn’t because of Germany. > [After the assassination] Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum: Unless Serbia met ten conditions aimed at suppressing the “subversive movement” behind the assassinations, there would be war. Serbia acceded to all but the second part of the sixth condition, which insisted that Austria-Hungary participate directly in the investigation of the assassination. This demand was unacceptable, Serbia explained, because its constitution did not permit a foreign power to participate in an internal investigation. Nine and a half out of ten was not good enough. (Chapter 5) Within our modern framework, none of this makes sense. It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided this was a good excuse to conquer Europe, while everyone else reacted with horror that they could think such a thing. It was a good excuse to conquer Europe, but leaders of countries in Europe took many things to be good excuses to conquer Europe, and Europe generally went along with that, because the rules were fair. It was just a natural chain reaction to the fact that countries used war as a tool of diplomacy. Within the old frame, we can see that the Allies treated Germany not as a villain, but as a defeated foe, and before the Pact, when you defeated your foe in war, you made them pay tribute in territory, concessions, and money. Originally, war was nothing less than the rawest enactment of power over those who could be defeated, and over time was tamed and made more legible to the modern mind by philosophy and legalism, but it remained normal and expected. Adding rules to an activity does make it more civilized, in a sense, but in the case of war, it remains horrific. Ultimately, World War I demonstrated to some forward-looking thinkers that our interconnected world simply could not bear it anymore. And so, to repurpose a quote from Jai Dhyani’s [500 million and not one more](https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more/), "An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed." A few people began to imagine that perhaps war should not be legal and normal, the prerogative of Kings or Parliaments, but rather, should be outlawed. H&S profile a number of people who were involved in the creation of the Pact, and the followup that happened throughout World War II, eventually culminating in the creation of the United Nations. Here are the chief ones, briefly: [Salmon Levinson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_Levinson) was a lawyer in Chicago who was one of two rivals to be first to popularize the idea of outlawing war, both through private letters to influential people he knew and through publishing a pamphlet that was read by tens of thousands of people. He is also the author of the text of the Pact itself. [James Shotwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_T._Shotwell) was a history professor who is the other claimant as first to popularize the idea of outlawing war, and would make numerous contributions to the movement. [Hersch Lauterpacht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hersch_Lauterpacht) was a lawyer who worked on the intellectual implications that the Pact had on other behavior in international relations, including the changes to expectations of neutrality, the use of sanctions, and many other aspects. He is also credited as the author of the arguments that were used against the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials, though he himself did not attend, perhaps because he had lost nearly his entire family to the Holocaust. And others along the way who made enormous contributions as well, including: [Henry Stimson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson) was a diplomat who became Secretary of State and later Secretary of War for Roosevelt. He wielded immense power as Secretary of War, and advocated for the creation of the United Nations as a tool to enforce the Peace Pact after the war. [Sumner Welles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumner_Welles) was a diplomat who rose to become Undersecretary of State before being forced to resign to prevent a scandal about his bi or homosexuality. He was one of the primary authors of the documents that would found the United Nations. I leave out Kellogg and Briand, who read as largely opportunists seeking to use these ideas for their own benefit. Kellogg in the end received the Nobel Prize. As an aside, I often think a history of all the times a Nobel went to the wrong person, or someone else could have reasonably contested it, would be a fascinating and very long book. ## Intellectual History Unlike many works of history, The Internationalists isn’t about a leader, a country, or a time period. Instead, it is an intellectual history - the history of a set of ideas and how they changed our cultures. As such, it ties together threads across historical periods and places to show how the ideas, rules, and culture changed. This is my favorite kind of history, both because it’s the history of the most interesting aspect of human behavior - ideas, and how they affect us - as well as because it often brings out surprising connections across times and places. As an intellectual history, it offers us something more than just the events that occurred. H&S offer us a demonstration of how culture changes in response to intellectual inventions. This is a topic that should be near and dear to any aspiring rationalist. Culture changes slowly, and then quickly, and then often forgets that it has changed. Someone, probably not Gandhi, perhaps a union activist named Nicholas Klein, gave us the pithy "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." What they didn't add is "then they forget they ever thought differently." People struggle to really deeply inhabit the mindset of another culture. We also have this cliche, “the past is another country,” that helps remind us that it’s just as difficult to place ourselves in the mind of someone from a long time ago. The changes in the intellectual watershed, the ideas that were invented and became normal, are a big part of why. For those of us steeped in evolution, it's challenging to fully inhabit the worldview from before Darwin that can only explain the complexity of lifeforms through a divine being individually designing them. Most people growing up inside our trade-centric capitalist system struggle to look at the long distance movement of objects in the archaeological record and see anything but trade. And it's rare for any of us to really internalize what it meant to live in a world where war was not just legal, but normal and expected. In defending the Pact's place in the tier of first-class important events of the 20th century, H&S also document some of the intellectual history of evolving expectations and norms about war. These norms were driven from Europe, perhaps because of a combination of globalization and near-continuous intra-Europe conflict that co-occurred with the Enlightenment and the need to document philosophical underpinnings for everything. A brief aside - these norms were often confusing and initially incomprehensible (and often patently unfair!) to peoples outside the European sphere of intellectual influence. H&S tell some great stories of cultures colliding. One is an instance of a Sioux warrior having to be freed rather than tried for murder because the US finally admitted that he was a foreign soldier, and thus immune to prosecution for murder. Another is the “opening” of Japan via Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy - basically, showing up and threatening to go to war if they didn’t sign a treaty with him - and the ensuing pursuit by Japanese scholars of an understanding of the European philosophy of war. Before the Pact, the expectations of everyday citizens of the world was that sovereign countries had the right to go to war. Today, most people expect the opposite: that war is unusual, morally wrong, and forbidden except in rare circumstances. The implicit belief that our current expectations of war are the only possible expectations of war is widespread, even among rationalists. Not to pick on him, but [Zvi wrote the common version of it](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/ukraine-post-7-more-data-and-peace-terms/) recently: > "One school of thought is that Putin will consider himself entitled to keep any gains won on the battlefield, or at least any that it would make sense to keep. Whereas Ukraine most definitely can’t agree to that any time soon. It also is highly contrary to the kind of history that Putin used to justify his invasion. You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works.* For a guy who lectures us for hours about events from Europa Universalis this would be a very poor understanding of war score and formal borders."* (emphasis added) Except this has only been true since the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Prior to the Peace Pact, you absolutely did get to keep territory you took in war. > It is hard to think of a legal right that has a longer or more illustrious pedigree than conquest. Cyrus the Great, who ruled the Persian Empire in the sixth century BC, admonished his court not to feel guilty about their imperial prerogatives: “It is an eternal law the wide world over, that when a city is taken in war, the citizens, their persons, and all their property fall into the hands of the conquerors. It is not by injustice, therefore, that you hold what you have taken, rather it is through your own human kindness that the citizens are allowed to keep whatever they do retain.” (Chapter 2) European countries constantly fought for and won territory both within Europe and throughout the world during the 18th and 19th centuries. The US, too, started doing so almost as soon as it existed. For example, in 1847 the US acquired territory from Mexico through conquest, in a war started officially because of unpaid debts. > Though President Polk wanted the land owned by Mexico, he did not simply threaten to invade unless the Mexican government handed it over”. > > His legal justification for the war looked back to 1821, when Mexico secured its independence from Spain. The years following independence brought deep instability. Mexico went through thirty-five administrations in thirty-four years. U.S. citizens conducting business there were subject to illegal confiscations of property and physical assaults by government officials and made numerous claims against Mexico for compensation. U.S. diplomats collected these complaints and presented them to the Mexican government. (Chapter 2) Under a succession of Presidents, the US threatened Mexico with war if redress wasn't provided. We went to arbitration in 1839 with a panel of 2 Mexicans, 2 Americans, and the representative of the King of Prussia. > [The panel] awarded the United States roughly $2 million in damages. Unfortunately, the cost of near-constant revolution had depleted Mexico’s treasury and it could not satisfy those awards (Chapter 2) When Mexico repeatedly couldn't pay, Presidents Tyler and Polk offered to accept land instead. Polk also advanced troops on the border to make it clear what the alternative was. Mexico attacked scouts of the US army, and Polk asked for a declaration of war. But the main reason for the war wasn't the attack on our scouts. “Polk’s war message, however, focused first and foremost on the issue of unpaid debts.” (Chapter 1) Even more confusing to our modern expectations, before the Peace Pact there was no such thing as helping your friends while staying neutral. Under the rules written by Hugo Grotius that held until the Peace Pact, which H&S term the Old World Order, nations had an obligation to neutrality if they wished to not be dragged into the war as co-belligerents. In 1793, France sent a diplomat named Edmont-Charles Genêt to the US to acquire any assistance the US was willing to provide for France’s war against Britain. Many people in both countries viewed the other as a sister nation, the only other Republic in the world. Still, we refused. > Neutrality entailed strict impartiality. If Britain could not use American ports to outfit privateers, then the law of nations would not allow France to use them in this way either. > > Any unequal support provided by the United States to France would have been a casus belli, an act of belligerency warranting a military response. The Girondins should have realized that the United States government could not let its territory be used as a recruiting ground for a rebel army to foment insurrections. To aid France this way would have been an act of war against Britain and Spain. > > As Vattel stated, “[A] neutral and impartial nation must not refuse to one of the parties, on account of his present quarrel, what she grants to the other.” Jefferson quoted this precise passage in his June 17 letter to Genêt. (Chapter 4) The Pact evolved from a more complex wrangling among thinkers and diplomats as they struggled to imagine a world in which war wasn’t normal, and argued over how to chart a course to achieve that. In the end, because of uncertainty about how best to achieve their aims, and the need for diplomatic compromise, all it says is that war is outlawed. Enforcement mechanisms and expectations of what to do when countries violated it would come later. H&S sum it up this way: > Our book explains why this skeptical reaction [that outlawing war is preposterous], while reasonable, is wrong. Outlawing war only seems ridiculous to us because ours is a world in which war has already been outlawed. (Introduction) ## Ukraine Let’s compare this to the current topic of concern, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The global outcry against Russia, the massive and continued use of sanctions to try to isolate and punish Russia, and the supplying of arms to Ukraine to help them fight off Russia -- all of these are aspects of a set of expectations about the legal status of war that we have inherited from the Peace Pact, a set of expectations that H&S name the New World Order. None of this would have been allowed under the Old World Order. Our current economic sanctions against Russia and our providing weapons to Ukraine would have been, in the 19th century, considered plenty of reason for Russia to declare war on us. Today, though Russia complains and bickers, they recognize that under the current rules, what we're doing is (perhaps barely) allowed - in fact, they themselves have frequently done similar behavior, expecting that it will not draw them directly into war. The idea that we can sanction countries for launching an illegal war is an intellectual creation of Hersch Lauterpacht and others, interpreting the Peace Pact. > In the 1935 edition [of Oppenheim’s International Law], Lauterpacht added twenty pages on the Peace Pact. In the preface, he justified this major revision by saying that the Pact had “effected a fundamental change in the system of International Law.” In particular, Lauterpacht claimed, the old principle of neutrality had to be abandoned. Under the Pact, “the outbreak of war is no longer an event concerning the belligerent alone." Rather, it is the concern of the entire world. “The guilty belligerents, by breaking the [Pact], violate the rights of all other signatories, who, by way of reprisals, may choose to subject him to measures of discrimination, for instance. by actively prohibiting some or all exports into his territory. (Chapter 10) Since it began I have, as I think we all have, been trying to make sense of the war in Ukraine. What story does it best fit, and how will its future unfold? Is it the beginning of World War III, as once again a dictator with a powerful army attempts to sweep across Europe, to build or rebuild the Russian Imperium? Is it closer to [a religious crusade that will end in Kyiv](https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-best-of-christian-compassion) or not at all? Is it [the last gasp of a demographically dying nation](https://edwest.substack.com/p/children-of-men-is-really-happening?s=r)? Will it be the model for future wars, that countries that feel threatened can conquer their neighbors? I've found it useful to notice the ways, as H&S exhaustively document, that we don't live in the era of World War I, or even World War II, anymore. In the first world war, war was expected, and the web of alliances that had been built were almost designed to pull us all into war, not because we were trying to right a wrong or stop an evil, but because war was inevitable between nations. In the second world war, we no longer viewed war as inevitable or normal, but we had yet to build infrastructure and institutions, such as the sanctions regimes and "outcasting", as H&S call it, that we would use to respond to a country invading another. Many countries also had yet to fully internalize the idea that war was illegal, or imagine what that meant they should do about it when someone broke the Pact. Today we have those institutions, though they are far from perfect. Some of them seem thoroughly broken, like the UN Security Council, others are creaky with disuse, and some, like individually targeted financial sanctions, are brand new and may turn out to be more effective than what we had before. > An obscure office in the U.S. Treasury Department is tasked with enforcing sanctions rules: the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. Over the course of the last two decades, OFAC has developed more targeted—and effective—sanction tools. The biggest innovation came in 2010. At the behest of OFAC, Congress passed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, which strengthened U.S. sanctions on the Iranian energy industry and financial sector. Whereas previous measures had targeted Iranian firms, Congress now authorized the imposition of “secondary sanctions” on any bank, anywhere in the world, that transacted with Iran’s central bank. By placing it on the black list, OFAC could cut off any bank from access to the U.S. financial sector. The United States offered banks a choice: You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Iran; you can’t do both. (Chapter 16) One of the strongest bulwarks against war’s success today is that citizens everywhere do not believe that most war is legitimate. Putin’s war propaganda is focused on minimizing the war, calling it a “special operation” and claiming it’s in defense of the local Russian populations. While these excuses can cover a variety of sins, they demonstrate that even Putin expects that his people do not support wars of conquest. H&S document that in the 19th century, leaders published pamphlets justifying their wars using a wide variety of reasons, and that the citizens accepted these reasons as legitimate. Today, most reasons for war that used to be legitimate, are no longer considered so. Still, it's unclear whether these tools and expectations, the New World Order, can withstand the desires of dictators to overturn them for their own advantage. Today we have nearly a century of the expectation that war is illegal, and decades of relative peace between nations (see the discussion in the New World Order section for some of the evidence of this). We remain unsure what will happen if our expectations, our belief that “we just don’t do this anymore”, just isn’t strong enough to constrain dictators. H&S help us travel back into the minds of a set of thinkers who were in a very similar situation, though with many fewer tools. The thinkers they profile had worked to get the world to agree that war was illegal, but only a decade later were facing a set of countries that were violating that agreement. They had to invent tools to hold those countries and leaders to account, to enforce the Pact that they had signed. Some of those institutions were ideas, like the changes to neutrality that Lauterpacht authored, while others were formal organizations, like the United Nations and other international organizations. They built them because they needed them, layering idea upon idea until the whole came to resemble its current form. The story of how they came to do so makes a fascinating case study in the idea of raising the sanity waterline. ## The core objections H&S carefully document and disprove five major claims about why the Kellogg-Briand Pact is irrelevant. I’ve added a sixth here, which they do not address, and a short section about it below. 1. Outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. 4. The world isn't more peaceful today, post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. 6. The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. ## Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. > Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. > Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) ## Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. > 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. > > 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing [More Dakka](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/more-dakka?s=r) and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. > In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. > Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. > Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. > The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. > The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? ## Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. > 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. > > 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. > A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. > > What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. > > From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. > > After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) ## The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) > More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) > > And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. > > Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? > > The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) ## The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. > Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. > > The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. 1. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims. 2. Economic sanctions are a valid form of punishment of aggressor states, not a casus belli. 3. Conquest is illegal, and will not be recognized. 4. Coerced agreements through threats or gunboat diplomacy are not valid. James T. Shotwell and Salmon Levinson started us on the journey to ending war. Hersch Lauterpacht formalized it. > The legacy of Hersch Lauterpacht was nothing less than a system of rules embodying the idea that war is an illegitimate tool for establishing or enforcing legal rights. The last few years I have been celebrating [Petrov Day](http://petrovday.com) with readings and quotes from people who changed the world. This year I’m likely going to add some recognition of Hersch Lauterpacht, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell and the others who brought about an end to the normalcy of war. ## Addendum 1: So, we did it, we’re all good, right? So, we outlawed war, and war has become less common, this is all positive, right? Well, no. H&S also discuss the downsides of the Peace Pact, including failed states that act as breeding grounds for abusive governments and terrorism, and how the expectations built by the Peace Pact prevent stronger neighbors from conquering them. > [W]eak and failed states are a significant source of terrorist threats. States that control their territory suppress violent groups, usually through ordinary law enforcement—police, rather than the military. In states that cannot control their territory, by contrast, violence tends to grow, with no organized force to contain or counter it. > > By removing predators from the international ecosystem, then, the outlawry of war has effectively enabled the survival of the weakest. Those weak states sometimes become failed states. And those failed states too often become breeding grounds for internal conflict and terrorism. > > This is the dilemma: The rules of the New World Order that provide so much benefit protect all states from the use of force, including those we do not want to protect because they are too feeble, chaotic, authoritarian, or, for lack of a better word, evil. (Chapter 15) There’s clearly still work to do to figure out how to handle the downsides of banning interstate war, but overall, I’m still glad Levinson, Shotwell, Lauterpacht, etc started us down this path. ## Addendum 2: The League of Nations I think it’s also reasonable for you to be wondering what about the League of Nations? How does that fit in here? The answer is complex, and deeply inspected in the book, but doesn’t quite fit into this review. H&S argue that the League was built on the Old World Order, and assumed both that states could go to war, and then, when the League adopted the Peace Pact, it all got really confused because there was a lack of clarity over whether that meant the League required members to go to war against whoever went to war first, or what the situation was. It got pretty confusing, at the time. > Levinson and his allies were not the only ones to notice that the League and the outlawry of war imposed conflicting legal obligations. As the committee appointed by the League Council to examine the matter put it, “The League Covenant, under some of its articles, reserves the right to go to war.” But the Pact prohibited the resort to war—perhaps even wars that would be approved by the Covenant. (Chapter 7) But the League did renounce conquest, and make other steps in the right direction, so, uh, I guess it’s a wash? > It would be hard to overemphasize the importance of the League’s acceptance of the Stimson Doctrine. By February 1933, the vast majority of states had joined the League—including the defeated Central Powers of Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Bulgaria. By accepting the Stimson Doctrine, a policy proposed by the nonmember United States, the members of the League had renounced the most ancient right of sovereignty: the right of conquest. (Chapter 7) ## Addendum 3: Idealism, or cynical self-preservation? H&S do acknowledge that one reason the Pact appealed to the Allies was that they were on top at the time, and the Peace Pact would preserve the empires they had built in the face of upstart imperial contenders, including Germany, Italy, and Japan. > The Axis powers stood for the Old World Order. Germany, Japan, and Italy had each rejected the principles of the Peace Pact—Japan by invading Manchuria and continuing into China, French Indochina, British Malaya, Indonesia, and Singapore; Italy by invading Ethiopia, Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa; and Germany by seeking to gain control of nearly all of Europe. Each had a reason to resent the Allies and their efforts to outlaw war. The Axis powers had largely missed out on the colonial land grab. Japan only began to participate in international affairs in the 1860s, and it was more than a generation before it was prepared to project military force outside its own borders, too late to successfully participate in the empire-building scramble. Both Germany and Italy finally achieved unification in the same year—1871. They joined the land grab soon after, but were never as successful as France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, which built extensive empires. Without the authority to wage war and conquer new territory, the Axis powers saw little possibility of ever achieving equality. (Chapter 8) It’s an interesting point, and almost certainly true to some degree or another. It’s also an interesting thing that sometimes when people push for idealistic sounding things that help them personally, they end up helping other people too. Whether Britain did this so that Germany wouldn’t take their colonies or not, the end result is a world that doesn’t believe war is good. And ironically, as we’ll see in the next addendum, it didn’t preserve their empires. ## Addendum 4: De-colonization One notable thing that the leaders did not expect that came out of the Pact is that colonial peoples used its ideals to argue for independence. This is another aspect of history that’s thin in the text, and I’ll look forward to finding more of it in other books. > An account by a member of the British 23rd Indian Division—known as “The Fighting Cock” for the insignia on the uniforms of the men within it—shows how the colonized turned the colonizers’ ideals against them. During the war, the Japanese had seized control of Indonesia from the Dutch. When the Japanese surrendered in early September 1945, the Fighting Cock went to Java to accept a transfer of authority to Allied forces. In Singapore, en route to Java, an advance party met a “cheerful Dutchman who assumed that he and his countrymen were coming back to the peaceful reoccupation of their Empire.” But the Indonesians had a different idea. To greet the returning imperialists, they covered carriages and vehicles with graffiti declaring: “Atlantic Charter means freedom from Dutch Imperialism.” “Indonesia for Indonesians.” And, simply, “Merdeka”—Freedom. The armed resistance did not abate until the United Nations recognized the country’s independence in 1949. > > Indonesia was not alone. With the war won, it was difficult to square the ideals for which the Allies had fought with the realities of empire. (Chapter 14) ## Addendum 5: Presented without comment Napoleon. > Strictly speaking, though, exile was not a punishment, for Napoleon had committed no crime. Like his soldiers, Napoleon was licensed to kill. Furthermore, as a sovereign, he had the right to resort to arms—to plan, declare, and wage war. Elba, therefore, was not a prison. It was more like a sanitarium, sealed off from the rest of Europe to protect it from the Corsican contagion. > > Indeed, the Allies had no choice but to give him a sovereign country of some kind. With the war over, Napoleon lost his status as a prisoner of war and had to be released. But the Allies could not let him stay in France as he posed too great a danger to the newly restored Bourbon king. Nor did they have the authority to detain him on foreign soil against his will. There was only one remaining option: give him his own kingdom and then forbid him from coming back to theirs. (Chapter 3) Also, torture. > But perhaps the biggest problem for outcasting is that countermeasures [i.e. responding to a violation of the rules with your own violation of the rules] do not always work. Yes, they are effective for enforcing rules on trade and mail delivery, but there is a whole array of rules that cannot be enforced through simple tit-for-tatting. For example, countermeasures cannot be used to enforce human rights agreements like the United Nations Convention Against Torture. A state cannot torture its own people in response to illegal torture by another state against its people. (Chapter 16) ## Addendum 6: Seeing Like an Islamic State The last chapter, titled Seeing Like an Islamic State is, to me, the least successfully persuasive, perhaps because it would need to be a full book of its own to take into account sufficient perspectives to fully persuade, especially on a topic that is somewhat aligned with culture war. Reading it provides a useful exercise in trying to push yourself out of assuming that other people everywhere have the same cultural assumptions that you do, and the specifics of it are interesting, but I can’t recommend it as conclusive. H&S’s goal is to cover some of the modern threats to the New World Order. They argue that the conflict between the West and the Islamic world isn’t really about the specific disagreements, as much as it is that many in the Islamic world reject the intellectual underpinnings that Europe formulated - the New World Order. This goes back to Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and inspiration to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. According to H&S, Qutb’s experience in the West and then interacting with the Nasser government in Egypt led to him rejecting in its entirety the Western conception of states, national sovereignty, and the Peace Pact. This has been inherited by some others within the Islamic world who consider themselves to be in a state of permanent jihad against the West. In this way they seek to move the underlying expectations, to change the rules of the game. Instead of seeing conflicts with Islamic jihadists as equivalent to other conflicts, then, we should attempt to understand their worldview. It is its own set of rules and expectations, but likely is closer to the way pre-Enlightenment religious wars, also known as hygienic wars, worked. Here are some quotes to set the flavor of it, but none of this is essential to the rest of the book. > Qutb is the mirror image of Grotius. Grotius sought to ground the right of war on liberalism, on the natural rights of individuals to use force to protect life and property. Qutb grounded the right, indeed the duty, of war in the obligation to annihilate Jahiliyyah. Whereas Grotius argued that war could be fought for liberal rights, Qutb argued that war had to be fought against liberal rights. > > The Qutbian enemy, therefore, is breathtakingly encompassing. The realm of Jahiliyyah is not merely the West, with its secularism, racism, imperialism, inequality, and sexual promiscuity. Nor is it simply Nasser and his henchmen, the brutes who ran torture chambers like Tora Prison. It encompasses all secular Arab governments—including those in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria. It also includes the ulema, the clergy who claim to speak for Islam, but support the lordship of man. It includes anyone who stands in the way of the establishment of an Islamic State. The enemy is the rest of the world. > > [To Qutb] the Crusades were never about power or territorial control. The war with the West has always been a battle of ideas—between those who recognize that only God possesses sovereignty and those who impute it to man. > > Qutb’s crusade is not a nationalist one. Seeing the history of the Middle East as a legacy of foreign control, he argued, misleads Arabs into thinking that the solution must be local control. Arab nationalists think that the antidote to imperialism is nationalism—Churchill must be replaced by Nasser. But that is a trap. Rule by man—any man—is the problem, not the solution. Victory over Jahiliyyah cannot be achieved by adopting an Arab form of Jahiliyyah. Eastern Jahiliyyah is no better than the Western version. In Qutb’s messianic view, triumph requires nothing less than a global Islamic state. (Chapter 17)	Scott Alexander	62111294	Your Book Review: The Internationalists	acx
# Links For June [Remember, 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: Did you know: seven countries in East Africa [plan to merge into a single state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Federation) sometime in the next few years (I bet it won’t happen). 2: 3: In 1927, young Buckminster Fuller’s housing business failed, and he decided to commit suicide. Then (h/t [@amplituhedron](https://twitter.com/amplituhedron/status/1518577006161670147)): > Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared: “From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You belong to the Universe. Your significance may remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others. Sixty years later, he would describe himself as “Guinea Pig B”, and write: > I am now close to 88 and I am . . . a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed. More on Fuller’s [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Depression_and_epiphany). 4: [DeepMind on AGI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SbAgRYo8tkHwhd9Qx/deepmind-the-podcast-excerpts-on-agi) (podcast transcript). Co-founder Shane Legg says that "maybe we will have an AGI in a decade". Other co-founder Demis Hassabis says "I wouldn't be super surprised in the next decade or two." Hassabis also reveals that he's asked Terence Tao about working on AI alignment (no sign Tao is interested). 5: Finally we discover what kind of perverse behavior is so disgusting that it can get you banned from FetLife: 6: More [commentary on Edward Teach and](https://j-nelson.net/2022/04/wests-disease-and-sadly-porn/) [Sadly, Porn](https://j-nelson.net/2022/04/wests-disease-and-sadly-porn/). 7: [Google Image searches for “desk ornament”](https://www.google.com/search?q=desk+ornament&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih=1047&ei=QsdgYs_eDbrdqtsPluOE0AY&iflsig=AHkkrS4AAAAAYmDVUvKkcyaeQEGVI0k9QqB3d_BshOh1&ved=0ahUKEwjPh8nDk6T3AhW6rmoFHZYxAWoQ4dUDCAY&uact=5&oq=desk+ornament&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBggAEAUQHjIGCAAQBRAeMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAUQHjIGCAAQBRAeMgYIABAFEB46CAgAEIAEELEDOgsIABCABBCxAxCDAToICAAQsQMQgwFQAFiuC2CqEGgAcAB4AIABYYgBgAmSAQIxM5gBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1n&sclient=img) are pretty concerning. Is this representative of the broader desk-ornament-having community? 8: John Wentworth on [accounting for rising college costs](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fJvjin8ETkzhFdadC/accounting-for-college-costs). He concludes most of the extra price tag has gone into more courses and smaller class sizes. 9: Twitter thread on [shared genetic factors among psychiatric diseases](https://twitter.com/Andrew_Grotz/status/1522261980190429185). “We find a correlated factors model is useful for understanding patterns of relationships at various levels of analysis, but that a p-factor is both wrong and not super useful for modeling these particular datasets.” 10: Lee Crawfurd: [how well do educational interventions scale](https://twitter.com/leecrawfurd/status/1517242492298698757)? “This figure shows three programs with steeply diminishing effects as they scale (early-grade reading programs, home visits, & teacher coaching) [and] two that seem much more consistent (longer hours & meals): 11: Why is there [more mental illness in open compared to authoritarian societies](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-struggle-for-mental-health-illness-uvalde-shooting-depression-anxiety-religion-meaning-authoritarian-11654034338)? Obviously a lot of ways these statistics could be misleading, but I take them seriously and will hopefully write more about this soon. 12: Commenters on the review of [The Castrato](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato) mentioned Radu Marian, a singer with an intersex condition who probably sounds the way historical castrati did. Here’s a sample: 13: Since it’s so hard to get permits for skyscrapers, why don’t we dig buildings deep into the ground? [Many excellent reasons, say civil engineers](https://twitter.com/AaronBergman18/status/1535968622081867777). 14: [Knowledge And Sentiments Of Roe v. Wade](https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-019-00392-2): “65.7% of the sample incorrectly answered that abortion would be illegal everywhere if Roe v. Wade were overturned." (h/t [Ramesh Ponnuru](https://twitter.com/RameshPonnuru/status/1521501133856034816)) 15: Academia is only a month or so behind me now, I need to start working faster: [Birth Order Differences In Education Originate In Postnatal Environments](https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/2/pgac051/6604844). And by the same team: a claim that [birth order effects exist in some cultures but not others](https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-abstract/36/1/16/5542612). 16: Change in US cannabis use (h/t [@KeithNHumphreys](https://twitter.com/KeithNHumphreys/status/1536002121023164416)): 17: Richard Hanania: [Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than) A conservative intellectual discusses why he works on fighting wokeness instead of more pressing problems. Everyone has praised this piece for its honesty, and I agree it is commendably honest. But I also feel like - and I mean this in the most respectful way - it basically cashes out to “because I am a bad person”. I’m not saying this just because he doesn’t spend enough time fighting genocide - obviously we all could do better on this. But he concludes that his personal aesthetic is anti-woke, and that he would fight for that aesthetic even if wokeness “would lead to a happier and healthier society”. My thoughts on this are more complicated than can fit in a link summary paragraph, but I do think the concept of “fight for your own preferences even if they would make society worse” is pretty close to the concept of “bad person” (though with a lot of fuzziness around the edges). In fairness to Richard, he claims that this is only a hypothetical and that in fact he thinks his preferences would make society better. But it’s a heck of a hypothetical. Anyway, worth reading, if only for the questions it raises. 18: Related -[Go Republican, Young EA](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/myympkZ6SuT59vuEQ/go-republican-young-ea). It argues that although there’s brutal competition for spots at liberal think tanks / journals / policy wonk positions, the crop of conservative intellectuals is so much sparser that there’s much less competition at the conservative end. But the Democrats and Republicans both hold power about equally often. So somebody trying to get power (sorry, I mean “make a difference”) should try to get into the conservative ecosystem instead of the liberal one, since they’ll rise much higher in an equally lucrative field. I agree with all of this. I don’t think liberals should fake being conservative (it wouldn’t work, plus you’d have to be conservative which might not be the difference you want to make). But I would encourage anyone who’s on the border to polish their conservative credentials, and anyone who happens to be a conservative interested in EA ideas to be aware of their value. 19: A poll from just after the Uvalde shooting: 20: Thanks to everyone who sent me this: a California appeals court has ruled that, for the purposes of environmental legislation, [bees should be considered a type of fish](https://twitter.com/AjitPai/status/1531720927796420608). I originally thought the court was being dumb, but it turns out that the law they were interpreting, taken literally, [clearly defines “fish” in a way that includes bees](https://twitter.com/ringwiss/status/1531719401287950337). So I retract my criticism of the court and instead think that the California legislature is dumb, which I guess we already knew. 21: Speaking of insects, [more evidence](https://resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/icad.12575) that the supposed insect decline is spurious and that overall there are about as many insects as ever. 22: Feminism through [unionizing female college party-goers](https://twitter.com/maediocre/status/1534720853732012032). I like this idea, although the devil on my left shoulder is telling me it should involve blockchain somehow. 23: New report claiming that hormones are bad for transgender kids [does not seem to be a very good study](https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1536389660846567425). Jesse Singal [agrees](https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1536760204796186624). 24: [Interview with Edward Luttwak](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/three-blind-kings-edward-luttwak). TIL that Xi Jinping has memorized Faust. Also, the claim of global cognitive decline due to decreasing nicotine use hits exactly my sweet spot for insane yet intriguing theories. 25: Open Philanthropy [analyzes their past predictions](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/how-accurate-are-our-predictions/) about how their grants would do. Conclusion: their calibration is great, their accuracy is better than chance but not super impressive. 26: Several AI political compasses going around, I was happiest with [Rob Bensinger’s](https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1537724894678380544) (version below slightly edited by Michael Trazzi): I endorse my position here, which coincidentally is also around where I am on the regular political compass. 27: [Claim](https://nypost.com/2022/04/02/chronic-absenteeism-in-nyc-public-schools-hits-alarming-40/): post-pandemic, 40% of NYC public school students are “chronically absent”. 28: An effective altruist group is [offering to mentor students interested in EA](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w74b7KwtH3xEbdTTk/uk-university-admissions-support-programme) in getting into top UK universities. 29: [Claim](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-221/comment/6224717) from the comments section: “[FaceApp morph](https://twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/1518006583187456006/photo/1) of all Democratic Senators (‘what if John Hickenlooper was a cannibal?’) and all Republican Senators (‘what if Bob Katter was the smuggest individual on the planet?’) is \extremely\ evocative of [Paul Fussell's chart](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class) distinguishing upper-middle from prole”. 30: Speaking of class: I actually think this is really interesting! I can just barely remember the time when the culture was telling us that small butts were attractive; now it tells us the opposite. Everyone always talks about how attractiveness is culturally conditioned, but it’s weird to have lived through a shift and have an intuitive sense of how both sides feel from the inside. 31: In response to Russia debating un-recognizing Lithuania’s independence, the Kiev City Council [has rescinded](https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1535321088137232388) the 1147 AD decree by the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus founding the city of Moscow. Moscow now officially has not been founded; please conduct yourselves accordingly. [Update: [Likely fake](https://telegraf.com.ua/ukraina/2022-06-10/5707474-moskvu-nado-udalit-v-seti-zabavno-potrollili-putina-ot-imeni-klichko)] 32: Global inequality declined throughout the 2010s ([source](https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1537884374040838144)): 33: [Poll](https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas#gender): 46% of Democratic men below 50 now believe “feminism has done more harm than good”, compared to only 4% of Democratic men above 50 (h/t [Dylan Matthews](https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1537802812616232960)). I would like to see this result replicated before updating on it too hard, but that is one heck of a vibe shift. [Update: probably just bad data, see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7/comment/7472446)] 34: New-ish startup Ultima Genomics claims to have lowered full genome sequencing costs by an order of magnitude, [to $100/genome](https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/ultima-genomics-claims-100-full-genome-sequencing-after-stealth-600m-raise/) (and incidentally to have broken Illumina’s suspected-of-being-sinister monopoly on sequencing). [Here’s some fair criticism](https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1533875723995185153), but overall I find this exciting. 35: More in “NYT being bad” news - some people I know in tech endorse Jacob Steinhardt’s claims [here](https://twitter.com/JacobSteinhardt/status/1521599337943289856) that a recent article committed “journalistic malpractice” and “platform[ed] a bully” . 36: Elsewhere in media malpractice news: Sydney Morning Herald [nonconsensually outs an actress as lesbian](https://deadline.com/2022/06/rebel-wilson-sydney-morning-herald-outing-controversy-1235044071/), using the old “well it was possible to find the information so you couldn’t have really been committed to keeping it secret” excuse. They have since apologized, which I guess is more than NYT has ever done. 37: People say that US environmental impact regulations are onerous, but [all SpaceX has to do](https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1536463425211080711) in order to keep launching rockets from its Texas spaceport is all the usual stuff, plus hire a biologist to investigate the effect of lighting on sea turtles, plus perform quarterly cleanups of local beaches, plus operate an employee shuttle, plus write a report on the Mexican-American War (really!), plus “install missing ornaments” on a local historical marker, plus help protect ocelots, plus make an annual donation to a state recreational fishing program, plus ~70 other things. 38: Goodreads reviews by genre by gender (h/t [@a\_centrism](https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1527844235524943872)): 39: Eliezer Yudkowsky summarizes his case for AI risk [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities). Arch-AI-optimist Paul Christiano responds [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer). 40: Related: want to get into AI safety, but don’t know where to start? [AISafetySupport.com](https://www.aisafetysupport.org/) 41: [Indian people getting angry about the Taj Mahal](https://twitter.com/dhruv_rathee/status/1523921391254392832). I cannot claim to completely understand this discussion, but I feel like I have broadened my horizons in some important way. 42: Jessica Taylor: [On the paradox of tolerance in relation to fascism and online content moderation](https://unstableontology.com/2022/05/02/on-the-paradox-of-tolerance-in-relation-to-fascism-and-online-content-moderation/). 43: Be careful with your tone of voice! (from [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vcumca/oc_which_topics_do_american_couples_argue_about/)): 44: The world’s smallest motorsport, the [Nanocar Race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanocar_Race), takes place on a 100 nm track. The first competition ended when: > The American team from Ohio University turned back for no apparent reason after 20 nanometers, the German team broke 2 vehicles without being able to restart, and the Japanese team ended up giving up. The French team lost sight of its vehicle on its surface area, and was also obliged to abandon, comforting itself with the symbolic prize of "the most elegant car in the competition. 45: Contra previous claims, recent research shows that [performance on an IQ test does not increase very much](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289622000332) (~2.5 points) when test-takers are more motivated. Previous research likely wrong due to [publication bias and fraud](https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1520338596909273090). 46: Nootropics Depot is on a crusade to test whether other supplements are correctly labeled. [Here’s what happened with turkesterone](https://www.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/va9kvu/lab_testing_results_of_turkesterone_beta/). 47: Natalia Mendonca has been working hard trying to investigate theories of obesity (especially SMTM’s lithium contamination theory). Her main writeup is here: [It’s Probably Not Lithium](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium). But I’ve been even more impressed with some of the periperhal things she’s found that apply to almost all “alternative” theories of obesity, like that [lab mice don’t actually seem to be getting fatter](https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1521205212802859008) and [the evidence that truly wild animals are inexplicably getting fatter is slim](https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1522006013519486976). I hope she puts it in one place someday. 48: Related: Elizabeth VN has released a dataset of [US counties’ water quality vs. obesity level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ardqtuGaXntyEN3M5/new-water-quality-x-obesity-dataset-available). “So far I have failed to find anything really interesting with it, but maybe you will” 49: 50: BBC Africa: [The Deadly Accordion Wars Of Lesotho](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61097386). Related: [BBC from 2011 on the African space program](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9573163.stm) (ie one Ugandan man trying to build a shuttle in his backyard). 51: Holly Elmore: [I Believed The Hype And Did Mindfulness Meditation For Dumb Reasons — Now I’m Trying To Reverse The Damage](https://hollyelmore.substack.com/p/i-believed-the-hype-and-did-mindfulness-meditation-for-dumb-reasons-now-im-trying-to-reverse-the-damage?s=r) 52: Some scientists genetic engineered an orange petunia, then closed the experiment down and forgot about it. Then - and nobody knows how - orange petunias were spotted growing at various locations around the world. Regulators panicked, leading to the [Great Petunia Carnage Of 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_petunia). 53: Douglas Hofstadter published [a recent article](https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter) pointing out that GPT-3 gives straight answers to silly questions - for example, if you ask when Egypt was transported across the Golden Gate Bridge, it will guess 2017. [Rictic on Less Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ADwayvunaJqBLzawa/contra-hofstadter-on-gpt-3-nonsense) demonstrates that if you ask it nicely to not do this, and instead to call you out when you ask silly questions, it’s perfectly able to do that. 54: [Why do stars seen through the James Webb Space Telescope look so spiky](https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/)? 55: Should environmentalists buy coal mines to prevent the coal from being mined and burnt? John Halstead on the EA Forum explains [why this is financially, legally, and logistically difficult](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XYbwi9ZdxdQzk2d9p/should-we-buy-coal-mines). 56: This BBC article is on [the supposed death of mandatory office “fun”](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220517-the-death-of-mandatory-fun-in-the-office); it claims that with the pandemic culture of working remotely, companies (thankfully) gave up on forced “morale-building” social activities that everyone hated. I agree these were bad, but then the article blows its credibility by gushing about companies instituting new, actually fun social activities that workers should be grateful for, which to me sound exactly as bad as the old ones. Am I missing something here? Do other people just really want their companies to provide dubiously optional opportunities to stay late on Fridays talking to co-workers? 57: Be not afraid! (it’s a great still image, but play the video too!)	Scott Alexander	60718618	Links For June	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko [Original post [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko)] 1: [Nifty775 writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7300505): > This doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness. Many comments made this point. Shellenberger did bring it up in the book, so its absence in the post is my fault and mine alone. He writes: > I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.” > > Said Chicoine, the permanent supportive housing provider for the Kushel study, “I don’t have a solution. I will acknowledge what you’re saying. I’m not going to be a bullshit advocate who says, ‘Oh you should just ignore that.’ It’s real. There’s so many stigmas and stereotypes that some of us in the industry were scared of telling the truth.” > > I asked Steve Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C., a similar question. “Let’s say we build one hundred thousand apartment units. What’s to prevent another hundred thousand people from going from doubling-up and couch-surfing to become homeless and ask for housing?” > > “That will definitely happen,” said Berg. “And it’s not ‘What if,’ it’s ‘That will definitely happen.’ If you don’t deal with the reasons people are losing their housing then the system will never be able to keep up. Communities did really well getting people off the streets but they haven’t really thought about the inflow of people.” But the stats I found were that [70% of SF homeless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Causes_of_homelessness) lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From [this report](https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/San-Francisco-PIT-Homeless-Count-2013-Final-February-13-2014.pdf), I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence. I don’t know whether the numbers are different for chronic mentally ill homeless. I could imagine these people are more likely to come out of state (more experienced in the homeless lifestyle and how to optimize it) or less likely (they don’t have the resources and executive function to plan a scheme like that). Overall these numbers make me a little less worried about this concern. San Francisco is already quite generous, and even if some new policy doubled the absolute number of people who came from elsewhere, it would only increase the total number 10-20%. 2: [James M on Houston’s success story](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7306069): > These numbers are from 2019, but you might enjoy them: > > Houston Texas has reduced its homeless population from ~7,000 to ~4,000 in the last 10 years even as the metro area's population increased from 5.8 million to 7.0 million, and they did it by doing a housing-first solution that was viable and scaleable because housing costs were low. They housed 17,000 formerly homeless people during that decade (notice that 17,000 >> 3,000, so a lot of homeless people are transiently homeless). Houston's funding to homeless programs was $38 million in 2019, compared to LA's $619 million, and LA's homeless population went from ~25,000 in 2009 to ~55,000 in 2019 while the LA metro area\* went from a population of 12.9 million in 2009 to 13.3 million in 2019. > > So to compare those 2 cities: > > Both have about 1/3 of the population of their metro area in the city proper. > > Houston provides $12,700 in funding per 2019 homeless person > > LA provides $11,254 in funding per 2019 homeless person > > Houston's metro area increased in population by 21% in the last decade > > LA's metro area increased in population by 3% in the last decade > > Houston's homeless population FELL by 42% in the last decade > > LA's homeless population ROSE by 120% in the last decade > > It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston: > > <https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/02/why-homelessness-going-down-houston-dallas/> Together with the model showing housing prices predicted homelessness well, I find this really convincing. 3: [Eledex from DSL](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6920.0.html) wins Most Dramatic Story: > My, and my whole family's, take on homelessness has changed significantly in the last year and a half. > > The lot next to my house had a giant three story tree which formed a dome around its base. Shortly after moving into my house a camp of 5 - 15 homeless people (depending on the day) moved into the tree. They yelled, fought, had fires, used power tools, and behaved in various undesirable ways. I called the police on them for various offenses ~5 times without ever having even a single officer or official appear on site. About 8 months after they had moved in (I found the backstory out in retrospect) the lot was purchased by a developer. Construction workers came and told the homeless people they should leave because the tree was being cut down tomorrow. Per said construction workers the response was "over our dead bodies, we will burn it down first!" to which the construction workers, who were planning to cut the tree down anyways, responded with a shrug. Mind you the edge of this giant tree was ~15 feet from my house. That day/night the homeless people gathered >20 propane tanks and strapped them to the tree, then lit it on fire. > > I woke at ~2 am to rattling bangs shaking my house, a weird bright red glow shining through my kitchen window, baking heat emanating from the windows, and my wife and six day old child screaming. We fled the house naked with our child, injuring my wife who had just given birth. I went back in once for some documents and clothes after determining the house was not actively on fire. After maybe 5 minutes the fire department showed up and put out the fire. The next day the construction workers cut down a sooty and much reduced tree. One cop spoke to me on the phone once and never followed up. All the same homeless people still roam the area and now live in a wash ~150 feet away. > > I've now moved to a fancy expansive HOA community that costs more than twice as much. I used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I no longer think that, I'm now in favor of basically anything that results in fewer homeless people. This is vivid enough to clarify a few things for me. In a perfect world, the way this would have gone is that the first or second time Eledex called the police, they would have solved the problem somehow. In this imperfect world, Eledex is left with two proposed solutions (assuming that “just suck it up and deal with it forever” doesn’t count as a solution). First, move to “a fancy expensive HOA community that costs more than twice as much”. Second, “basically anything that results in fewer homeless people”. This second one seems deliberately inflammatorily phrased, but I guess that’s why this seems so vivid. Eledex is saying that if the government can’t do surgical strikes on people who are actually breaking the law / harassing people, then citizens are going to demand sweeping action. This sweeping action will be unfair to some (homeless people who aren’t causing trouble), but not doing the sweeping action seems unfair to Eledex (and especially hypothetical versions of Eledex without enough money to move to the suburbs). In other words, if we can’t solve the problem fairly and properly through competent responsive police who enforce the laws as written, then there’s going to be a lot of pain and unfairness, with the only remaining question being how to distribute that pain and unfairness among homeless vs. homeful people. Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped, but also, I’m imagining being the police officer who shows up here, and - what? Eledex says “Officer, these people are generally annoying, they yell a lot and start fires and stuff”. Even if there’s a regulation against eg noise on the books, it’s probably not a regulation that allows you to call for backup and arrest fifteen people and throw the book at them. If you give them fines, I assume they will never pay. If you do take it very seriously and spend 5-to-6-digit sums of money to give all of these people a fair trial - if you make Eledex and their family come to court and testify, let lawyers for the homeless people cross-examine Eledex and try to prove that they’re racist or lying or confused about where the noise came from, and miraculously get a conviction - then maybe these people are in jail for however many weeks or months you get for noisy scary trespassing, after which they get released and come right back. Common-sensically what these people are doing is bad and should stop. My guess is that a hundred years ago, this would have been enough to stop it, and the amount of police discretion that made this possible would also have generated a bunch police corruption and brutality and rights violations. Now nobody gets to use common sense at all, and this does sort of make the brutality and rights violations a bit less. Whatever I think of this balance, I’m not really optimistic about our current ability to solve this the perfect world way where police are responsive to Eledex’s complaints and able to deal with these people in particular, while leaving other innocent homeless people alone. So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair. Probably there are gradations of unfairness and you could figure out some way to minimize the impact, but I don’t know, Eledex sure does have a valid gripe here. 4: [Sean does some excellent detective work](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7319018) on both my and Shellenberger’s claims. I edited some of these into the post already, so you may not have seen the mistaken versions, but here are the corrections. First, on the Zillow study: > Hi Scott. You write: "The researchers do not use the terms “local policy” or “social attitudes” in the paper itself." But in the paper it states: "To account for these unobserved local covariates, we include a CoC-level dynamic latent factor F 0 iβi,t, allowing for small departures from the cluster-level regression that may be due to local policies, cultural attitudes toward homelessness, affordable housing initiatives, and many other difficult to observe local factors." Doesn't take away from your main point, but they do mention local policy, and "cultural" attitudes seems like a reasonable proxy for "social" attitudes. I responded “Thanks, I'll correct that! I just CTRL+Fd "local policy" and "social attitudes" and tried to skim for proxies, but seems like I missed these.” Next, on mental illness among the homeless: > You [Scott] write: > > " I cannot find this report anywhere, the methodology does not seem to be public, and when people give a link to it, it’s always to this Google document which assumes there are exactly 4000 people in this category and then breaks them down further - 100% have psychosis, 95% have alcoholism, etc. " > > I think this is the report: > > <https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/MHR/Mental_Health_Reform_Update_Report_FINAL.pdf> > > And this the methodology: > > "Through an in-depth data analysis, conducted in collaboration with the DPH Whole Person Care team, the Mental Health Reform team found that approximately 18,000 adults experienced homelessness in San Francisco in fiscal year 2018-19. These individuals were identified by the Coordinated Care Management System (CCMS), a DPH-operated system integrating 15 separate databases from DPH, HSH and the Human Services Agency (HSA). CCMS defines people as experiencing homelessness in the fiscal year if they either: 1) utilize a City service that indicates housing instability, for example, a City shelter, or 2) self-report homelessness while accessing health care services. > > While the DPH estimate of 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in FY1819 may appear to conflict with San Francisco’s Point-in-Time Count (8,035 people counted in January 2019)1, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) details in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress that the full-year number is generally 2.5 times greater than the single-night count. > > Using the CCMS-defined 18,000 people experiencing homelessness as the base, the Mental Health Reform team analyzed the population’s diagnostic epidemiology to understand the associated burden of behavioral health issues. The team found nearly 4,000 adults experiencing homelessness who also suffer with cooccurring mental health and substance use disorders. Specifically, in addition to homelessness, this group of 4,000 has a history of both psychosis and substance use disorder." > > Shellenberger I believe makes the mistake of using the one-point-in-time number (8035) as his denominator as opposed to the CCMS number (18,000), which the authors use in their report. This is another really good catch, and means the percent of the homeless with mental illness + drug abuse is only about 22%, not the stated ~50% - although considering only the chronic homeless separately might blunt this change. Next, on Los Angeles’ Proposition HHH, which I (following Shellenberger) described as trying to build new houses for $100,000 but later ballooning to $500,000: > You [Scott] write: > > “[Los Angeles] hoped to build ~10,000 units for the homeless, at a projected price of $140,000 each.” > > This might be a bit misleading; I think Proposition HHH’s contribution of ~$140,000 was always meant to be a \partial\ subsidy of per-unit costs. Here’s the text of the proposition in question: > > <https://cao.lacity.org/homeless/PropHHHCOC-20181109d.pdf> > > See page 23 of that PDF, which shows the subsidy allocation. Also if you "ctrl f" for "subsidy" you'll note other places where it's made clear. > > A more readable version of the same point comes from the city’s controller, who writes: > > “Funds from Proposition HHH make up only a portion of total development costs. Across all projects in the LAHD/HHH pipeline, the HHH subsidy per unit is approximately $134,000, or 23% of the total development cost of a project.” > > That’s from: > > <https://lacontroller.org/audits-and-reports/problems-and-progress-of-prop-hhh/> > > You write: > > “But in fact, five years later, LA has completed only 700 units, and the cost per unit has spiralled to $531,000 each. Nobody has a good explanation for what happened, with Shellenberger quoting one local service provider who said a lot of it was “bullshit costs”. “ > > a. On only completing 700 units, I have some evidence here from the comptroller that’s a bit more nuanced: > > “the total number of completed units (1,142) is wholly inadequate in the context of the ongoing homelessness emergency” > > And > > “...there are almost 4,400 units in construction.” > > So – about +400 on where you were (still “wholly inadequate” per the comptroller’s editorializing), but there are also thousands more in construction per the controller’s same report. > > I think the ~400 discrepancy might be that the \Reason\ article is from 2021, and the comptroller's report from 2022. > > As to “bullshit costs,” there are a couple of other, perhaps complementary, explanations. > > -One is just context from above: the HHH funds were always only meant to be a subsidy. > > -Two is the city is guilty of overconfident modeling, according to the controller, and that overconfidence was taxed very heavily by the pandemic and its consequences in the construction markets. He writes: > > “Even before the pandemic, a study by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that construction costs for multifamily buildings across the State were rising due to factors such as gaps in the construction workforce and higher materials costs. The unprecedented disruption brought on by the pandemic and other factors accelerated these trends. Existing labor shortages in the construction industry became more pronounced and the cost of some construction materials—such as lumber—skyrocketed. While these costs have somewhat stabilized from their record highs, they remain markedly higher than their pre-pandemic levels.” > > The controller’s solution here, fwiw, is in part to reallocate much of the remaining HHH funding to “acquisition, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse opportunities,” which seems in line with your suggestion around short- and medium-term mediocre solutions being more achievable and practical than idealistic HF-ish ones. > > Hope springs eternal on that one! On shoplifting: > 1. Shellenberger’s claim is: > > “Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019.” > > Short version is that I think he's correct, but that he complicated his correctness somewhat by describing "shoplifting" as an example of "larceny." > > 2. The source you show that compares Kern to San Francisco is found here: > > <http://www.cjcj.org/news/13219> > > \That\ site’s source is here: > > <https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances> > > And it's the California’s DOJ site. And here’s it where Shellenberger is I think on pretty firm ground, and where some of the anecdotes you’ve heard from your friends and patient \do in fact\ match up with the data. > > The primary challenge with the graph from your essay is that it uses only SHOPLIFTING for its comparisons. Shellenberger is talking about LARCENY (and again then complicates that somewhat by stating shoplifting as an example of larceny). > > But the DOJ separates out "larceny" from "shoplifting." They are two different classifications, and have different data attached to them. > > And, within that classification framework, it’s true that shoplifting follows the pattern of the graph in your essay. But larceny almost perfectly matches onto Shellenberger’s description. Source is here -- > > <https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances> > > -- though you will have to input "San Francisco" to check. > > According to that site: There were 24,304 reported larcenies in 2011 in SF. There were 39,687 in 2019 in SF. This tracks very nicely with Shellenberger’s per 100,000 claims. > > But shoplifting barely moves at all, and has very few reported incidences, as you discussed. > > 3. How to resolve this? > > Under the CA penal code, shoplifting is “entering a commercial establishment, during business hours, with the \intent to steal,\ where value does not exceed $950.” > > So one guess is this is kind of “niche” charge. Once “intent to steal” becomes “actual stealing” it gets reclassified as larceny, of which there has been the steep rise that your friends have described (and which, in absolute terms, is more than 10x as common as shoplifting). That's speculation, though. What seems clearer is that Shellenberger's claim of larceny appears to be sound, empirically, according to CA DOJ. I’m not sure I agree with Sean on this one - the site breaks down larceny into lots of different sub-crimes, and most of the rise is from car break-ins - which everyone already agrees have gone up a lot. I don’t think this leaves a lot of room for the growth in larcenies to come from shoplifting-not-officially-categorized-as-shoplifting. And on drug use: > 1. You [Scott] write: > > "San Fransicko’s description of Amsterdam solving its drug and crime problems matches the other sources I found, although I’m confused about how much harm reduction was involved." > > I'd dissent with your and Shellenberger's description of the trends here. > > 2. If you go here: > > https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/7052eng/barv?ts=1656160323471 > > (That's the central bureau of statistics for the Netherlands.) It brings you to the underlying cause of death, broken out by subtopic, for the whole country. > > And then if you filter "topic" by "5.2 -- due to use of drugs" you'll see a pretty steep rise in drug-related deaths from about 2012 to now. > > Here's one account of many in the popular press describing the phenomenon -- > > <https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/dutch-drugs-deaths-including-prescription-drugs-double-in-two-years/> > > 3. This corresponds (at least in theory) to the more-than-doubling of homelessness in that same period. > > i.e., One reasonable prior is that increased homelessness is associated with increased drug use, and that increased drug use is associated with increased deaths due to use of drugs. That seems to be borne out in the official Dutch data. As homelessness has gotten worse, so too have drug-related deaths. What I can't square is your ACS data which shows overall declining drug use. I have to look into that some more. Overall I’m very impressed with Sean’s work here. Sean, if you ever have anything this illuminating about some other topic, please send me an email and pitch it to me. 5: [Graham shares](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7300529) his experience as an “ex-cop in a city with a lot of homeless”: > I can tell you homelessness is not a thing in suburbs at least in part because suburban police do not allow it. This can be achieved through a number of methods: > > 1) Drive/bus all homeless to the nearst big city, buying them tickets or giving them courtesy rides in the back of police cars - this is what the suburban police who bordered my beat did. It's extra effective in a place like SF where there might be a water boundary and large bridge between jursidictions. > > 2) Eliminate all things that would attract homeless, such as shelters/services but also open-air drug markets. Cities have these things, suburbs make sure they do not - and transients will often tell you quite specifically that they are looking for them. > > 3) Issue non-extraditable arrest warrants for minor crimes that transients often commit (like trespassing), which are only served if the offender returns to the suburban jurisdiction. This latter method is especially effective, as offenders know they are free as long as they stay out of the suburb, and big-city cops generally cannot serve the arrest warrant to remove the offender from the city. I’m surprised cities co-operate in this game while suburbs defect. Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs? Why don’t they eliminate their shelters? Obviously this would be pretty anti-social, but why are the suburbs selfish in this game and the cities altruistic? Is it just that there’s so much established precedent that cities believe it’s their problem and suburbs believe it isn’t? Also [from Graham](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7301066): > I can tell you [the shoplifting situation is] actually very simple. Almost all data on property crimes is garbage. Most people do not reliably report property crimes of any kind, if you look at the National Crime Victimization Survey you see only about 30% of larceny is ever reported. Shoplifting in particular is almost never reported in large cities, retail workers do not care. They don’t get paid to care, they don’t need a police report for insurance, it takes hours to get a police response, and nothing happens to shoplifters in any large progressive city anyway. I used to ask retail employees in my beat, they would always tell me about rampant shoplifting they simply didn’t bother to report. Changes in reporting caused by Prop 47, COVID and other random factors like police response time will always swamp any actual change in crime. Property crime statistics are worthless. People should believe their own eyes. > > An exception: I’d say the data on auto theft is probably more reliable, because having your car stolen is a major pain in the ass that people notice, most stolen cars (unlike all other stolen property) are recovered, and insurance will not give you a whole new car if you haven’t bothered for file theft report. I’m still confused that reporting varies in exactly the right way to keep the reported level constant regardless of the real level, but right now that’s my only objection to just going with the “stats are wrong” story. 6: AvalancheGenesis [has more on shoplifting](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7301896): > I'll also add some SF retail employers now actively discourage paying any attention to shoplifting at all. Carrot: "you'll never be held responsible, even if you could have feasibly stopped the boost". Stick: "we will censor and possibly outright fire you for even minor confrontations". You can entirely forget about any sort of reporting, even to the mall cops, outside of egregious cases that involve physical injuries. But even those are more likely to be classified as assault etc instead of property crime. (Same trend discourages reporting most muggings here. Possibly a whole other anecdata minefield there. I think car break-in reporting is more accurate mostly because there's hard physical evidence which simply can't be brushed aside - plus insurance.) > > The carrot further erodes labour's sense of agency and value. There's a certain freeing aspect in not having responsibilities - but if one has no actual meaningful responsibilities on the job, isn't it just make-work? The "don't care" attitude starts to creep into other areas beyond just shoplifting, creating a perceptible loss of morale and work ethic. It'd be one thing if the solution was simply passing the buck to security or middle management as the "eyes and ears", but their hands are mostly just as tied. > > The stick causes additional problems beyond the shoplifting itself. Everyone in retail (ideally) comes in with a certain expectation of being treated like shit and deferring to utility monster customers. But it's above and beyond that baseline to proactively fear for one's job just in case a confrontation is subjectively perceived to have been "excessive". At my work, there's been a suspicious pattern of such firings occurring along totally coincidental racial and gender lines, further contributing to general apprehension. We've also entirely stopped stocking certain high-value items due to how often they get stolen, which isn't fair to the law-abiding legitimate customers who want them too. All to avoid potential conflicts. > > Upshot: whether the anecdata or the Official CDC Statistics are more reflective of the territory, \people act like the anecdata are true\, with consequent harmful policy and behaviour modifications. So spending resources to address the perception, if not the underlying (non-)problem, would seem to be a $20 win lying on the ground regardless. Current Nash equilibrium is painful for everyone. 7: Slaw (writes [Slaw’s Newsletter](https://slaw.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [says](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7301578): > I think that the canonical reference when talking about a data driven approach to the homeless problem should be "Million Dollar Murray" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell cites Dennis Culhane's research on homelessness that produced a surprising outcome: the most frequent period of homelessness is a single day. The second most frequent duration? Two days. > > Why? Because when you're talking about homelessness you're talking about (at least) two different populations. The first are those individuals who are homeless only briefly--they are often employed and after a night or two of sleeping in a car or on a bench they find shelter on a friend's couch or in the basement of their parents home. In Gladwell's narrative they can be ignored because they can take care of themselves. > > The other population is far more problematic. For this group of individuals the average stay on the streets isn't measured in days, it's years. Rates of drug abuse and mental illness are far higher for this group than for the general population, along with the concomitant issues of joblessness and familial isolation. (Culhane in another interview said that they tend to have "tenuous" relations with friends and family. Translation: they can't stay at Mom's house because they pawned the tv to buy crack and are now persona non grata.) > > This is not a distinction without a difference. If homelessness has its roots in simple economics than providing housing vouchers or subsidies should be enough to make a difference. If the real issue is addiction and mental illness than those measures will be woefully inadequate. And [Mek writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7328986): > As someone who has, on occasion, been homeless (and being 195 cm and 125 kg and sleeping in a '99 Camry is not an experience I can recommend) and also only having read the first section, I have a feeling that there may very well be different "classes" (?) of homeless. > > I will admit that I was fortunate enough to not be faced with the prospect, and fair warning, this is basically just "gut feeling" levels of rigor, but I simply feel that there is likely a distinction to be made between "people who are currently homeless because they lost their housing due to recent misfortune or price increases" and "people who are currently homeless and shoot drugs and defecate on the sidewalk". To call back a few weeks, just describing all of these people as "homeless" strikes me as akin to (and likely as effective for "solving the problem") as calling everyone from the person with mild Aspergers and the truly severely 24/7 care require disabled person with autism, "Autistic". > > "Homelessness is a spectrum", etc. > > And perhaps I am absolutely, completely wrong, and I might well have also ended up using the sidewalk as a restroom and doing hard drugs if it had gone on longer than it did. I'm also probably significantly more able to quickly find \some\ job doing \something\ that pays decently than your average homeless person, and thus that may also color my views on the topic. > > I don't know, and hell, maybe you even address all of this in the, uh, 90% of the article I haven't actually read yet, but it seems as though simply trying to treat this as a monolithic problem isn't going to actually be effective. > > I dunno. I understand that you disagree with Shellenberger about the "drugs and mental illness" driving factor versus housing costs, but... why couldn't it be \both\ in this case? > > That is to say, yes, the general levels of homelessness in SF may well be primarily driven by housing prices. But perhaps the thing that makes SF seem so particularly bad is the proportion of the homeless population there with a serious addiction and / or mental health issue. (Epistemological status: Total ass-pull. I have no research or numbers to back any of that up, I'm basically just brainstorming at this point.) MadmanB [says the same](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7331742): > Some thoughts below. My background: SF Bay Area resident for 20 years, frequent visitor for 10 years before that. Spent 3-4 years from 1998-2003 doing weekly food distribution to homeless in southern California. > > There are (at least) three "sub-classes" of homeless and confusing or conflating them results in total confusion regarding solutions. > > A. Subclass A are the "lifestyle homeless". Vagabonds, drifters, gutter punks, street musicians, beach bums, craft stall vendors, "van lifers". A number of these folks I know by name, and consider to be friends. They could hold straight jobs in theory, and often come from more conventional backgrounds. The tradeoffs inherent in living the straight-and-narrow are too much, and they cannot or will not do it. Sometimes drugs and mental illness are an issue, but not overwhelmingly so. > > B. Subclass B are the "down on their luck homeless". Living in car, van, or RV temporarily due to job loss, bills, bad luck, or poor choices coupled to above. Will actively seek out shelter, come to social services and adhere to plans to improve the situation. Aiming to get back on their feet. Overwhelmingly working class and not happy or proud of their current condition. > > C. Subclass C are the "wretched homeless". Sorry about the moniker but it fits. Extreme mental illness or drug addiction. Limited ability or agency. Suffering in many dimensions. Selling body for drugs. Crime and violence -- both perpetrators and victims. Passed out on street in own fluids. These cases are extremely sad, and my heart breaks for them. A test: if you ask them their name or their story, you most often cannot get any kind of comprehensible reply. > > The wretched homeless are the ones that are most obvious in many ways, and seemingly what the book focuses on. They will not be helped by marginal changes in housing markets: rents dropping from $1500/mo to $1250/mo are not their issue. On the other hand, the "down on their luck" \WILL\ be helped, and mightily so, by more affordable housing and/or social programs. NIMBY and 30 years of working class job offshoring are reasonable causes. > > Class C cannot be divorced, in any way, from changes in mental health policies, nor from the flood of ever-stronger drugs in the last decade. Drug induced psychosis and/or willingness to do almost anything for the next hit create a massive hole that is very very very hard to pull out of. Many (most?) die in that condition. Jail seems to be the only circuit breaker we have in the current system, and it does a poor job of interrupting the cycle. > > In the 30 years of my experience, the problem in SF Bay has gotten much worse. Some areas have improved (as I recall Mission district was very intense with heroin on the street in the 90s). Both classes B and C seem to be much larger overall. > > A major concern is preventing lifestyle and down-on-their-luck from becoming wretched. That is, how can we stop class A and B from becoming class C? Another major concern is tailoring programs and help to fit the person. A wretched homeless selling their body and dignity for the next hit is NOT going to fill out your paperwork, and will scare or harm others in a shelter. > > I think this review is too hard on Shellenberger. He seems to grasp realities of the problem that are glossed over by the homeless-industrial-complex. This is a really good and really important point, and one way I worry I was being unfair to Shellenberger’s thesis. I think there were a lot of cases where he said “the homeless are mostly X”, I found statistics showing most of the homeless weren’t X at all, and what he really meant was something like “the homeless I really care about who are causing all the trouble are mostly X”. (for example: as discussed above, most homeless people are natives of the city they’re in - is this also true of most homeless people weighted by number of problems they cause? Homelessness seems very correlated with/responsive to housing prices; is this also true of number of problem homeless?) Unfortunately, you can’t ask people on a survey “are you the good or the bad kind of homeless person?” so there aren’t a lot of statistics that do a good job taking this into account. One possible criticism of San Fransicko is that it makes a good and valid criticism which statistics will naturally contradict because everyone’s doing the statistics wrong, and instead of arguing this, it tries to massage the statistics. 8: David Roman (writes [A History Of Mankind](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7302033)): > As somebody somewhat familiar with the Portuguese situation, and who was born next door to Portugal and has lived in the neighborhood for a long time, let me clarify that Portugal is NOT a very conservative country, not even when it comes to drug use. In fact, it's so not conservative that the usual party switcheroo between conservatives and progressives there literally involves the "social-democratic party" running against the "socialist party" since the early 1970s. In fact, the only actual conservative who was ever president of Portugal in living memory was murdered by state security; they didn't even bother to cover the crime very much, and then the whole country has sort of ignored the matter for decades, as one of those things that sometimes happen <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_S%C3%A1_Carneiro>. Regarding the specific issue of drug use in Portugal: we should mention this study <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31808250/>, and put it in whatever context. It looks into all hospitalizations that occurred in Portuguese public hospitals from 2000 to 2015, and finds that the number of hospitalizations with a primary diagnosis of psychotic disorders and schizophrenia associated with cannabis use rose 29.4 times during the study period, from 20 to 588 hospitalizations yearly (2000 and 2015, respectively) with a total of 3,233 hospitalizations. Without wanting to claim that Portugal is fundamentally conservative, it does seem to have always had fewer drugs than the average European country. If I’m wrong about that, let me know. 9: Shaked Koplewitz [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7302605): > Based on these excerpts, I think you're wrong to describe his position as "supporting sweeping institutionalization" - he supports more institutionizing than we have now and thinks we've gone too far to the other side, but doesn't seem to support peak institutionalization (there's a pretty wide gap between what we have now and the My Brother Ron era). When you say "sweeping institutionalization" I imagine "immidiately rounding up all the homeless people and locking them up". His described preferred policy has the option for that for some people, but unless I'm significantly misunderstanding it it's not the default for everyone (I don't think the Netherlands has mass institutionalization?). I didn’t want to say that Shellenberger “supports institutionalization”, because almost everybody (including existing laws) supports some institutionalization, and the position I’m criticizing is supporting much more. Maybe I should have said he supports “much more” institutionalization rather than “sweeping” institutionalization, I guess. I would be more sympathetic to this fair criticism if he was more willing to criticize the mass institutionalization era and less willing to criticize everyone who was ever against it. 10: Lots of people wanted to tell their horror stories. [Daniel Franke](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7304326): > Have you ever tried reporting a robbery or an assault in San Francisco? I have — tried, that is — twice. The third and fourth times I didn't bother trying. The fifth time I just got the hell out of San Francisco. I have a friend who got literally curb-stomped, has it on video and has the identity of the guy who did it, and eventually gave up on getting anyone to take his report after getting a jurisdictional runaround. The real crime rate is something much higher than the official statistics. And [Alice K](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7323834): > I appreciate your trust of in-person reports about shoplifting. We live part-time in Seattle. We do see flagrant, open shoplifting, where the thieves just wheel out carts of stuff in front of security guards. This is a new thing. We asked why the guards don't stop it and they say a combination of the risk of crazy, violent response combined with no legal consequence is why. I guarantee most of it is not being reported. The remaining police are overwhelmed. Unless one is filing an insurance claim and a case number is required, there is no point in calling them to report theft. It is a waste of time. 11: [Unsigned Integer](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7307327) and several other people thought Phoenix/SF comparisons were unfair: > I wouldn't be surprised if Phoenix and Houston had few unsheltered homeless people because it was too hot to live outdoors. The human body doesn't have an air conditioning system (only evaporative cooling through sweat). So, if the temperature outside is above the range of normal human body temperatures, you \will\ get heatstroke eventually, it's only a matter of time. California and Seattle are among the rare US cities where it never gets unbearably hot or cold, and do have a lot of homeless people. But cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless, so I’m not sure how much to update on this. Unsigned also links to [r/homeless](https://reddit.com/r/homeless/), which is pretty fascinating and a good antidote to the temptation to think of all homeless people as crazy or dumb or addicted - though it also includes threads like [San Francisco is the ultimate place to camp](https://np.reddit.com/r/homeless/comments/prge48/san_francisco_is_the_ultimate_place_to_camp/). 12: Gordon Tremeshko writes: > Apart from the spiraling costs, which you correctly noted, have we forgotten so quickly what happened with the public housing projects built with Great Society money back in the '60s? To take one famous example: > > Unlike many of the city's other public housing projects such as Rockwell Gardens or Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green was situated in an affluent part of the city. The poverty-stricken projects were actually constructed at the meeting point of Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sat Michigan Avenue with its high-end shopping and expensive housing. Specific gangs "controlled" individual buildings, and residents felt pressure to ally with those gangs in order to protect themselves from escalating violence. > > During the worst years of Cabrini-Green's problems, vandalism increased substantially. Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace, rotting garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left in disrepair. > > On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the façade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of decay and government neglect. The balconies were fenced in to prevent residents from emptying garbage cans into the yard, and from falling or being thrown to their deaths. This created the appearance of a large prison tier, or of animal cages, which further enraged community leaders of the residents. > > ... > > While Cabrini–Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river. > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes#Problems_develop> > > Someone want to point me to why something like this wouldn't happen again? Keep in mind that SF already spends a 100 million to clean feces off the streets (only semi-successfully, at that). Frankly, this seems to me like an marker of what Tyler Cowen calls The Great Forgetting. Matthew [responds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7311725): > You gave a long list of problems, and it sounds like it was a miserable place to live, and it hindered economic development for some of the surrounding area... but even the later parts of the wikipedia article you link note how the residents considered it preferable to being homeless (their likely fate without it) and lobbied to keep it standing. I don't know, suppose we did it again and everything happened exactly like it did before, but also 15,000 people had a stable home they could call their own for a few decades (no matter how ill-repaired and unpleasant) instead of being homeless. I think whether that was a success or failure would be a matter of analysis, not obvious, and of comparing against alternative ways the money could have been spent. And maybe with some "lessons learned" everything wouldn't happen exactly the same and there could be an iterative improvement. 13: Alexander Turok [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7316192): > Suppose you came upon a small town of 600 adults. The mayor tells you that while the large majority of the town's people are kind and decent, 6 of them are complete scumbags who just have to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. Everyone knows everyone, and he can personally vouch for this being true, he says. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis? > > What if it were 2 million, in a nation of 200 million adults? This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more. 14: Cups And Mugs [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7321131): > Claim 3 and the Interlude seem to be very poorly performed/tried seriously by cities and fall into the 'anything can be done badly' camp of approaches. > > Hotels are obviously dumb and are the opposite of 'Housing First' in that they come with lots of conditions to the point that people felt like they were in prison being there. That sure sounds like conditional help to me if you have to accept prison like conditions before you accept housing. Housing First is said often, but they are empty hollow words almost everywhere. Shelters and hotels and other prison like environments are highly highly conditional and nothing like the free conditions which those in regular housing experience. > > Building new buildings or finding ways to concentrate the homeless into hotels and such are all really bad ideas that are obviously bad and had bad outcomes. No surprises there. Newsome tried nothing and now he's all out of ideas! Go figure! > > Taking approaches like trying a long term plan to solve 1/3 of the problem and never finishing it due to what was probably corruption and cost disease in construction...is also a really bad idea with obviously bad outcomes. Again, another non-surprise bad faith attempt which succeed in loading up their corrupt construction friends. Help the poor? How about a handout to the rich instead? It didn't work? Colour me surprised. > > The label on the sticker might say 'Housing First' but as you noted...none of these cities have tried you know... ACTUALLY provided housing for all of the homeless people at the same time and in an immediate sense with no conditions which did not concentrate them in their own ghetto. Who knew it was tough to get to sleep in a hotel room or a shelter or a crappy apartment when all of your neighbours are crazy and howling and screaming all night every night? > > The clearcut and obvious easy solution of just renting large numbers of apartments which are NOT clustered together idiotically to create horrible high concentration brand new sudden ghettos around hotels or housing developments....is the obvious thing everyone says they want to do which somehow has NEVER happened!!!?!?!? > > We had one idea, so we tried it out badly in half-baked ways over and over again for 30 years and it didn't' work. So the original idea was never actually tried? Yep! > > It makes me think...all those bad people who want to do bad things to set goals, barriers, and whatever are real and the NIMBY triggering dumb concentration ideas and half-measures don't even begin to count as real Housing First initiatives. > > Does housing solve why someone became homeless or what happened to them while they were homeless or their health or drug problems? Of course not, we don't need studies for this! How can smart people talk themselves soo stupid that they think 4 walls and a roof might impact health or addiction? Those are their own problems with their own solutions, but stable housing and getting people fed and off the streets is a LOT better than having them on the streets! > > Do we want to solve homelessness or not? The answer is staring us in the face, everyone pretends they are doing it already, and yet in no place has it actually been tried on 100% of the entire homeless population in an even halfway decent attempt. > > I really hope one of those mayors wins and uses 3% of the city budget to end homelessness overnight. Or at least give the real housing first approach a fair go. > > When I see 7,000 flats rented for 7,000 formerly homeless people in SF, then we'll see if housing solves homelessness....or at least the crisis aspect of it being really bad, obvious, and annoyingly in the fact of CBD workers and Tourists. Spoiler! It does work and very few people will choose to sleep on the street if they have an apartment, though a small number will or will some of the time as their transportation and pan handling tactics are not solved by housing either. In fairness to the Governor, the hotels were mostly an emergency pandemic measure that everyone acknowledged was bad. But I agree I would like to see an explanation of why this hasn’t been tried. My guess is normal landlords refuse to rent to the homeless, but I’d like to see someone in the city government explicitly say that they tried this and it was true. If the explanation is “we think it would be unfair to normal poor people who have to work hard for housing” then I would like the city to say this, instead of talking about Housing First and making everyone wonder how things keep going wrong. 15: [Bob Jacobs](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7323696) writes: > One small thing we could do to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place is giving people an attorney at housing court. Right now landlords hold a lot of power over their tenants since a lot of them simply can't afford to fight injustices in court (and since court battles are publicly registered going to court could cause you to have trouble renting new homes, even if you win). This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean. The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything. So I take the opposite position here: if the government wants people to be able to live in places long-term when they don’t have the money to pay, they should give those people rent vouchers, or pay the landlord directly, or something - not invent a legal doctrine which is basically “if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely” and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that. 16: Will (writes My Bookshelf Runneth Over) [says](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7346938): > I have told my left-wing friends for years that fixing American urban dysfunction (crime, public nuisance, garbage everywhere, etc.) would be a big step forwards in fighting climate change. > > Why would people take public transit when people are consistently disruptive? > > In this context, San Fransicko strikes me as an immensely useful and mostly accurate corrective, and any minor factual issues are unimportant. I mostly agree. I think this is a book that makes many good points, but gets bogged down by its choice to be kind of data journalism-y, and then having to claim (mostly falsely) that there are clear statistics and stories that support its prescriptions. If I had to rewrite this, my main changes would be: 1. Explain the point (mentioned above) about how “homeless” conflates beach bums, down-on-their-luck poor people, and the severely mentally ill. Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill. Then acknowledge that most statistics collected “about homeless people” superficially don’t support your narrative. The stats say the main cause of homelessness is housing affordability. The stats say most homeless people aren’t mentally ill or addicted. The stats say most homeless people come from the area they live in and haven’t been attracted by better handouts. The stats say most homeless people do well when given housing. Acknowledge all of that is true of the three-groups-together population, but that you still think if you were to separate out the severely mentally ill group who are actually causing the problems, the picture would look less rosy. 2. Explain that crime statistics don’t show any rise in shoplifting, but that’s probably because shoplifting is going unreported (and has been going more unreported over time in proportion to how much it grows over time? I’m honestly still confused by this) 3. Explain that the 1950s system of institutionalization was genuinely pretty terrible in a lot of ways, that the people who campaigned for it to be ended had lots of good points, but that the current system is also failing people. You support some specific loosening of the current laws around commitment, and the way you would ensure that people’s rights are still respected is [some paragraph that demonstrates you have thought about this question for five minutes]. 4. Shift the “here’s why this is morally good” argument slightly away from “this would help homeless people get back on their feet” (which I think is harder to justify as true) and more towards “this would help poor people in cities and potentially lessen NIMBYism”. I don’t think any of these things would detract from the book’s main points, and I think they would make it much more accurate and defensible against pedants like myself who care a lot about which statements are actually true. 17: Miss M [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7324502): > Great post scott, read all of it even though I live on the other side of the world. My only problem is the book's name: it always makes me think about that meme with the "sicko" standing next to a window going "ha ha ha! yes! yes!". It was kind of distracting. In fact, the origin of the meme was a comic about exactly this topic: [Source](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sickos-haha-yes)	Scott Alexander	61120327	Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko	acx
# What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike? In [my review of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko) [San Fransicko](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko), I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback. The nationwide 2020 spike in homicides ([source](https://www.thetrace.org/2018/04/highest-murder-rates-us-cities-list/)). The spike is small compared to the secular trend from the 1960s through 2000, but large by the standards of the past twenty years. Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here’s why: ## Timing When exactly did the spike start? The nation shut down for the pandemic in mid-March 2020, but the BLM protests didn’t start until after George Floyd’s death in late May 2020. So did the homicide spike start in March, or May? Let’s check in with the [Council on Criminal Justice](https://build.neoninspire.com/counciloncj/wp-content/uploads/sites/96/2021/07/Crime-in-US-Cities-October-Update.pdf): Edited to remove the word “pandemic”, which they put in a place suggesting the red line was associated with the pandemic. They meant the faint graph paper effect was associated with the pandemic. The red line is the BLM protests. It very clearly started in late May, not mid-March. The months of March, April, and early May had the same number of homicides as usual. This is the conclusion of most sources I can find. The only dissenter is [this Intercept article](https://theintercept.com/2021/02/21/2020-murder-homicide-rate-causes/), which claims the following: Here it looks like there’s a big change in murders through April, with basically no extra increase through July. This definitely contradicts the graph above. What’s going on here? I don’t know the Intercept’s criteria for including cities on their chart, but more than half of the cities in the US [with the most murders](https://everytownresearch.org/report/city-data/#data-tables-murder-and-gun-homicide) aren’t even on there, whereas they did choose to include such colossi of crime as Omaha, Nebraska. Either they’re cherry-picking on purpose, or using some kind of inscrutable methodology that coincidentally is giving the wrong result. Of the actually relevant cities on there - New York, Chicago, etc - most of them show the May spike we discussed earlier. From the Financial Times. Notice no difference from the usual trend in March, April, or early May, then a very obvious spike around the time the BLM protests start on May 25. This is shootings rather than murders, for the same reason discussed below, but murders show a similar though noisier pattern. Another surprise on the Intercept’s graph: Minneapolis, the epicenter of BLM protests, saw more of a change in January-April than from May-August. Is this true? [Cassell (2020)](https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=scholarship) shows us the data: It looks like maybe this is random variation; there’s so few murders in Minneapolis in the winter that even one or two looks like a very large percent increase. But the raw data show that the summer was a much bigger deal. Since murder is very rare, maybe we can get a better view using assault, a crime similar to murder but much more common: Now the pattern is really obvious, except that it looks like it began about a week before the protests. I’m not sure, but I think this is because the site the paper took this from uses a 7-day rolling average, which smooths the data at the cost of having it be about a week off. A few of the other graphs have this problem as well, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. Nationwide, the spike in murders clearly happened in May, not March. On a city by city level, it’s hard to tell because murders are so rare. But when we look at other crimes that probably correlate with the murder rate, they clearly go up in May, not March. ## Police Pullback My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of: * Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied. * Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them. * Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk. * The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police. I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back. For evidence, see [Cassell (2020)](https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=scholarship) again: Here’s number of arrests in Chicago. We can see that it goes way down in March when the pandemic starts and everybody (including police and criminals) are indoors, then starts going up again before the protests. Then after the protests it goes back down and stays down. My interpretation is that people complied with the strict lockdown early in the pandemic, that effect was played out by May, and then separately the protests caused a longer-term decrease in policing. Cassell shows an even more dramatic pattern for traffic stops in Minneapolis: This itself doesn’t prove that the murder spike was because of the BLM protests rather than the pandemic, since both events caused decreases in policing. But it fleshes out the model and demonstrates a casual chain by which the protests could have caused the spike. ## Victims Who is being targeted in these extra murders? Source: [Manhattan Institute](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/breaking-down-the-2020-homicide-spike). The last number listed on the axis is 2019, but if you click through to the source you’ll see it definitely includes 2020 data. The 2020 homicide spike primarily targeted blacks. (there also seems to be a much smaller spike for Native Americans, but there are so few Natives that I think this might be random, or unrelated). Most violent crime is [within a racial community,](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv20sst.pdf) and there was no corresponding rise in [hate crimes](https://www.statista.com/chart/16100/total-number-of-hate-crime-incidents-recorded-by-the-fbi/) the way I would expect if this was whites targeting blacks, so I think the perpetrators were most likely also black. This was a rise in the level of violence within black communities. A priori there’s no reason to expect lockdowns and “cabin fever” to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group. But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would cause police to pull back from black communities in particular. I think this is independent evidence that the homicide spike was because of the protests and not the pandemic. ## Effects Of Previous Protests Although the George Floyd protests in May 2020 were the largest round of Black Lives Matters protests, there had been several previous rounds. Most notable were the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August 2014, and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015. If Black Lives Matters protests can cause homicide spikes, we would expect to see one around this time also. This was definitely observed by many people, and given the title “[Ferguson Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect)”. Every official source on the Ferguson Effect is careful to say we can’t be sure it is real / was caused by the protests, just as every source on the recent homicide spike is careful to say the same thing. But let’s look at the evidence: Source: [FactCheck](https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-wrong-on-crime-record/) Here’s a graph of US murder rate until 2018 (ie not showing the most recent spike). You can see a clear spike in 2014. (You can see the same spike on the graph up to 2021 at the top of this post, it just looks less impressive next to the 2020 spike). Some detractors point out that this is very small compared to (say) the difference between now and 1990, but all things are smaller than other, larger things, and that doesn’t prevent them from being real or relevant. Other skeptics point to [this study](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292982674_Was_there_a_Ferguson_Effect_on_crime_rates_in_large_US_cities), which claims an overall effect on crime did not occur. The study does claim this, and even says there was no statistically significant break in the homicide trend around 2014. I have no explanation for why their statistics give such a different result than just looking at the graph above. But they do say that when they disaggregate by cities, they find a clear increase in homicides in cities with large black communities, with the two highest being St. Louis (Ferguson is a suburb of St. Louis) and Baltimore (where the Freddie Gray incident happened). My guess is that homicides rose in all cities, and it only reached statistical significance in mostly-black cities and the cities where the protests were most concentrated. Here is a graph from the Economist on Baltimore’s homicide rates. In the first graph, you can see that the 2015 homicide rate de-correlates from the 2012, 2013, and 2014 rates immediately after Gray’s death, eventually reaching about 50% more homicides than in any of those previous years. In the second graph, you can see a more traditional presentation of homicide rates, which shows them shooting up after Gray’s death to a level higher than they had been in the previous twenty years. A followup shows that they stayed elevated for several years afterwards: Source [here](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/08/03/baltimore-needs-help-to-fix-its-crime-problems). On this chart, it looks like Gray’s death happened after the spike, but this is just an artifact of the recording method they’re using, where 2015 is represented as a single point. You can read more people trying to deny this effect [eg here](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-17/the-myth-of-the-ferguson-effect-there-is-no-new-crime-wave-sweeping-u-s-cities), but I don’t find them very convincing. And after a year or two, the pattern became clearer, and now even the detractors don’t seem to really have their heart in it anymore. The New York Times had an article [Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/us/politics/ferguson-effect.html), subtitled “The idea that the police have retreated under siege will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”, which as far as I can tell is as close as the New York Times has ever come to acknowledging that a politically inconvenient fact is true. Likewise, Vox has an article [The Ferguson Effect, A Theory That’s Warping The American Crime Debate, Explained](https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11683594/ferguson-effect-crime-police), which makes it very clear that believing in the Ferguson Effect is Problematic, but admits halfway through that if you insist on thinking on a completely literal level, “evidence has begun to mount that there really is something going on.” I think the proposed Ferguson Effect and the proposed George Floyd effect mutually reinforce each other. The people who believed in the Ferguson Effect would have predicted that the 2020 George Floyd protests would have been followed by a homicide spike, and they would have been right. The people who attributed the 2020 homicide spike to the protests, if they hadn’t previously known about the Ferguson Effect, could have predicted that it existed, and they would have been right too. I think this is a point in favor of both theories. ## Other Countries The pandemic hit almost all countries. Although the Black Lives Matter protests spawned some sympathetic demonstrations around the world, they probably most affected police behavior in the US, where there are large black communities. So did foreign countries see murder spikes, or not? The murder rate in the UK fell in 2020-21 compared to the previous year: Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/318385/homicide-rate-england-and-wales/ In Germany, there was slightly less attempted murder and slightly more completed murder, but nothing that could really be called a spike. Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045508/number-of-murders-in-germany/. I’m not deliberately trying to move the goalposts by including attempted murder, this is just the graph I was able to find. Even completed murder, while higher than in 2019, was lower than 2017 or 2018. [EDIT: See [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7423220) on a better way of defining murder in Germany, which shows a smaller 3.7% increase] Denmark went from 48 murders in 2019 to 49 in 2020: Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/576114/number-of-homicides-in-denmark/ I promise I’m not deliberately trying to cherry pick - these are the first three foreign countries [that I was able to find good graphs for on Statista](https://www.statista.com/markets/411/topic/546/crime-law-enforcement/#overview) (it also has an unreadable graph for China, which I think says Chinese murders declined in 2020). A commenter was concerned that European countries were a bad comparison, and asked about other countries with lots of guns and high murder rates. I looked into Central America, and found that [Honduras](https://www.statista.com/statistics/984779/homicide-rate-honduras/), [Nicaragua](https://www.statista.com/statistics/312441/number-of-homicides-in-nicaragua/), [El Salvador](https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/), and [Guatemala](https://www.statista.com/statistics/984814/homicide-rate-guatemala/) also all saw murders decline rather than spike in 2020. No country except the United States had a large homicide spike in 2020, which suggests that the spike was unrelated to the pandemic and more associated with US-specific factors, for which the BLM protests and subsequent pullback of policing in black communities seem to me to be the most obvious suspect. ## A Moment Of Griping Most of these points have already been made in right-wing sources, but have gone unnoticed because respectable people don’t read right-wing sources. One of these is the Heritage Institute’s piece, [What The Media Doesn’t Want You To Know About 2020’s Record Murder Spike](https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/what-the-media-doesnt-want-you-know-about-2020s-record-murder-spike). This is an annoying title, basically designed to annoy / drive off / own the libs. It sounds sensationalist and confrontational. Still, I kind of think the media doesn’t want you to know this. I mentioned the Intercept piece above, which through selective presentation of data managed to make it look like the protests and homicide spike didn’t coincide. It presents several unconvincing lines of evidence against the protests alone being a main driver (though eventually allows them a supporting role), and in the end focuses on rising gun sales (but guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black). Finally, it concludes that it was “a complex stew of forces”. Most other media treatments do the same. Vox’s [Rise In Murders In The US, Explained](https://www.vox.com/2020/8/3/21334149/murders-crime-shootings-protests-riots-trump-biden) gives seven possible explanations, of which two are protest-related, but its overall conclusion is that: > Above all, though, experts caution it’s simply been a very unusual year with the Covid-19 pandemic. That makes it difficult to say what, exactly, is happening with crime rates. Are there any implications for policy?: > The first priority should be to end the pandemic — ending its potential ripple effects on crime . . . In this sense, Trump’s failures to address Covid-19 may be leading to more violence. This is basically par for the course. Read [New York Times’](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/fbi-murders-2020-cities.html) or [Washington Post’s](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/21/homicide-rates-have-soared-nationwide-mayors-see-chance-turnaround-2022/) [The Atlantic’s](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/2020-homicide-spike-was-real/620183/) or [Pew’s](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-know-about-the-increase-in-u-s-murders-in-2020/) or [Voice of America’s](https://www.voanews.com/a/why-homicide-rates-spiked-30-during-the-pandemic-/6420391.html) articles on this same topic. They’re all exactly the same “It’s a complex combination of factors, we can never know for sure, but probably the pandemic is the most important thing”. I accept that they had somewhat less data when they wrote their articles than I have now, but many of them have since updated their articles with new data without updating the conclusion, and none of them have since published any correction or indication that they changed their minds. I won’t waste your time by speculating on why they might do this, or what the implications might be for the truth of everything else you read on these sites. I have tried this so many times and it never works. People keep saying things like “oh, I liked when he made an compelling statistical case showing that the media was completely wrong on this one thing they sounded very confident in, but then he started saying the media is often wrong and biased, and that sounded cliched and conspiracy-ish and right-wing, so I lost interest”. ## Conclusion I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period. I understand this is the opposite of what lots of other people are saying, but I think they are wrong. EDIT: Further discussion, and answers to reader objections, [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9).	Scott Alexander	61103156	What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?	acx
# Model City Monday 6/27/22 ## Goodbye, ZEDE Law The story so far: in the mid 2010s, Honduras passed a first-in-the-world law saying that private actors could apply to run charter cities / special economic zones (ZEDEs) on Honduran territory. Three groups took them up on the offer and designed various interesting projects. In January, Honduras kicked out the right-wing government that passed the ZEDE law and replaced it with a socialist party led by Xiomara Castro, which had made opposition to the ZEDEs part of its platform. In April, [the new government repealed the ZEDE law](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/honduran-congress-unanimously-nixes-special-economic-zones-2022-04-21/), with uncertain consequences. Everyone agrees that creating new ZEDEs is now illegal. There’s less clarity on what happens to the existing projects. The government that instituted the ZEDE law wanted to protect ZEDEs from future governments changing their minds, and added various protections saying that once the ZEDEs existed it should be very legally difficult to close them down. In theory, it would take acts of two separate legislative terms (this one counts as one), and even then the ZEDEs would have (according to international treaties on protecting investments) up to a fifty year grace period to wind down their activity. [Prospera](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera), the first and largest ZEDE, has (as usual) dominated press coverage. They state that the government hasn’t asked them to shut down, that the government continues to accept payments Prospera owes them for its continued operation, and that when Prospera has told the government that it plans to keep operating, nobody in the government has objected. — This (~4:00) is my main source for Prospera’s position and what they’ve done. — They’ve also retained the services of [White & Case LLP](https://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/profile/white-case-llp/rankings/9117), described as [one of the best](https://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/profile/white-case-llp/rankings/9117) international arbitration law firms in the world. They add that sophisticated investors have given them over $30 million since Castro’s government was sworn in, representing a vote of confidence from the markets that they’ll be able to get through this. What about the other two projects? The head of Ciudad Morazan, Massimo Mazzone, writes (copied from [his Twitter](https://twitter.com/massimomazzone4) and translated from Spanish by Google Translate): > Morazan.city received its permit in April 2020, we started building some months later . . . from the beginning, it was conceived and built as a complete community with a very large residential part. > > The ZEDE law makes it possible to extend to individuals and families the advantages that the ZOLI (the traditional maquilas) extend only to companies, because the ZOLI are pure industrial parks, the employees work there but live outside. > > I am interested in building a complete community, with families, jobs, schools, hospitals, parks and everything else that is the basis of a safe and dignified life. The prices are reasonable, 3,000L per month for houses of 60 meters, all included apart from electricity and water. > > I am not interested in building an industrial park. If that had been the objective, the ZOLI already exist and are better than the ZEDEs, the companies in the ZOLI enjoy many advantages without having to spend to take care of public services for the people. > > I don't know if the government is serious when it says that it wants to find a way to maintain investments with a different regime from the ZEDE. I think there is a very large space for a compromise. I did not participate in the creation of the law, I found it as it was. > > Many of the articles never interested me. I agree to delete or change them. But the most important characteristic, that families live, is not negotiable, simply because it was the only reason for the project. If this is not possible, I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in continuing. Also: > Balance of the ZEDEs so far: No expropriation, no corrupt refugee, no "HN sale to the highest bidder." Billions of investments, thousands of jobs, Honduran families living in peace and prospering. Many resentful social networks [???]. > > Yes, the Law is repealed, and it is false that ratification is needed. However, the Government is respecting the Zones, eg. sending Customs people every day because it is a free zone. Maybe they do it because they want to respect acquired rights and avoid lawsuits But I don't think so, the Repeal Act says they don't want to do it, and the rhetoric is clear. > > I think they want to achieve a satisfactory agreement for all. I hope so, as I said there is a lot of room for a compromise, we found the law as it was, it can be modified. Obviously there are many details, but the two fundamental things for us are that 1) the possibility that new Zones can host individuals and families is respected, and 2) the same international guarantees that we have now are recognized. I can’t find any statements from Orquidea, but my understanding is that their business model is less ambitious, they don’t have much incentive to resist this legal change, and they will probably devolve gracefully into a standard industrial park. ## Goodbye, Reedy Creek Reedy Creek Improvement District is a forty-square mile piece of Central Florida including the towns of Bay Lake, Lake Buena Vista, and - last but certainly not least - Disney World. Florida gave the territory as a charter city to the Disney Corporation back in 1967, when they were first planning Disney World. Partly this was so Disney could handle the services for their theme park, but partly it was because Walt Disney had grand plans to build the “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow” (EPCOT), and Florida wanted to let him. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)): > EPCOT was to be a utopian autocratic company town completely controlled by Walt Disney himself and featuring commercial, residential, industrial and recreational centers, connected by a mass multimodal transportation system. Based on ideas stemming from modernism and futurism, it was designed to replace the inefficient infrastructure created by urban sprawl that was growing in the United States in the 1960s. Needing the flexibility and independence to establish and maintain his own specialized, personalized government, Walt lobbied the Florida Government to create what became the Reedy Creek Improvement District. But Walt died the next year, his successors had less interest, and the plan was cancelled. Parts of it survived as the Disney World monorail (originally planned as EPCOT’s public transit) and as the EPCOT Center (a Disney World attraction memorializing the plan). The giant silver golf ball at the center of the EPCOT theme park. Compare to the [giant gold golf ball](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821) at the center of Auroville. I think someone should create a conspiracy theory about this. In the end, all Disney had was a forty-square mile corporate fiefdom, on which they built several cities. Overall they seem pretty nice, although more because of the magic of walkable urbanism than the magic of Disney. Celebration, Florida. But earlier this year, Florida passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBT topics to young children, which the media dubbed “the Don’t Say Gay Law”. Disney did some corporate activism against the law, the Florida government got mad and brainstormed ways to punish Disney, and the best they could come up with was to re-establish state control of Reedy Creek, [which DeSantis officially did last month](https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2022/05/16/desantis-says-state-will-take-control-of-reedy-creek). Disney has [sued the state](https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/us/reedy-creek-disney-florida/index.html), but it looks like it’s just over some debts and the lawsuit is unlikely to prevent the dissolution. You get socialists in power, they dissolve charter cities. You get conservatives in power, they also dissolve charter cities. All I want is one government that doesn’t dissolve charter cities! Is that too much to ask? ## Hello, Afropolitan Last year venture capitalist and thought leader Balaji Srinivasan introduced [the idea of a “network state”](https://1729.com/the-network-state). With the advent of social networks and cryptocurrency, as well as increasing polarization leading people to group themselves more by ideological cohesion than geographic proximity, maybe people could group themselves into nonterritorial state-like communities. And although these would seem pretty thin compared to real states that have monopolies over use of force in real geographic areas, maybe some of them could use charter-city like systems to eventually buy land and graduate into full statehood. (is this just the [Hive System](https://terra-ignota.fandom.com/wiki/Hive) from [Terra Ignota](https://amzn.to/3bmeOY4)? I think so, but probably with fewer major governments being controlled by weird brothels.) Anyway, [Afropolitan](https://www.afropolitan.io/) has taken him up on this. They share a name with [a landmark essay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afropolitan) by Achille Mbembe (founding a country based on an especially good essay also sounds like something that would happen in Terra Ignota, as does history being changed by people named things like “Achille Mbembe”), arguing that Africa needs to re-invent or re-define itself or something. The founders of Afropolitan-the-company have taken this idea of a trans-national African diaspora and turned it into an "African DAO [and] digital nation...building a network state to unleash the maximum potential of Africans around the world". They [write](https://afropolitan.mirror.xyz/qkBv4y7MidTpDZJVEIEBC4EZi70v30IrCXLCZ-F6eMs): > The nation-state experiment has failed for Black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. > > All people who call themselves free have a *fundamental right* to create the society they want by choice collectively. As the internet enables us to shrink space and form bonds across the planet, no person should live in a society by accident or force. …and go on to list a four-step plan to create the society of the future. Step One is to sell NFTs “representing the mythology of our new nation” . Step Four is “a[n] extensive system of charter cities akin to Singapore or Hong Kong”. In the unlikely chance that you care what Steps Two and Three are, you can find them [here](https://afropolitan.mirror.xyz/qkBv4y7MidTpDZJVEIEBC4EZi70v30IrCXLCZ-F6eMs). Why should you take them seriously? I am not at all claiming that you should. I am only claiming that “sell digital tokens representing mythology, but eventually this turns into a country” is the most Terra Ignota thing ever. Also, at least the founders have good aesthetics: But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/20/afropolitan-raises-2-1m-to-build-a-digital-nation-backed-by-balaji-srinivasan/) and (very briefly) [Marginal Revolution](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/tuesday-assorted-links-370.html). I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the [Kingdom of Talossa](https://talossa.com/) has been [online since 1995](https://wiki.talossa.com/History). A [2000 New York Times article](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/25/technology/utopian-rulers-and-spoofs-stake-out-territory-online.html) on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got [involved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/) in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. ## Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, [Las Verandas](https://www.las-verandas.com) and [Pristine Bay](https://www.facebook.com/PristineBayResort/), have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company [Mini Circle](https://minicircle.clinic/), which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: > Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently [the clinical trials have NFTs](https://mirror.xyz/0x422dFd5F83361149598B7BA7cBF6180e30f05ED5/uhPCudlAD9Z8ay66PhfPwPTjY_RtO_Kdkj2AZXnhAcM), because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! ## Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now [Colorado Sun has investigated](https://coloradosun.com/2022/02/08/black-hammer-utopia-norwood-colorado/). The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The [Charter Cities Institute](https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/nxt50/) continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the [Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition](https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/nxt50/), which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, [CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization](https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/founder-and-executive-director-mark-lutter-leaving-organization-to-head-new-city-development-project/) to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - [Story Living By Disney](https://www.storylivingbydisney.com/), starting with [Rancho Mirage California](https://www.storylivingbydisney.com/cotino.html). Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: * Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70% * Reedy Creek is still substantially independent and controlled by the Disney Corporation in 2025: 15% * Afropolitan has at least 10,000 paying members/citizens and makes more than $1 million per year in 2025: 15% * Afropolitan accomplishes Stage 4 of its plan by 2050: <1% * Mini Circle runs a clinical trial to the satisfaction of its corporate clients by 2030: 50%	Scott Alexander	61400433	Model City Monday 6/27/22	acx
# Open Thread 230 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Solenoid\_Entity, who runs the [ACX Podcast](https://linktr.ee/sscpodcast), is expanding his empire to run a [Less Wrong Curated Podcast](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kDjKF2yFhFEWe4hgC/announcing-the-lesswrong-curated-podcast) and [Metaculus Journal Podcast](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11102/introducing-the-metaculus-journal-podcast/). Good luck, Solenoid! 2: More volleys in recent AI conversations: [Cameron Bucker](https://twitter.com/cameronjbuckner/status/1536265110787866624) (“debates in deep learning are now repeating the same mistakes as comparative psychology”), [Edwin Chen](https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/humans-vs-gary-marcus) (how do humans do on the same questions Gary Marcus asked GPT?), and a new paper, [Emergent Abilities Of Large Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682) (formalizing the insight that as models scale up, they can do completely new types of tasks, not just the old tasks better). 3: Related: does anyone reading this have access to the new [Parti-20B image model](https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1539821642775678976) from Google? I would like to check whether I have won [my bet with Vitor](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design/comment/6945486?s=r) about image model progress. If yes, I will write a post about it and give you good publicity. Please contact me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com 4: In Obscure Pregnancy Interventions, I mentioned a Mongolian study found that air purifier use during pregnancy increased birth rate, but that nobody had tested yet whether it increased later-life IQ. Those results are now in and [it appears that it does](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/956654). Caveats (some from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/viscah/reducing_air_pollution_can_support_healthy_brain/)) only marginally significant, your area is probably less air polluted than Mongolia, normal air conditioners might work as air purifiers already. Update: Emil K [says it seems p-hacked](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230/comment/7377328).	Scott Alexander	61259637	Open Thread 230	acx
# Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] [update 6/26: at least one paragraph of this review appears to be plagiarized; see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230/comment/7375551) for more information. I will be investigating this and possibly disqualifying it from the contest -SA] ## Introduction [In [Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy](https://amzn.to/3OBt7GE)], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from [public choice theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#:~:text=Public%20choice%2C%20or%20public%20choice,the%20study%20of%20political%20behavior.) in economics) can explain the United State’s incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from [rational choice theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory) in economics) that underlies the illusion of American [grand strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategy) in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of [realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relations)). As the subtitle How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason. In the unitary actor model, the primary unit of analysis of inter-state relations is the state as a monolithic agent capable of making rational decisions (forming coherent, long-term “grand strategy”) from cost-benefit analysis based on preference ranking and expected “national interest” maximisation. In the public choice model, small special-interest groups that reap a large proportion of the benefits from a policy (concentrated interests) are much more incentivised to lobby for a policy than the general public who pay for a negligible portion of the cost of the policy (diffused interests) are incentivised to lobby against. The former can coordinate much easier than the latter that has to overcome [rational ignorance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance) (the cost of educating oneself about foreign policy outweighs any benefit an one can expect to gain as individual citizens cannot affect foreign policy) and the society-wide [collective action problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem) (irrational for every citizen to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma especially if individual gain is negligible) resulting in inefficient (not-public-good-maximising) policymaking i.e. [government failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure). It is very much an academic book that should revolutionise the whole field of IR by challenging the fundamental assumption of realpolitik with impressive rigour, so the brisk 200 pages should probably be mandatory reading for IR/political science freshmen. Like [Robin Hanson](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/02/foreign-policy-is-incoherent.html), I would have been persuaded by an article length analysis, but as [Hanania](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/podcast-appearances-responding-to?s=r) himself agrees, the belabouring book length treatment is to disabuse academics who by nature demand sweat and impressive mastery of literatures — this review should, dare I say, suffice for the cynical reader. ## 1. Goodbye Unitary Actor Model IR theorists have put forth three justifications for the unitary actor model. First, Morgenthau argued that human nature is intrinsically aggressive, so states seek to dominate one another in the struggle for power. But this begs the question of why the collective action problem inherent to large-scale cooperation within hierarchic political organisation is overcome at the level of states. Second, Mearsheimer, Bosen, and Waltz argued that nationalism is strong enough to make states act like unitary actors. However, nationalism only appears strong when compared to the pull of universalist ideologies like Marxism or liberalism, because soldiers can continue fighting for their fellow combatants despite widespread disillusionment with the mission itself as seen in the Iraq war. Nationalism is weaker than financial self-interest, as no viable army can exist without paying soldiers market salary, and states need laws like tariffs to protect domestic industry; nationalism is also weaker than familial interests, as states need laws against nepotism. Third, Waltz argued that states behave as unitary actors because those that do not get overtaken by those that do. The Darwinian or market selection analogy breaks down as there are only very few states at any point in history i.e. insufficient units for selection, and conquest has disappeared from international society i.e. selection pressure does not exist. Other IR theorists have argued that the unitary executive model can save the unitary actor model but Hanania argues that they, too, fall short. First, Milner and Tingley argued that US presidents are more constrained in policy areas with concentrated interests (e.g. trade, foreign aid, immigration), and less constrained in policy areas with diffused interests i.e. public goods (e.g. geopolitical aid, deployment of force, sanctions), so American foreign policy has the tendency to militarise. Alas, voters have short memories — an election with the president’s party on the ballot is never more than two years away, so the president should constantly be seeking to help his own party, even when not facing the voters himself. A “grand strategy” based on a biennial election calendar is not much of a grand strategy at all. Second, Posner and Vermeule argued that the executive branch of the US government can be considered a united force capable of outmanoeuvring a Congress divided by power, which leads to a federal government that is more responsive to public opinion via elections and politics (rather than laws) to better solve problems. Afterall, politicians are political — they are selected based on their ability to convince others of their sincerity, likability, and competence, not necessarily their ability to solve problems, and especially not to solve problems that will arise after they have left office. ## 2. Hello Public Choice Model Public choice theory was developed to understand domestic politics, but Hanania argues that public choice is actually even more useful in understanding foreign policy. First, national defence is “the quintessential public good” in that the taxpayers who pay for “national security” compose a diffuse interest group, while those who profit from it form concentrated interests. This calls into question the assumption that American national security is directly proportional to its military spending (America spends more on defence than most of the rest of the world combined). Second, the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence. Even politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant, for example most(!) counterterrorism officials — the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a seven-term congressman then serving as the vice chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. The same favoured interests exert influence at all levels of society, including at the top, for example intelligence agencies are discounted if they contradict what leaders think they know through personal contacts and publicly available material, as was the case in the run-up to the Iraq War. Third, unlike policy areas like education, it is legitimate for governments to declare certain foreign affairs information to be classified i.e. the public has no right to know. Top officials leaking classified information to the press is normal practice, so they can be extremely selective in manipulating public knowledge. Fourth, it’s difficult to know who possesses genuine expertise, so foreign policy discourse is prone to capture by special interests. History runs only once — the cause and effect in foreign policy are hard to generalise into measurable forecasts; as demonstrated by Tetlock’s superforecasters, geopolitical experts are worse than informed laymen at predicting world events. Unlike those who have fought the tobacco companies that denied the harms of smoking, or oil companies that denied global warming, the opponents of interventionists may never be able to muster evidence clear enough to win against those in power with special interests backing. Hanania’s special interest groups are the usual suspects: government contractors (weapons manufacturers [1]), the national security establishment (the Pentagon [2]), and foreign governments [3] (not limited to [electoral intervention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention)). What doesn’t have comparable influence is business interests as argued by IR theorists. Unlike weapons manufacturers, other business interests have to overcome the collective action problem, especially when some businesses benefit from protectionism. By interfering in a foreign state, the US may build a stable capitalist system propitious for multinationals, but can conversely cause a greater degree of instability and make it impossible to do business there; when business interests are unsure what the impact of a foreign policy will be for their bottom line, they should be more likely to focus their lobbying efforts elsewhere. The mechanism of influence is outbidding all other competitors in the marketplace of ideas, by 1. donating to the most influential think tanks in Washington (the United Arab Emirates to CSIS; Qatar to Brookings Institution); 2. funding movements, as in the case of neoconservatives who pushed for Saddam’s overthrow, the movement was spearheaded by PNAC (created by Lockheed Martin) lobbyists who would go on to become Bush administration officials like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Weber; 3. bureaucratising public opinion management (the supposedly independent and neutral RAND Corporation gets 80% of its funding from the federal government); 4. boxing in the president’s major foreign policy decision via military generals’ press manipulation (MacArthur commenting on escalating engagement in the Korean War before he was fired by Truman; top generals in the Obama administration publicly discussing troop commitment needed to win in Afghanistan) 5. shaping foreign policy reporting from propagandistic journalists in the close-knit ‘foreign policy community’ (former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is literally the wife of neocon author Robert Kagan) 6. ‘revolving doors’ for all three concentrated interest to actively collaborate (80% of retired three- and four-star generals between 2004 and 2008 went on to work as consultants or executives in the defence industry; ‘rent-a-general’ like the Four Star Group in which generals leverage their Pentagon contacts to consult in equity investing) You know the book is dry when this is one of the only two graphics. ## 3. Team America: World Police Hanania argues that Ikenberry and other’s advocacy of America’s role in maintaining the “rules based international order” cannot account for the American exceptionalism in blatantly violating international law — 237 American military interventions between 1950 and 2017 (3.5 per year), and 64 covert regime changes in the Cold War alone. In the satire, the terrorists have WMDs courtesy of Kim Jong Un; in real life, Saddam had neither WMDs nor terrorist ties. International law allows the use of force either in self-defence or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The “legal” American military interventions include: * The Korean War (1950-1953): UNSC declared a “breach of the peace” when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel * The Vietnam War (1954-1975): from the initial American involvement in fighting off communist insurgency in the South as requested by the sovereign state of the Republic of Vietnam, to the later ceding of governing responsibilities to South Vietnam with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement in 1975 (notwithstanding the violation of proportionality in the Vietnam War, and the violation of international law in extending conflict to the sovereign nations of Cambodia and Laos) * The First Gulf War (1990-1991): UNSC authorised the US and 34 other countries to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invation out of Kuwait at the Gulf Monarchy’s request * The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal Similarly, the Soviet Union did not violate the sovereignty of states when it invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of its government in 1979, and similarly in Syria in 2015. When Russia violated international law, most notably Georgia in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the goal was occupation rather than removing their governments, killing their leaders, or fundamentally remaking their societies (the book was published before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). The US is truly singular in violating international law: * Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power * Yugoslavia Humanitarian Intervention (1995, 1999): UNSC sanctioned NATO’s intervention against ethnic Serbs’ massacre of ethnic Bosnians in Srebrenica and Sarajevo in 1995, but not the so-called “illegal but legitimate” 1999 bombing of Kosovo to stop the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnians as NATO would have been vetoed by Russia and China. * The War in Iraq (2003-2011): China, Russia, France, and Germany all opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam regime that was sold as a ‘preemptive war’, turns out there were no WMD and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent. * The bombing of Librya (2011): a newly passed UNSC resolution allowed NATO to enforce a no-fly zone against al-Gadhaffi’s government “to protect civilians”, but did not sanction the no-fly zone intended for regime change, nor the subsequent airstrike that led to the capture and killling of al-Gadhaffi by rebels Indeed, the idea of some wars being “illegal” seems odd enough, but the fact that no country on earth violates the most fundamental tenets of international norms so flagrantly and often as the United States means that IR theorists cannot insist on the grand strategy of maintaining “rules based international order”. Hanania also dismisses other popular explanations of American grand strategy, in particular Chomsky’s argument that America’s interventions are a matter of great power competition and/or a struggle for resources. Somalia and Yugoslavia are some of the least strategically important states in the 1990s; the war in Iraq did not in any way increase American power but rather empowered Iran; and the removal of al-Gadhaffi made it clear to Kim Jong Un that any leader willing to dismantle their WMD program and ally themselves with the US in the war on terror were destined to be killed. As for intervention in oil-rich states, the US was not even willing or able to ensure American corporations benefited as Libya was already selling its oil on the open market (al-Gadhaffi’s removal only hurt production), and the largest Iraqi oil contracts under US occupation went to China and Russia (even if they went to the US, the costs of war ~$3 trillion was far from recoverable). It’s surprising how the longest-running meme of American invasion for oil is misplaced cynicism; US foreign policy elites aren’t even competent enough to secure oil for American exploitation. An additional evidence against American grand strategy is the pattern of troop deployments abroad: Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. ## 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: 1. Hurting the economy 2. People get fed up 3. Blame the regime for their problems 4. Get rid of the regime The theory falls apart because citizens still need to overcome the collective action problem; regime elites, almost by definition, benefit from the current regime; regimes prioritise paying for security forces over domestic population; and rival powers come to the rescue. As empirical research clearly shows, sanctions are the most brutal and harmful when they have the least likelihood of success. Step 1 of causing economic hardship certainly succeeds — UN sanctions were associated with an aggregate GDP reduction 25% of GDP per decade; US sanctions were associated with a 13.4% decline over seven years. Beyond the destruction of wealth of innocent citizens, sanctions cause excess deaths due to starvation and brutalising ever more desperate regimes that engage in mass killing to repress domestic protests — six-figure infant deaths in Iraq; 1,000 infant deaths per month in Haiti, 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela in 2017-2018 alone; 38% of Syrian population unable to meet basic food requirements in 2018. Step 4 of regime change has yet to happen as a result of the harshest sanctions against Cuba since 1959, Iraq since 1998, Syria since 2011, and Venezuela since 2019. The Bush, Clinton, new Bush, and Obama administrations all stuck to a policy of not speaking with adversaries, which is the opposite of achieving foreign policy goals by providing targeted regimes a clear path towards the removal of sanctions. Once again, Hanania shows that there is no American grand strategy — sanctions are used to accomplish domestic political goals rather than foreign policy objectives. Leaders face domestic pressure to ‘do something’ about human rights violations and military aggressions abroad, and short of military intervention, sanctions is the only option beyond words of condemnation. Sanctions are an ‘easy’ option because there will be little to no domestic opposition when all the deaths and economic destruction are out of sight; out of mind. ## 5. The War On Terror ### The Bush Years After 9/11, the United States has invaded the al-Qaeda sanctuary of Afghanistan, but also the completely irrelevant Iraq. In the view of grand strategy, war is a means to accomplish national security objectives; in the view of public choice, national security objectives is a means to accomplish war (or at least a large military budget). The post hoc rationalisation of the war on terror rests on three incoherent ideologies: 1. Antiterrorism: disproportional militarised response to terrorist attacks 2. The Freedom Agenda: America must spread democracy abroad 3. Counterinsurgency (COIN) In the case of Afghanistan, the Bush administration was so eager to go to war it avoided any other options. No evidence has ever emerged that Taliban (the political faction that ruled Afghanistan at the time) itself knew about the 9/11 attacks, much less planned it; the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan condemned the attacks on 9/12. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” became the standard American line — before the war began, Taliban was willing to discuss bin Laden’s fate but the White House Chief of Staff refused; after the war began, Taliban was willing to hand over bin Laden to a third country for trial but White House refused just the same. In the case of Iraq, Bush was so eager to, in his own words, “Fuck Saddam, We’re taking him out” as early as February 2002 (and floated the idea of invading Iraq to Tony Blair), that on 9/17 Bush told his cabinet “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not gong to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” The administration couldn’t find any evidence directly tying Saddam to 9/11, so they settled on the now-discredited lies of WMDs and “ties” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. “We don’t negotiate with terrorist”’ extended to the non-terrorist Saddam — before the war, Saddam was cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency; after the war began, Saddam was willing to accede to practically all Amercan demands but White House refused communication just the same. Just like in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had no interest in exploring any other option short of war. Two feuding factions within the Bush administration had little contact with each other: the war hawks (neocons like Cheney i.e. products of Lockheed Martin), supported by the Pentagon, did not want to do nation-building; those partial to nation-building (the State Department) did not want war. Bush agreed with the former at the start of the war, but once Saddam was removed, sided with the latter. The postwar plan for Afghanistan was officially determined by the Bonn Agreement of 2001, but neither Bush nor Cheney consider it to be worthy of much thought in their memoirs despite years of hindsight; the postwar plan for Iraq lay entirely in the hands of Paul Bremer as subsequent Deputy Committee meetings on Iraq stopped being conducted — there wasn’t a single meeting to discuss disbanding the Iraqi army that left 400,000 jobless former soldiers prime for insurgency. The Iraq war dealt with no real crisis but cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, plunged Iraq into two decades of intermittent civil war — a candidate for the worst American foreign policy failure in history, but a success for the careers of Bush (who won reelection and congressional seats) and his advisors who led the US into Baghdad (who went on to work for think tanks, the World Bank, and the Trump Administration). Once again, there is no grand strategy as each party was only self-interested in short-term gains. ### The Earlier Obama Years As a candidate, Obama campaigned in support of the Afghanistan war, and indeed his first foreign policy decision as president was to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, largely due to overwhelming political pressure from top generals like Petraeus and McChrystal who boxed Obama into sending more troops by limiting the options presented to Obama, blatantly lobbying in press interviews, and threatening dire consequences like resigning from commanding troops in Afghanistan. We know Obama was hesitant as he announced at the same time that American troops would begin withdrawal in July 2011 (by 2015 he announced that American troop presence would stay in Afghanistan indefinitely). Obama’s second decision was to bomb al-Qadhafi in the name of Libyan regime change, due to domestic but this time also international political pressure from the heads of France and the UK who would face political embarrassment if Qadhafi’s regime, despite months of bombing and sanctions by the US-led coalition, recaptures the rebel-held Benghazi. NATO forces bombed al-Qadhafi’s convoy. Ten days after the killing of the dictator, the bombing campaign ended, and the subsequent decade of intermittent civil war faded from the American consciousnesss. Obama’s third decision was to cripple Assad’s regime in Syria with sanctions and by arming and training rebels, again due to overwhelming political pressure from hawkish ‘foreign policy community’ who still criticise Obama for having ‘done nothing’ despite spending $1 billion through the CIA and $500 million through the Pentagon, and crushing the Syrian economy. Top officials in the Obama administration admitted that assisting rebels would not change the course of war, nor was there any way to prevent arms from ending up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Syrian civil war only got bloodier with American involvement. ### The Later Obama Years Obama’s first major decision was the war on ISIS with the reentry into Iraq from which all American troops withdrew just a few years ago in 2011, due to overwhelming political pressure and in the face of a potentially humanitarian catastrophe (ISIS was going to massacre the Yazidi religious sectarians in Mount Sinjar). This time, the United States would roll back all territorial gains of the Islamic State by working with the Iraqi government, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Obama’s second decision was signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Acton (JCPOA) with Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for UN and EU sanctions to be lifted, $100 billion in assets seized by the US to be returned to Iran, and the US to stop implementing secondary or third-party sanctions. This time, Obama faced unusually significant pressure from Congress which passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act by overwhelming majority to be able to revoke JCPOA, but Obama signed JCPOA with Iran nonetheless as enough Democrats would be able to sustain a veto. This was the one and only decision that made sense from the perspective of classical IR theory — American leaders doing things they think are right for the country without a clear political payoff. Indeed, the Iranian nuclear agreement is the exception that proves the rule of public choice, as the deal was only possible near the end of Obama’s second term, and at the end cancelled by Trump upon entering office — a president’s foreign policy accomplishment made without the support of concentrated interests only lasted as long as his administration. ## 6. Learning From American Foreign Policy Failures IR theorists widely acknowledge that it was a mistake to invade Vietnam and Iraq, and even the war in Afghanistan went on for too long even if it was originally justified, but these scholars have yet to comprehend the shortcoming of the unitary actor model in accounting for the lack of rational cost-benefit analysis. Comparing the pre-invasion GDP of the countries to what the US has sacrificed (even setting aside the number of lives lost), the GDP-to-money-spent ratio has been 1:74 in South Vietnam, 1:43.3 in Iraq, and a staggering 1:396 in Afghanistan. In other words, the United States has spent in Afghanistan the equivalent of that country’s level of production for close to four centuries. Cost-benefit analysis also fails outside the major wars: NATO, despite the collapse of the USSR, is willing to absorb practically any country including states that can drag the US into war without contributing anything to American security; the military expenditure in Japan and South Korea, despite anti-China talks in Washington, are either flat or declining. While an utter failure in humanitarian and economic terms, American foreign policy has a been a resounding “success” from the public choice perspective: 1. Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone (more than any company in history) 2. The Pentagon has a budget of $700 billion for fiscal year 2019 (higher than it was at the end of the cold war even after adjusting for inflation); the vast majority of high-ranking generals have become rich as consultants or weapons industry executives upon retirement 3. Eastern European countries that joined NATO are protected by the threat of American nuclear war; Israel and Middle Eastern Gulf monarchies see an Iran impeded by American sanctions Hanania ends with some ideas for legal reforms: 1. Limited, if not lifetime, ban of retired military and national security personnel from taking jobs with Pentagon-contracted companies 2. Requiring think tanks to disclose their funding sources like 501(c)(3) non-profits 3. Closing the loophole for scholarly work (e.g. authoring books) in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) that requires individuals lobbying for foreign states to report their propaganda to the federal government 4. Making lobbying illegal for all states including allies (e.g. Saudi Arabia), not just enemies (e.g. Iran), except recognised democracies 5. Reinforcing the Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States by prosecuting any individual who publicises classified material, including top military officials and journalists who routinely leak classified material but are never prosecuted (unlike whistleblowers like Edward Snowden) And finally some ideas for norm changes: 1. The press should include current weapons industry employment when reporting ex-government officials 2. The press should include funding information when reporting think tank scholars’ work, and clarify that the organisation cited refused to provide said information should it be unavailable 3. The press should include political motivations when reporting American leaders’ foreign policy decisions (as they do for Kim and Putin) 4. The press should include Tetlock’s superforecasting/prediction markets when reporting the forecasts by the military and national security bureaucracy at public interviews, official reports, and congressional testimony ## 7. Conclusion And Further Readings [Gordon Tullock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Tullock), one of the founding fathers of public choice theory who coined “rent-seeking”, has always wished for a book like this, and now it exists. It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model, and any scholar who insists on American grand strategy is deluding themselves. The book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream outlets (which probably only reviews “pop” nonfiction), but have been unanimously praised by scholars in adjacent fields: Steven Pinker praised it as “[cynical but probably accurate](https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1476270915243544577)”; [Robin Hanson](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/02/foreign-policy-is-incoherent.html) was “quite impressed”, Byran Caplan, whose work [The Myth of the Rational Voter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) was cited extensively by Hanania, praised it as “[eye-opening](https://www.econlib.org/hanania-highlights-i/)”; Tyler Cowen praised the book as [impressive](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/what-ive-been-reading-210.html) in spite of finding Hanania’s view to be more sceptical than his own — a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works (another contrarian economics-related work I’ve [reviewed](https://subcriticalappraisal.com/2021/Book-Review-How-Asia-Works/)). ### Russian Invasion of Ukraine At the time of writing, Russia is invading Ukraine, so it is interesting to see how well the public choice model’s predictions fit. Indeed, the unitary actor model can describe autocratic states to some degree — to understand Russia we only have to get into the head of Putin (the model still falls short in accounting for the oligarchs who run the mafia state). Ukraine is central to Putin’s ideology and subjectively important to Russian society, and the desire to obliterate and absorb the nation of Ukraine far [predates](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/03/who-gains-and-loses-status-from-the-war-in-ukraine.html) the history of NATO (see also Adam Tooze’s excellent [essay](https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-68-putins-challenge-to?s=r) on understanding Russia as a strategic petrostate). As Hanania [writes](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the?s=r) on his Substack (worthy of your subscription, by the way)4: > We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding. When it became apparent in December that an invasion was on the table, the US started a diplomatic process that has involved trying to work out concessions on other things, while refusing to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. Putin has become Satan in liberal imagination, and when it comes to the culture war, the emotional response is overwhelming. Hanania [writes](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the?s=r): > Brexit, Trump, and the rise of Orban and other right-wing populists in Europe have helped solidify a narrative in which Russian hackers and influence operations are behind everything liberal elites find distasteful, from opposition to Syrian refugees to bans on Critical Race Theory. Here’s a [website](https://russiamatters.org/blog/cockroaches-weather-whats-russia-weaponizing) laying out all the things Russia has been accused of “weaponizing” in the media, including dolphins, federalism, and the weather. The details of debates surrounding the wisdom of NATO expansion and whether Ukraine actually matters to the United States are lost in the larger story, as emotional denunciations of Putin as the source of all anti-democratic activity drives attitudes and policies. Inconvenient facts are ignored because it’s not really about “democracy,” “international law,” or any of the other words they use to obscure the fact that it’s culture wars all the way down. And the Western response is driven by extreme [public outcry](https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/24/ukraine-russia-news-world-unites-in-solidarity-as-landmarks-lit-up-16169517/) to an unprecedented extent: It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is [not](https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-95-is-ukraine-the-wests?s=r) “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his [viral lecture](https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4), but “[NATO’s door remains open](https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion)” for me and “[we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis)” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania [writes](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/lessons-from-forecasting-the-ukraine?s=r): > If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania [writes](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/yes-we-understand-you-hate-putin?s=r): > Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting [cancelled](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/opinion/ukraine-russia-cancel-culture-putin.html). The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision [banned](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/01/the-show-cant-go-on-russian-arts-cancelled-worldwide) Russia. Tchaikovsky is [cancelled](https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/march/why-cancel-tchaikovsky). As Tyler Cowen [writes,](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-01/canceling-performers-because-of-their-ties-to-putin-is-un-american?sref=htOHjx5Y) cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on [German defence spending](https://www.economist.com/leaders/a-big-defence-budget-shows-germany-has-woken-up/21808225) and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of [shitpost diplomacy](https://scholars-stage.org/thoughts-on-shitpost-diplomacy/), as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally [posts](https://twitter.com/USEmbassyKyiv/status/1496115593149358081) memes to spite Putin: A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi [writes](https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2022/02/28/the-real-war-will-not-be-trending-thoughts-on-ukraine/): > Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. ### A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent [interview](https://youtu.be/2M33am5sGws) with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per [80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/nuclear-security/), [Future of Life Institute](https://futureoflife.org/background/the-risk-of-nuclear-weapons/), and [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons-riskhttps://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons-risk). Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, [The Precipice](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50485582-the-precipice), estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be [~1 in 1000](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/) in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez [estimates](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAYa6on5gJKwAywrF/how-likely-is-a-nuclear-exchange-between-the-us-and-russia-1) a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; [summarised](https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1498945370935767040) by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of [Pax Americana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana#:~:text=Pax%20Americana%20(Latin%20for%20%22American,United%20States%20became%20the%20world's) since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the [MacArthur Foundation](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/19/washington-arms-controllers-nuclear-weapons-500126) have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling [details](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/joan-rohlfing-avoiding-catastrophic-nuclear-blunders/) in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine [gave up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances) their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is [surprised](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samuel-charap-why-putin-invaded-ukraine/) by how much public outrage is driving policy: > Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like [Scott](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links?s=r), am surprised we’re still capable of [jingoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism). 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include [China specialist](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/china-specialist/) to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and [captured](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania [writes](https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/great-power-competition-as-an-anachronism), “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises [the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline), which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but [a multipolar world will be more humane](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-a-multipolar-world-will-be-more?s=r). ## Endnotes 1. In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin. 2. It is a universal feature of the American government that substantial federal agencies do not shrink — even Ronald Reagan, the president most opposed to an expansive federal government since Coolidge, failed to see any reduction in spending. 3. Foreign governments can be direct beneficiaries of American foreign policy as the US defends and overthrows countries, and provides material and economic aid; indirectly the US controls American weapons sales, aid, and diplomatic support for states to head off domestic rivals. Dictatorships, in particular, act more like unitary actors as their existential question relies on their ruling territories, not elections. 4. Pax Americana had been so strong that even American ice-cream companies have foriegn policy priorities — [Ben & Jerry's thinks NATO should chill a little over Ukraine](https://qz.com/2123753/ben-jerrys-thinks-nato-should-chill-a-little-over-ukraine/).	Scott Alexander	60978211	Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy	acx
# Book Review: San Fransicko Last month [I discussed the platforms of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates) twenty-six candidates for California governor. One candidate, author and activist Michael Shellenberger, objected to my characterization of him, so I read his book [San Fransicko](https://amzn.to/3yb25Ra) to learn more and decide whether I owed him an apology. San Fransicko is subtitled “Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents: > In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault. Things haven’t always been like this. San Francisco used to be one of the safest and most beautiful cities in the world. Shellenberger opens with the story of a 1970s SF candidate who campaigned on a message of public cleanliness, promising stronger punishments for owners who failed to pick up after their dogs. The message was a hit, so much so that the increased community and social pressure was enough to reverse the dog-poop-in-parks problem with minimal police enforcement. (that candidate’s name? Harvey Milk) But jump forward forty years, and: > In 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.” > > “Than you’ve ever seen?” asked the reporter. > > “Than I’ve ever seen, for sure,” she said. “And we’re not just talking about from dogs. We’re talking about from humans.” > > Complaints about human waste on San Francisco’s sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning—four times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger. > > Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car. This is a good introduction to San Fransicko. It adequately telegraphs what you’ll be getting in the rest of the book: scenes of devastating human misery and urban decay, little-known tidbits from California history, and very precise statistics. But that makes it hard to review. It makes enough different claims to leave the reader feeling kind of overwhelmed. If the claims are true, then the book is great and important. If they’re false, it’s bad and damaging. I felt that the fairest way to review this book was to meet it on its own terms with deep dives into ten of its key claims. ## Claim 1: Homelessness Isn’t Just About Housing Nothing is ever just about one thing. But San Fransicko starts by quoting some experts who say homelessness is mostly a matter of poverty and housing costs, then expresses skepticism in that narrative, instead preferring to focus more on drugs and mental illness. [Alyssa Vance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qz9GvoPbnFwGrHHQB/visible-homelessness-in-sf-a-quick-breakdown-of-causes) investigates whether housing costs predict homelessness at the level of US states, and finds that they do, r^2 = 0.69. The outlier below is DC; removing it brings the correlation to 0.73. I was suspicious of using a state-based analysis to talk about cities, so I repeated her work with the 50 biggest US cities, using two different sets of price data - one from Kiplinger, one from Zillow. I found the Zillow numbers a little more plausible; here they are: This was slightly lower, r^2 = 0.42, but still pretty good! I also don’t think my city homelessness data were perfect (people report homelessness data not by city but by “continuum of care area”, and it’s complicated to figure out what the overall population of each area is), so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s responsible for most of the decay from Alyssa’s analysis to mine. Here you can see that San Francisco has a pretty high homelessness rate, but no worse than some other big cities like DC, Boston, and New York (Shellenberger, to his credit, mentions this in the book). So how come everyone talks about SF all the time? Alyssa gives two main reasons. First, SF homeless tend to concentrate in a few areas downtown; this is also where a lot of the tourists and businesspeople are, so the average tourist or businessperson in San Francisco sees a lot more homeless people than they would if they were evenly distributed throughout the city. And second, SF homeless are less likely to be sheltered than homeless people elsewhere; Shellenberger notes that “over 99% of New York’s homeless have access to shelter. In San Francisco, just 42% do” (see [here](http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/bay-area-homelessness/) for other cities). Source is [here](https://medium.com/@josefow/the-one-stat-that-explains-sfs-street-homeless-crisis-e863329ba8ed); I think “street homeless” means the same as “unsheltered” We’ll talk more in Part 4 about why this might be, but one common theory is climate: San Francisco has year-round above-freezing temperatures, so there’s less urgency to shelter everyone. Alyssa shows that the relationship between temperature and percent unsheltered is strong: That regression line looks suspicious, but I hear computers are never wrong. So one possible conclusion is that SF has around the amount of homelessness you would predict from its very high housing prices, and around the percent unsheltered you would predict from its balmy winter weather, and there’s nothing further to be explained. Shellenberger does not like this conclusion. > San Francisco’s mild climate alone cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. Miami, Phoenix, and Houston have year-round warm weather and far fewer homeless than San Francisco per capita. Per capita homelessness in San Francisco, Greater Miami, Greater Phoenix, and Greater Houston in 2020 was 9.3, 1.3, 1.6, and 0.8 per 1,000 residents, respectively. And Greater Miami, Greater Phoenix, and Greater Houston saw their per capita homeless population decline from 2005 to 2020 by 39, 17, and 74 percent while San Francisco saw its rise 30 percent. > > Nor can housing prices explain the discrepancy. Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem. As for the Zillow study that was reported to find a correlation between rising rents and homelessness, a deeper look at the research reveals a more nuanced finding. Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain “local policy efforts [and] social attitudes,” concluded researchers. This feels like kind of a shell game. San Francisco’s mild climate alone can’t explain why it has more homeless people per capita than Miami or Houston. But as the graph above shows, housing prices do explain about 75% of the difference between SF and those two cities. But because the book talks about the Miami-SF discrepancy in the paragraph about climate instead of the paragraph about prices, it makes it sound like a mystery that neither prices nor climate can explain. The Zillow article mentioned is [Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rents Exceed A Third Of Incomes](https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordability-22247/), which is based on [this study](https://wp-tid.zillowstatic.com/3/Homelessness_InflectionPoints-27eb88.pdf). Shellenberger’s summary is not really the researchers’ conclusion. The article does mention “local attitudes” and “social policy” once, but only to explain that the paper includes a term representing “latent factors” that they’re not going to bother distinguishing from each other in their model, and some of those terms could be local policy or social attitudes. Later they mention there are some outliers in their model (eg Houston), and it would be reasonable to assume that the latent factors help explain the outliers, but they don’t give us any reason to think that this is more interesting than the fact that every model ever will have outliers. But also, this is one study by Zillow. Alyssa and I both tried the same analysis, and found the same thing, with a correlation that’s unusually high for this kind of work. Sure, there are outliers, but San Francisco isn’t one of them. San Francisco is only a couple of percent off where the regression line would predict. That leaves the point about Palo Alto and Beverly Hills. They “have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem”. At first I felt like this was cheating - yeah, rich suburbs don’t have lots of homelessness, come on. But “rich” and “high property values” are pretty close to synonyms. If you’re going to say that high property values cause homelessness, isn’t it in fact pretty surprising that rich suburbs don’t have it? In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb? Quieter (so probably easier to sleep at night) more places out of sight to pitch tents, less crime (important if you’re living on the street!), and potentially lower cost of living in terms of food and goods. I tried looking into this issue and found explanations like: * Usually it’s poor people who become homeless. Cities have more poor people than suburbs, because they have more rental units, small apartments, public transportation, and blue-collar jobs. Suburbs, by natural consequence of their layout, enforce a certain wealth minimum before people can live there, and people above that wealth minimum rarely lose everything and become homeless. It’s strange that poor people tend to live in cities (ie places with very high land values), and you have to wonder whether there are ways that could be different, but it does seem true. * There are some homeless people in suburbs, but they’re less visible because suburbanites usually have cars and ample parking opportunities, so they mostly shelter in their cars out of sight instead of tents on the street. * Suburban police departments might be less tolerant of homeless people, either harassing them until they leave or outright telling them to go to cities. Why would suburban departments be less tolerant than urban departments (especially when urban departments, eg the LAPD, are better known for their ruthlessness)? It might just be an entrenched norms thing; suburbs can get rid of their homeless populations, so they do. Or it might be politics; suburbs might be more conservative than cities. * Cities have better homeless services, and the densest parts of cities have the most homeless services of all, because nobody expects the homeless to be able to commute, so to a first approximation you would only build shelters in places where you expect enough homeless people within walking distance to fill one. * Cities have more of a homeless “community”, in the sense that homeless people can band together for security, friendship, and exchange of goods and services (eg drugs). Whatever the factors involved, they have to explain not just why there are so few homeless people in Palo Alto, but also why there are so few homeless people in the nicer, less dense parts of San Francisco - as Alyssa points out, about half of the homeless in SF are concentrated in District 6 area with only 10% of the population. Another area with 10% of the population, supervisor district 4, has only about 1% of the homeless. District 4, which is about as suburban as Palo Alto, has about the same homelessness rate Palo Alto does, which makes it hard to argue that this is about SF vs. Palo Alto policy differences. The San Francisco districts with the highest (left) and lowest (right) homelessness rates. I correlated homelessness rate and population-adjusted density in the same cities I looked at above, but it didn’t add much predictive value to housing prices. Maybe this is restriction of range (all big cities are dense enough to have homelessness, compared to suburbs), or maybe the key feature is relative rather than absolute density (ie the homeless will go to the densest place nearby). Conclusion: No social phenomenon is ever caused by just one thing, but San Francisco’s homelessness rate is around where a housing-cost-based model would predict. San Fransicko briefly touches on this, but overall tries to de-emphasize it in favor of talking about drugs and mental illness. Critiques of patterns of emphasis are necessarily subjective, but the book’s pattern feels misleading to me. ## Claim 2: Standard Accounts Underemphasize The Role Of Drugs And Mental Illness In Homelessness Having argued homelessness isn’t just about poverty, the book goes on to say we’re neglecting the central role of mental illness and substance abuse: > Over the last decades there were many visible signs that homelessness was about much more than poverty and housing. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of calls made to San Francisco’s 311 line complaining of used hypodermic needles on sidewalks, in parks, and elsewhere rose from 224 to 6,275. In 2018, footage of dozens of people slumped over in an entrance to a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, many with needles in their arm, went viral. “We call it the heroin freeze,” said one local. “They can stay that way for hours.” Said another, “It’s like the land of the living dead.” > > For decades researchers have documented much higher levels of mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless than in the rest of the population. It’s true that just 8 and 18 percent of homeless people point to mental illness and substance abuse, respectively, as the primary cause of their homelessness, but researchers have long understood that such self-reports are unreliable due to the socially undesirable nature of substance abuse, and the lack of insight that often accompanies mental illness. Using other methods, San Francisco’s Health Department in 2019 estimated that 4,000 of the city’s 8,035 homeless, sheltered and unsheltered, are both mentally ill and suffering from substance abuse. Of those 4,000, about 1,600 frequently used emergency psychiatric services. Shellenberger’s source for 4000 homeless people having these issues is [this SF Chronicle article](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-counts-4-000-homeless-addicted-and-mentally-14412061.php), which seems to based off of [this report](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7319431). The report does estimate 4000 homeless people with mental illness and substance abuse, but it uses a yearly rather than point estimate of homelessness, and finds 18,000 rather than 8,000 people. That means it only finds a 22% rate of these problems, not a 50% rate. Thanks to commenter [Sean](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7319431) for hunting down this report and helping explain this. I looked for other statistics to provide context on this number. This [2013 San Francisco Homeless Count](https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/San-Francisco-PIT-Homeless-Count-2013-Final-February-13-2014.pdf) found that 29% admitted chronic depression, 15% PTSD, and 22% some other mental illness. About 30% admitted to a substance use disorder, although as far as I can tell this is just the number who admitted it was a disorder, so maybe more used drugs. [This article](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless-population-mental-illness-disability) by the Los Angeles Times describes an LA study finding that 25% of homeless people had mental health issues and 14% had drug issues. The Times re-analyzes it in a way that ups the numbers to 34% and 46%, respectively. But they don’t say exactly what choices they made differently, and the few they do give don’t really inspire confidence. Although in some cases they count questions clearly about mental illness which the official definition inexplicably refused to count, in others they decide to count anyone who has ever had mental illness, reversing a government decision to require the mental illness to be long-term (does this mean that if I lost my house tomorrow, the LA Times use me as an example of a “mentally ill homeless person” because I saw a psychiatrist for OCD when I was a kid?) Studies like these don’t show causation. Sure, mental illness can make people homeless. But homelessness can also cause mental illness. One SF study found psych diagnoses among the homeless to be evenly divided among depression, PTSD, and everything else. Homelessness is a depressing and traumatic environment. Just because someone who’s been on the streets for a year has depression or trauma, doesn’t mean that we should attribute their homelessness to mental illness. [This study](https://www.capolicylab.org/health-conditions-among-unsheltered-adults-in-the-u-s/) by the California Policy Lab does better. It asks what factors played a role in homeless people losing their homes, and finds that 50% of unsheltered and 17% of sheltered homeless point to mental illness (given SF’s balance, that suggests 37% of SF homeless would point to that problem). But I can’t help but notice that when you add up the percent of people who lost their homes due to physical illness, psych illness, and drug use, it totals 147%. Based on numbers from other studies, it looks like if you added in job loss, eviction, etc, the numbers would total well above 400%. This makes me think people are saying “yes” if the factor played even a minor role in their eventual homelessness, and this shouldn’t be treated as 37% of homeless having mental health issues being their main problem. The same study finds that about 66% of the homeless “have” some mental health problem, but this time they don’t tell us what question they asked or what criteria they use. What about psychosis in particular? [This meta-analysis](https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-019-2361-7) claims that in developed countries (a category to which San Francisco still nominally belongs) about 19% of homeless people qualify for diagnosis with a psychotic disorder, including 9% with schizophrenia in particular. Not all people with psychotic disorders are completely crazy all the time, and [some very much are not](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the?s=w), but this is at least a specific condition with real criteria. Conclusion: Overall, I’m disappointed in most of the published research on this question, which seems more interested in producing glossy brochures about funding disparities than in informing anybody what any of their numbers mean. But putting it all together and squinting really hard, I think we can tell a story where 10-20% of the homeless are seriously psychotic, and another 20-30% have contributing mental health conditions including depression, PTSD, and others. Somewhere between 25% and 50% of the homeless have substance abuse problems, and this probably mostly overlaps with the 25% - 50% who have psych diagnoses. I think San Fransicko gets this mostly right. ## Claim 3: “Housing First” Isn’t As Great As People Think, And Might Be Harmful The National Myth About Homelessness is that The Bad People are refusing to give people houses until they’ve “proven” they “deserve” them, thus perpetuating homelessness when they inevitably fail to qualify. The Good People have united under an exciting new banner called “Housing First” to push the revolutionary idea that people should get houses regardless of whether they conform to normal standards of respectability or not. Wherever this is adopted, homelessness rates fall, and the formerly homeless becoming healthier, safer, and more likely to re-integrate into society. Best of all, the program pays for itself in decreased health care and policing costs. The only impediment to solving homelessness everywhere is the Bad People who still insist on not housing the homeless until they’ve “earned” it. In real life, everyone important has been united under Housing First since the Bush administration [made it national policy](https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessness/index.html) fifteen years ago, and most of the cities with spiraling homelessness crises have been pursuing Housing First policies for decades (eg San Francisco has been trying Housing First [since the 1990s](https://beyondchron.org/stop-the-false-attacks-on-housing-first/)). The Obama and Trump administrations both set [funding policies](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/housing-first-effectiveness) that penalized any non-Housing-First welfare programs. Still, everyone is sure that the reason there are still homeless people must be that some Housing First opponent still exists somewhere, ruining everything with their purity-testing ways. But actually these people have already been relegated to the conservative think tanks where moribund ideas go to die. I have looked through a lot of studies and articles to try to see how well Housing First works. I am most sympathetic to the conclusions of [Tsai (2020)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7427255/), who basically says that: * Homeless people who are given houses are more housed than homeless people who are not given houses. Way, way more housed. You would not believe how strong of an effect giving someone housing has on them being housed. The same is true for other outcome measures like “time spent experiencing homelessness”, “number of days spent in a temporary homeless shelter”, etc. You might think this is obvious, but this is used as the primary outcome in a lot of studies, and “success” on this metric is behind a lot of claims that “studies show Housing First works great!” * Tsai describes “moderate” evidence showing that Housing First decreases emergency services utilization, based mostly on [this meta-analysis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6581117/), which admits that all of its studies have “high risk of bias”. * “There is no substantial published evidence as yet to demonstrate that PSH [permanent supportive housing] improves health outcomes or reduces healthcare costs. The one exception is a randomized trial of Housing First that found improved health outcomes for patients with HIV/AIDS.” Tsai also comments that (like in psychiatry) any intensive and well-thought-out housing program is better than nothing (“treatment as usual”, in medical lingo). This is also the conclusion of [this giant review](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.4073/csr.2018.3) on homelessness interventions, which classifies Housing First as “high-quality” but gives the same honor to its direct opposite, abstinence-contingent housing. Either intervention beats doing nothing, or doing some vague unprincipled collection of whatever services are available at the time. But the few studies that compare them head-to-head do find Housing First doing better ([1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/casp.723), [2](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20063061/)), albeit usually with significant risk of bias. What about costs? I was able to find two meta-analyses. [Ly and Latimer (2015)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674371506001103) find that Housing First saves money on net (ie even after paying housing costs) in nonrandomized studies, but not in higher-quality true experiments. However, even in the latter group, it comes close to doing this, so that governments successfully house the homeless for much less than the cost of housing would suggest. [Jacob et al (2022)](https://stgdaiss.thecommunityguide.org/sites/default/files/publications/he-ajpm-ecrev-housing-first.pdf) find that benefits do exceed costs, estimating benefits of 1.8x cost in all studies, 1.3x cost in higher-quality studies, and about 1.05x cost in the best studies. I found [Basu et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3393008/) helpful in breaking down what was going on here. They have a great table of their assumptions about costs: …and find that: > Those in the intervention group incurred 2.6 fewer hospitalized days (p = .08), 1.2 fewer emergency room visits (p = .04), 7.5 fewer days in residential substance abuse treatment (p = .004), 9.8 fewer nursing home days (p = .08), and 3.8 more outpatient visits each year (p = .01) annually compared with those in the usual care group. Those in the intervention group had 7.7 fewer prison days during the study period (p = .07). Those in the intervention group had 62 more days in stable housing (p = .001) and 12 more days in respite care (p = .002) than those in the usual care group. Those in the intervention group used case management services (i.e., telephone calls and face-to-face meetings) more frequently than those in the usual care group, having on average 18 more encounters per year (p < .001). This study provided case management along with the free housing. I don’t know whether to think of that as a confounder, or a standard aspect of Housing First programs (especially since it is much harder to case manage someone with no fixed address). Notice that it assumes the cost of housing is given as $30/day. I think this is realistic for low-income housing in Chicago, but other California programs I’ve looked at have worked out to more like $70 - $100/day, which (assuming nothing else changed) would switch the conclusion of this study from “Housing First saves money” to “Housing First costs money”. Now let’s see what San Fransicko has to say: > The evidence for Housing First turns out to be significantly weaker than its proponents suggest. For example, the much lauded initiative to reduce homelessness among veterans was only four percentage points more successful than the overall decline in homelessness, when accounting for age, which is necessary to accurately estimate what is due to policy and what is due to demographic changes. As for Utah, its legislative auditor general concluded in 2018 that the 91 percent number was wrong, based on a sloppy use of incorrect methodologies. Before 2015, Utah had annualized its homeless count, meaning that researchers counted the homeless at a single point in time and multiplied the data by some factor. But after 2015 the state used raw point-in-time counts, causing a precipitous drop in the official population counts. Over the same period, the state also narrowed its definition of chronic homelessness in several ways, resulting in further apparent reductions. In reality, the homeless population in Utah increased by 12 percent between 2016 and 2020. > > An experiment with 249 homeless people in San Francisco between 1999 and 2002 found those enrolled in the city’s Housing First program, Direct Access to Housing, used medical services at the same rate as those who were not given housing through the program, suggesting that the Housing First program likely had minimal impact on the participants’ health. Wrote a team of researchers, “obtaining housing does not necessarily resolve other issues that may impede one’s housing success,” pointing to the lack of significant improvements in substance use and psychiatric symptoms over the twelve months that people were housed (the share of patients with severe substance use actually saw a modest increase). > > The problem with Housing First stems from the fact that it doesn’t require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness. Several studies have found that people in Housing First–type housing showed no improvement in drug use from when they were first housed. > > In 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a review of the scientific literature of Housing First. “On the basis of currently available research,” the report’s authors wrote, with some surprise, “the committee found no substantial evidence that [permanent supportive housing] contributes to improved health outcomes, notwithstanding the intuitive logic that it should do so and limited data showing that it does do so for persons with HIV/AIDS.” > > Tsemberis said he was not surprised by the findings of the National Academies. “It’s not like housing creates improved health,” he said. “You have to have a relationship with a nurse. You have to be educated on what your health problems are. You have to have a team that engages you and makes you an active participant in your own health care. I don’t even know if that would stop the number of deaths.” And, at least in the study funded by Benioff and conducted by Margot Kushel, which had those services, it did not. All of this seems to fit with what I found above. But: > Housing First may even increase addiction and overdose deaths and make quitting drugs more difficult. Warned a multiauthor review in 2009, “One potential risk [of Housing First’s harm reduction approach] would be worsening the addiction itself, as the federal collaborative initiative preliminary evaluation seemed to suggest.” The authors pointed to an experiment that had to be stopped and reorganized after the homeless individuals in the abstinence group complained of being housed with people in the control group, who didn’t stop their drug and alcohol use. “They claimed that they preferred to return to homelessness rather than live near drug users.” The multiauthor review cited is [Housing First For Homeless People With Active Addiction: Are We Overreaching?](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2881444/) They write: “It would be premature to conclude that Housing First programs cannot accommodate persons with severe addiction. But it also would be premature to suggest that research data provide clear guidance on whether, or how, Housing First programs can accommodate persons with ongoing severe drug and alcohol abuse. In the absence of research data on this subject, it is reasonable to consider the kinds of risks that may occur in Housing First programs. One potential risk would be worsening the addiction itself, as the federal collaborative initiative preliminary evaluation seemed to suggest (Mares, Greenberg, and Rosenheck 2007), or failing to progress toward addictive recovery.” Elsewhere, they describe this same study as: “The eleven-site federal collaborative initiative found an association between early access to housing and increases in alcohol problems during the subsequent year” The study is [here](https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hudhhsva-collaborative-initiative-help-end-chronic-homelessness-system-integration-associated-client-1), but I can’t find this result anywhere. It describes its own results (my emphasis) as: > The average number of days housed in the previous 90 days increased dramatically from 18 at baseline, to 68 at the 3-month follow-up, and rose steadily thereafter to 83 at the 12 month follow-up (Table 2). Mean monthly public assistance income increased steadily from $316 at baseline to $478 one year later, a 50% increase. Significant improvements of modest magnitude were also observed in overall quality of life, mental health functioning, and reduced psychological distress. Alcohol and drug problems remained largely unchanged over time. Total quarterly health costs declined by 50%, from $6,832 at baseline to $3,376 at 12 months. A 54% decrease in mean inpatient costs ($5,776 to $2,677) accounted for nearly 90% of the overall decrease in quarterly health care costs during clients' first year in the program And the table (slightly edited for readability): I might be misunderstanding this - I can’t imagine why the authors of the review would have gotten this wrong - but it does look to me like alcoholism stayed steady throughout this study. A [24-month followup](https://sci-hub.st/10.1176/ps.62.2.pss6202_0171) of what I think is the same study also finds that drug users who were housed used slightly fewer drugs over time, although probably not to any significant degree worth caring about: Continuing from San Fransicko: > There is evidence that privacy and solitude created by Housing First make substance abuse worse. A study in Ottawa found that, while the Housing First group kept people in housing longer, the comparison group saw greater reductions in alcohol consumption and problematic drug use, and greater improvements to mental health, after two years. “One reason for the surprising results,” wrote the authors, “may be that aspects of the Housing First intervention, such as the privacy afforded by Housing First and harm reduction approach, might result in slower improvements around substance use and mental health.” Okay, but the next sentence after the one the book quoted was the researchers admitting that oops, we also totally forgot to randomize our groups in any way, so the experimental and control groups had totally different levels of severity and maybe that was why they found this weird thing (this is non-obvious, because we’re looking at change over time rather than raw differences between groups, but the authors discuss some reasons why different groups might change differently over time). A few years later these same researchers did [a proper randomized study](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7492-8) and it found no difference in drug use between the two groups. [Somers, Moniruzzaman and Palepu](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26052657/) found no difference in drug use between Housing First and other subjects. [Padgett et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2916946/) found the Housing First group actually did better, although they are another victim of the epidemic of randomization failures in this space. [Kirst et al](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0376871614018821), no difference in drug use, but Housing First better with alcohol. [Milby](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449349/) found that housing contigent on abstinence worked better than housing not contigent on abstinence, which Shellenberger could have used to support his thesis, but even Milby found that housing not contingent on abstinence worked better than no housing! To summarize: I can find seven studies on this topic, only one of them agrees with San Fransicko’s thesis, and the authors admit that it’s weak. I accuse San Fransicko of citing only that one and pretending all the others don’t exist. (actually, I accuse it of doing that plus citing a line from a review claiming another study found this, but as far as I can tell that study did not actually find it) This is extra annoying, because all the popular news articles on Housing First gush about how it definitely decreases substance use and everything else bad. Shellenberger could have made the excellent point that all of these progressive journalists were totally wrong! This would have been an interesting, important, and completely true act of virtuous data journalism! Instead he tries to hold up a lonely negative result as representative, and ends up just as wrong but in the opposite direction. Continuing in San Fransicko: > Researchers have found ways to use housing to reduce addiction. Between 1990 and 2006, researchers in Birmingham, Alabama, conducted clinical trials of abstinence-contingent housing with 644 homeless people with crack cocaine addictions. Two-thirds of participants remained abstinent after six months, a very high rate of abstinence, compared to other treatment programs. Other studies found that around 40 percent of homeless in abstinence-contingent housing maintained their abstinence, housing, and jobs. > > In a randomized controlled trial, homeless people were given furnished apartments and allowed to keep them unless they failed a drug test, at which point they were sent to stay in a shelter. Sixty-five percent of participants completed the program. Three similar randomized controlled trials also found moderate to high rates of completion. And participants in abstinence-contingent housing had better housing and employment outcomes than participants assigned housing for whom abstinence was not required. All of this seems basically true. > It turns out that over longer periods of time, Housing First may not even outperform contingency in terms of keeping people housed. In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts published the results of a fourteen-year-long study of chronic homeless placed into permanent supportive housing in Boston. Most studies of permanent supportive housing, including the Kushel study conducted in Santa Clara, only study the newly housed homeless for a span of around two years. The study found that 86 percent of the homeless, who were referred based on length of time living on the streets, suffered from “trimorbidity”—a combination of medical illness, mental illness, and substance abuse. The authors found that after ten years, just 12 percent of the homeless remained housed. During the study period, 45 percent died. The authors concluded that, because the chronically homeless had such higher rates of physical and mental illness, “the supportive services, essential to the PSH model, may not have been sufficient to address the needs of this unsheltered population.” This study was done on an especially severe subgroup of homeless people. There was no control group, so Shellenberger shouldn’t claim we have any evidence about whether Housing First can “outperform contingency”. Shellenberger counts people who died as “unhoused” to get his 12% number; if he didn’t do this, the number would be 23%. Only 23% of people given housing retained after ten years sounds bad. But you could change this number to whatever number you wanted by changing the severity of the subgroup selected for the study. Select people who are even crazier and more disturbed than these people, and you can have 0% retained after ten years; select high-functioning people with no problems, and you can get 100% retained after ten years. (or maybe not - the study doesn’t say why people left the program. It mentions that one possible outcome is having to go to a nursing home because they had grown too sick or old to support themselves. I am not sure that “23% stay in this program” means “77% are back on the street and all their care has been a total failure”.) Conclusion: Housing First seems to work in getting people housing. It probably also helps people use fewer medical services, and it might or might not save money compared to not doing it (probably more likely when treating very severe cases, less likely in areas with high housing costs). It probably doesn’t affect people’s overall health or drug use status very much. San Fransicko is right to call out all the people promoting it beyond what the evidence supports, but then goes on to attack it beyond what the evidence supports. ## Interlude: Why Can’t We Just House All The Homeless? This is the question many of the California gubernatorial candidates asked. California has lots of money. There aren’t that many homeless people. Everyone is already committed to Housing First. So why don’t they have houses already? San Francisco has about 7,000 homeless people. The median SF apartment costs about $3,000 per month (presumably the government officials in charge would be trying to buy cheaper-than-median apartments for this project, but they seem bad at that, so let’s stick with median as a high-end estimate). So that’s $250 million/year to rent every homeless person an apartment. San Francisco has [a $14 billion budget](https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-budget/), although some of that is locked in nondiscretionary programs. So this effort would take about 2-3% of the city budget. Given how many people have both altruistic and selfish objections to the current level of SF homelessness, I can’t imagine that isn’t a better use of the money than whatever it’s being spent on now. So why hasn’t this happened? The closest thing I can find to the “rent apartments” plan is Governor Newsom’s “rent hotel rooms” plan, Project Roomkey. This was a short-term pandemic program. [This article](https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/05/03/will-californias-roomkey-model-of-sheltering-homeless-residents-in-private-rooms-live-on-after-the-pandemic-advocates-say-it-should/) says it cost $4,000 per month, which seems reasonable - it provided residents with a hotel room, meals, security, and “custodial services” for just above a hundred dollars a day. So how come nobody has made it permanent or scaled it up? The homeless themselves don’t seem very positive on the project. They [talk about](https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/12/10/with-no-exit-strategy-sacramento-will-keep-roomkey-motels-for-homeless-residents-open-through-march/) “jail”-like conditions, including curfews and bans on visitors. I don’t know if this is the usual nanny-state-ism, or an attempt to reassure hotel owners / other residents / local communities that the influx of homeless people won’t cause them problems. If the latter, it hasn’t worked. From [here](https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/12/10/with-no-exit-strategy-sacramento-will-keep-roomkey-motels-for-homeless-residents-open-through-march/): > Jenna Abbott, executive director of the River District Business Association, said having a Roomkey motel in her neighborhood has been difficult. The site — which is in an area with large number of unhoused people — has drawn family and friends of Roomkey residents who haven’t been housed but “camp close to that hotel,” some with the goal of gaining a room, Abbott said. That’s led to more loitering, public drunkenness and trash outside the restaurants, gas stations and other businesses in the area, she added. And here’s [another article about people objecting to](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/homeless-hotels-coronavirus/) local hotels accepting homeless people, which focuses on some combination of zoning, code, and public safety concerns. Everybody - the homeless, their advocates, various experts - interviewed in the article - agrees that the hotel rooms are kind of dehumanizing and much worse than having real housing. And [this article](https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/05/03/will-californias-roomkey-model-of-sheltering-homeless-residents-in-private-rooms-live-on-after-the-pandemic-advocates-say-it-should/) suggests that government budgeters believe it’s not cost-effective compared to alternatives. Since the homeless don’t like it, and it’s expensive, almost everyone seems to agree it made sense as a short-term COVID measure only. The government’s preferred medium-term solution is single resident occupancy (SRO) hotels. These are big apartment/hotel-like structures where everyone has a small bedroom and then there are communal bathrooms and maybe kitchens. These used to be the archetypal living situation for poor Americans (Matt Yglesias talks about them as “[boarding houses](https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing?s=r)” here). But moral reformers banned them in the 1900s on the grounds that they were slums - I think this is the usual “surely the reason poor people live bad lives is because capitalists oppress them by selling them cheap low-quality goods, and if we just ban selling people cheap low-quality goods, everyone will have high-quality goods and poor people will live great lives!” argument. Somehow this failed to work and homelessness got worse over this period, but there are still some SRO hotels left, and the government got them and converted them to public housing for homeless people. Shellenberger does not have high opinions of these: > The Tenderloin [district of San Francisco]’s single resident occupancy hotels . . . have for decades been dominated by a culture of heavy substance use and prostitution. “Of the people in supportive housing in San Francisco, 93 percent have a major mental illness that we can name,” said a housing policy maker. “That is very, very high. Eighty percent use cocaine, speed, or heroin every thirty days, or get drunk to the point of unconsciousness.” > > Tom Wolf, a former Salvation Army caseworker and a member of San Francisco’s Drug Dealing Taskforce, says the city’s supportive housing facilities are themselves a major market for illegal drugs. “Go down the street to the Camelot Hotel on Turk Street,” said Wolf. “Almost everyone that I’ve seen in those hotels are using. The last front desk guy that was working there got busted because he was selling crack. The actual guy that works in the single resident occupancy hotel is selling crack! It’s insane, man.” In any case, there are only so many of these still left. The government often announces plans to buy defunct regular hotels and convert them into these structures, which would indeed be a medium-term solution for housing the homeless, except that they usually get bogged down in fights about code. [Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/04/new-york-affordable-housing-program-00005049) discusses one of these attempts in New York City (h/t Marginal Revolution): > “There are very few hotels that physically could be converted and comply with the requirements of today’s zoning and building code without substantial, expansive reconstruction, partial removal or demolition,” said James Colgate, a land use partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP who has advised clients on zoning issues including the conversions of hotels. “That would increase the costs greatly.” > > For example, a building’s elevators, doorways, or rooms may be slightly short of the size required for a residential structure. Residential buildings are also required to have a certain amount of rear-yard space that a hotel may not have. > > “You would literally have to be chopping off part of the building,” Rosen said. > > …The legislation dictates that each unit include a kitchen or kitchenette with a full-sized refrigerator, cooktop and sink — something Rosen said made utilizing the program “simply too expensive.” > > “This is the classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the possible,” said Mark Ginsberg, a partner at the firm Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, which has worked on hotel conversions. > > Some advocates who pushed the creation of the program say those provisions were necessary to ensure it didn’t generate substandard housing […] > > “We didn’t want a program that cut corners to make it more palatable to developers,” said Joseph Loonam, housing campaign coordinator for the progressive advocacy group VOCAL-NY. “We wanted a program that centered the needs of homeless New Yorkers, which is true high quality affordable housing where they can have full autonomy and dignity.” As Marginal Revolution pointed out, Loonam got what he wanted; the expensive, over-regulated program was unpalatable to developers, with only one company putting in an offer; for whatever reason, NYC refused to go with that one company, and no housing was produced. But fine, these are also terrible, and they’re only medium-term solutions anyway. What about building real, long-term apartments for homeless people? Shellenberger tells the story of Los Angeles’ Proposition HHH, which raised $1.2 billion to do exactly this. They hoped to build ~10,000 units for the homeless, at a projected price of $140,000 each; since LA had about 30,000 homeless people at the time, this would solve a third of the problem - a good start. (how do these numbers line up with my back-of-the-envelope calculation for SF above? I talked about renting rather than building, but usually annual rents = 1/20th or so of total prices, so I was estimating about $700,000 per person. This is probably partly because SF costs more than LA, and partly because I was imagining median apartments whereas LA is probably working on very cheap apartments) But in fact, five years later, LA [has completed only 700 units](https://reason.com/video/2021/07/07/los-angeles-wastes-1-2-billion-while-homeless-face-a-spiral-of-death/), and the cost per unit has spiralled to $531,000 each. Nobody has a good explanation for what happened, with Shellenberger quoting one local service provider who said a lot of it was “bullshit costs”. Now might be a good time to re-read [Considerations On Cost Disease](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). [Update: this might not be accurate - see [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7337483)] This seems to be a general problem: everyone is committed to Housing First and to long-term good solutions rather than short- or medium- term mediocre ones. But that means building housing. And some combination of NIMBYism and over-regulation means building housing is somewhere between ruiniously expensive and impossible. ## Claim 4: Shelters Are Unpopular Among Progressive Activists And The Homeless Themselves San Francisco doesn’t have more homelessness than eg New York, but almost all the homeless in New York live in shelters and stay off the street. Why doesn’t that work here? Shellenberger: > In the context of cities with permissive attitudes toward drugs, like San Francisco, many homeless people stay in [tent] encampments to use illegal substances more freely and easily than they can in the shelters. Many policy makers understand this. “I went out with a team twice to have conversations with people to get an understanding of what they’re dealing with,” said Mayor Breed in 2020. “It was absolutely insane. Most of the people did not take us up on the offer [of shelter and services].” > > Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. “When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York,” said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, “almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.” > > In 2016, after the city of San Francisco broke up a massive, 350-person homeless encampment, dozens of the homeless refused the city’s offers of help. Of the 150 people moved during a single month of homeless encampment cleanups in 2018, just eight people accepted the city’s offer of shelter. In 2004, just 131 people went into permanent supportive housing after 4,950 contacts made by then-mayor Newsom’s homeless outreach teams. [An article](https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/why_homeless_people_avoid_shelters) by a former homeless person explains the problems with shelters beyond just “can’t use drugs”. Residents are crammed into a small space with 300 other homeless people. Lice and bedbugs are everywhere. Everybody catches every disease. Everybody has stories about getting raped or beaten up. Invasive moralizing about drugs somehow exists side by side with rampant drug use. Shelters are gender segregated, which means straight people can’t stay with their partner. Most shelters ban children and nobody has any idea what to do with them. Most shelters ban pets - a lot of homeless people have dogs for protection or companionship, and you can’t just store them somewhere while you’re sheltering. Although some lucky people can get 90-day beds, other people need to apply for beds on a day-by-day basis, which requires waiting in line several hours every day. Users talk about rampant cutting in line, denying cutting in line, false accusations of cutting in line, etc. Most shelters kick people out between 9-5, either to save on staffing costs or in the hopes that they’ll get a job. But many have strict curfews requiring people to be back by 5 PM sharp, which can make jobs impossible - if your boss doesn’t let you out until 5 and you have a half-hour commute, how do you get back to the shelter on time? Results of a [survey](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/shelters/) at one of SF’s new Navigation Centers at why their clients refused to go to normal shelters. But even the homeless people who do want to go to shelters mostly can’t get in. [This app](https://san-francisco-shelter-waitlist.herokuapp.com/) gives the current status of San Francisco’s homeless shelter waitlist. If you applied today, there would be 900 people ahead of you in line for one of the city’s 1500 - 2500 shelter beds. The app says that the median wait time is 826 days. So however many homeless people don’t want to go to shelters, we’re not building enough shelters to serve the ones who do. Why not? Shellenberger again: > In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.” > > Housing First advocate Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco agreed. “The problem with New York—and I spend a lot of time with people working in the system in New York—is that they spend an estimated $30,000 for each person per year to keep them in shelter. That’s not what we want to do. Because if you create the shelter and you don’t create the housing, then people are just in shelter forever.” > > Housing First advocates oppose shelter in Los Angeles. “Why haven’t we solved homelessness?” asked Housing First creator Sam Tsemberis. “Because [Los Angeles mayor] Eric Garcetti [has] Andy Bales [saying,] ‘You need emergency housing.’ ‘These people need to be cleaned up.’ ‘They need to be sober.’ ‘They need Jesus before they’ll be ready for housing.’ I said, ‘People should be housed and then maybe they’ll get sobriety and Jesus and the rest.’ We’re definitely on polar opposites of the whole thing.” > > Advocates for the homeless at the national level similarly oppose more shelters. “I don’t agree that we should be building more transitional housing,” said the head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. […] > > In other words, the reason that there are so many homeless people on the streets in San Francisco is that both progressive and moderate Democratic elected officials, and the city’s most influential homelessness experts and advocates, have for two decades opposed building sufficient shelters. And that is unlikely to change even after San Francisco starts spending hundreds of millions more per year on the problem and might even get worse. This basically seems true. I found [this webpage](https://medium.com/@josefow/the-one-stat-that-explains-sfs-street-homeless-crisis-e863329ba8ed) of a former SF Supervisor candidate a helpful corroborating source. He was running on a platform of “maybe we should build some homeless shelters”. He lost. You can also find a bunch of webpages by the sorts of people Shellenberger is complaining about, for example [this site](https://48hills.org/2022/05/crack-down-on-homeless-people-or-prevent-people-from-becoming-homeless/): > Sup[ervisor] Rafael Mandelman today pushed his new legislation that would require the city to offer at least temporary shelter to everyone living on the streets, a step that some say would lead to more homeless sweeps and do nothing to create permanently affordable housing . . . [our] Coalition has argued for years that the solution to homelessness is housing—not temporary shelter, which may never lead to housing. The ex-supervisor candidate gives some helpful numbers: permanent housing costs about $600,000 per person housed. Shelters cost between $20,000 and $30,000 per person housed. So SF could build enough shelters to clear its waitlist for about $30 million. More recently, SF has tried a sort of compromise, opening “deluxe” shelters called Navigation Centers which avoid some of the problems of regular shelters. They also cost more than twice as much, and the city has only created about 300 beds. Also, the people in regular shelters [are angry](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/shelters/), because being in a regular shelter disqualifies you from getting into a (much better) Navigation Center. Some of them are considering leaving their shelter, going back on the streets, then waiting however many months or years it takes to get a Navigation Center bed instead. I’m not at all sure of these numbers, but it looks like of SF’s ~7,000 homeless, about 2,000 are in shelters already, and 1,000 are on the shelter waitlist. I don’t know if the remaining 4,000 have made a specific commitment not to go to shelters, or just have given up on the waitlist process. My conclusion: agree with San Fransicko about the role of progressive activists, but I think it overemphasizes the role of wanting to use drugs in why homeless people themselves sometimes avoid shelters, and underemphasizes the many other problems with them. ## Claim 5: Drug Decriminalization Isn’t Working California legalized marijuana in 2016. Shellenberger says that San Francisco’s commitment to drugs has gone beyond that: it has effectively decriminalized opioids, cocaine, and the rest. Any attempt to lessen use of these drugs is attacked as “stigmatizing”; instead, government policy centers around providing addicts with needles and other drug paraphernalia under the guise of “harm reduction”. Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like [many people](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in), he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes. And when the government was first debating the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, black leaders were [among the strongest proponents of both](http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/16/212620886/the-shift-in-black-views-of-the-war-on-drugs). The talking point at the time - among everyone from black Congressional leaders to black churches - was that the government’s failure to crack down on drug use was racist, borne of them not caring about predominantly black drug victims. And while we’ve been patting ourselves on the back about how enlightened we are for ending the drug war: > Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic. Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019). […] > > There are about twenty-five thousand injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50 percent larger than the number of students enrolled in the city’s fifteen public high schools. San Francisco gives away more needles to drug users, six million per year, than New York City, despite having one-tenth the population. The part of this chapter that stood out to me as most worth looking into deeper was the section on Portugal: > For decades, harm reduction and decriminalization advocates have pointed to Portugal as a model, noting that it decriminalized drugs and expanded drug treatment. In 2013, Portugal’s drug-induced death rate was sixty-six times less than that of the United States. The number of people in treatment increased by 60 percent between 1998 and 2011, with three-quarters receiving an opioid substitute like methadone or Suboxone, the brand name of buprenorphine. Drug use among 15- to 24-year-olds actually declined after decriminalization. “All drugs have been legalized,” explained Monique Tula, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. “Their focus is on giving people tools, like job apprenticeships, and the means to support themselves.” […] > > [But Portugal] never legalized drugs. It only decriminalized them, reducing criminal penalties but maintaining prohibition. Drug dealers were still sent to prison even after the 2001 decriminalization. And Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook like progressive West Coast cities have done. It’s true that Portugal massively expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administered “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction,” composed of a social worker, lawyer, and doctor who encourage, push, and coerce drug treatment. > > And decriminalization doesn’t end drug violence. “Even if trafficking enforcement decreased, like it did in Portugal,” said criminologist John Pfaff, “illegal drug markets would still be forced to rely on violence to resolve disputes.” Indeed, prostitution and violence are ever-present in the open-air drug scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in thirty-three years,” said Rev. Andy Bales, who runs the largest homeless shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature.” > > People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use. This was also the case for alcohol consumption. It increased after prohibition ended in the United States. Even in Portugal, drug overdose deaths and overall drug use rose after decriminalization. I was most surprised by the claim that Portuguese overdose deaths rose after decriminalization. Uncharacteristically, San Fransicko doesn’t give a citation for it, but we can try to retrace its reasoning. Decriminalization proponents tend to point to [these numbers](https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/data/stats2020/drd), helpfully converted to per 100,000 population and graphed [here](https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-portugal-setting-the-record-straight): But [an anti-drug Australian think tank](https://www.dalgarnoinstitute.org.au/images/resources/pdf/dart/The_Truth_on_Portugal_December_2018.pdf) argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: > Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than > halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to [the updated 2020 version](https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/data/stats2020/drd) of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend [A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs](https://kar.kent.ac.uk/29901/1/Hughes%20%20Stevens%202012.pdf), which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: > As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. ## Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: [Ed West](https://edwest.substack.com/p/what-does-a-man-need-to-do-to-go?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct), do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: > During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. > > Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. > > Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] > > Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” > > Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. > > But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. > > In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. > > The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. > > The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” > > Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] > > District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” > > Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by [Public Policy Institute](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/r_0618mbr.pdf) and one by some [UCI criminologists](https://escholarship.org/content/qt54k3r6w2/qt54k3r6w2.pdf). The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read [Applied Divinity Studies’ article](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/)). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source [here](http://www.cjcj.org/news/13219). This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. [Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/o7qzs1/is_shoplifting_rising_in_san_francisco_heres_what/) to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument [here](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/). But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As [LouB’s analysis here](https://loub.substack.com/p/while-us-property-crimes-declined?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email) points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: > The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. > > In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? [This news article](https://www.davisvanguard.org/2021/11/statistics-v-claimed-store-experience-two-sides-of-viewing-shoplifting-cases-in-san-francisco/) quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies [claims to have an argument](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/sf-crime-2/) that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that [only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest](https://nypost.com/2021/06/16/san-fran-cops-walgreens-shoplift-incident-is-par-for-the-course/); I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html). Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From [the Economist](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-crime-rates-test-san-franciscans-values): The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “[San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime](http://www.cjcj.org/news/12756)”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. ([source](https://patch.com/california/san-francisco/san-francisco-homicide-rate-plummets-2019)) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by [percent African-American](https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/gun_deaths7.png) and maybe [percent Borderer](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/); with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime [here](https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state/); San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. ## Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: > Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] > > His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. > > Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. > > Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” > > Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. > > A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” > > Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. > > San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. > > Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” > > Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” > > In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. > > In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. > > A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” > > Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “[the Twinkie Defense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense)” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. ## Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: > In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” > > Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” > > I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] > > I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. > > “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” > > It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And > [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: > In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: ## Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: > What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” > > Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” > > At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] > > The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. > > “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. > > What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: * Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day. * Arrest the people involved, and threaten them with prison if they don’t accept mental health / substance abuse treatment. * Have good mental health and substance abuse treatment available for the people who agree, and genuinely forgive their offenses / don’t impose further penalties against them. Good substance abuse treatment has to be long-term; typical treatments lasting only three months are “kicking people to the street when their triggers and cravings will be at their highest”. * Follow through on the threat to put the people who don’t cooperate in jail. * [Not in the chapter on Amsterdam but I think this is part of the same general policy package] Build enough shelters to give every homeless person a shelter bed. Then require them to use it. Ban camping on the street. * [As above] Make it easier to commit the mentally ill to psychiatric institutions or get them conservatorships. I was able to find [Lessons Learned From The Amsterdam Cohort Study](https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12954-020-00444-6), which broadly backs up Shellenberger’s picture of declining drug use in Amsterdam, at least among the thousand-odd users in their study: Percent of people in the study who reported injection drug use by year. A minor note of discord: this study characterized Amsterdam’s successful drug program as “harm reduction”, and its conclusion section is titled “Harm Reduction Works”. Shellenberger usually uses “harm reduction” to mean the soft-on-crime policies that don’t do what Amsterdam did. For example, here he [points out](https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1453818566164181012) that Amsterdam has fewer than 130 people using safe injection sites (a typical element of harm reduction strategies). But I gather this is for heroin only; they have many more people on methadone. Most people would also classify methadone treatment as a form of harm reduction. I think this is probably just a semantic quibble and we shouldn’t worry too much about it, but it threw me for a loop here. In any case, whatever harm reduction is or isn’t involved, it’s definitely true that [law enforcement breaking up open-air drug markets](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-14-853) was a big part of the program. Amsterdam’s crime rate has definitely been going down over the same period: This is also the period in which crime rates everywhere went down, so we can’t definitely attribute it to any Amsterdam-specific policies, but given how successful the drug programs were, it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped. Homelessness is a mixed bag. I couldn’t find any numbers that covered the entire period under discussion, but in 2006 people [were talking about a](https://www.feantsa.org/download/ejh6_2_policy17177509030184530692.pdf) “sense of urgency” in dealing with rising homelessness in the Netherlands, and [homelessness has doubled](https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/homelessness-netherlands-has-more-doubled-2009) in the past ten years. Still, how it did in the 1990s seems more relevant, and the the Dutch homelessness rate is still only about half of California’s. Also, like everyone else in the world, Amsterdam switched to Housing First several years ago. FEANTSA magazine [says](https://www.feantsa.org/download/amsterdam-reaction7098862638174835489.pdf) that “ever since 2015, Housing First has been the standing city-wide policy for solving homelessness in Amsterdam”. Like all articles of this type, it mentions how this has been proven to solve all problems and surely homelessness will stop existing any moment now (in fact, it’s stayed the same). How do we square San Fransicko’s story with this story? Amsterdam solved its problems by doing the opposite of Housing First in the 90s, then decided to switch to Housing First? I don’t know, maybe they just switched from a policy that works well in real life, for one that doesn’t work but sounds good on paper. Many such cases! On the other hand, Amsterdam continues to shelter all its homeless and not have tent cities, which I guess is most of what this policy package promises. Conclusion: San Fransicko’s description of Amsterdam solving its drug and crime problems matches the other sources I found, although I’m confused about how much harm reduction was involved. I can’t tell if it solved homelessness in the 90s, but it seems to have unsolved it shortly thereafter, in the sense that there are still many homeless people. Still, it continues to successfully shelter all its homeless people and avoid having them sleep on streets. ## Claim 10: San Fransicko Doesn’t Support “Sweeping Institutionalization” Of The Mentally Ill All of this started when I [wrote about California governor candidates](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates?s=w). My post described Shellenberger as opposing suboxone treatment and supporting “sweeping institution” of the mentally ill. A commenter quickly pointed out that I was wrong about suboxone (Shellenberger supports it when appropriate), and I quickly corrected that. But Shellenberger said on Twitter I was also wrong about the institutionalization claim: Now I have read the book, and it’s three straight chapters of saying that deinstitutionalization was bad and we need to institutionalize the mentally ill more. I’m sure Shellenberger isn’t deliberately lying here. I’m sure he thinks that the increased institutionalization that he wants somehow fails to qualify as “sweeping”. But he has exactly the same position that I’ve argued against again and again: deinstitutionalization was bad, the pet project of a few ACLU attorneys driven by fanaticism and nothing else. In the end it amounted only to trans-institutionalization, ie moving the mentally ill from psych hospitals into jails. Therefore we should make involuntary commitment easier. Some quotes to demonstrate he believes this: > The tragic irony is that many of the people who had drawn attention to the poor conditions in mental hospitals had hoped to mobilize the public to increase funding for better care in them, not shut them down entirely […] Idealism and ideology had triumphed over pragmatism and reason. Between 1948 and 1962, the mental health center that reformers had pointed to as the model had not prevented a single case of mental illness or even treated a single individual with schizophrenia or other major psychiatric disorders. As a result, notes a historian, “The majority of lives were little different than they had had while hospitalized . . . and a significant number were considerably worse off.” Some mental health reformers regretted what they had done. Weird way to describe de-institutionalization if you support it. > In his memoir, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown writes, “I discovered factors—some bureaucratic, some political—working in a kind of evil synthesis with each other that really prevented the long-term homeless from entering the [mental institution] system. Backing this up was a collection of so-called activists with heavy political clout who absolutely believed (and still believe) that homeless people should have a right to live on the street. They believed that homeless people had an absolute right to do everything they were doing, no matter how harmful to themselves or to the rest of the citizenry.” > > Susan agrees. “California is really one of the worst states when it comes to taking care of seriously mentally ill,” she said. “I think a lot has to do with civil liberties. It’s really ingrained in the culture.” Some would say that quoting people calling a thing “an evil synthesis” and “harmful”, and the state that does the thing as “one of the worst states” is evidence that a person does not like that thing. Also, this isn’t how people usually talk about civil liberties when they support them. > While the ACLU is powerful, there is a growing movement for reform comprising natural, if seemingly unlikely, allies: psychiatrists, street doctors, police officers, and civil rights leaders. Relationships are emerging between doctors and police. And there is growing bipartisan support in both liberal and conservative states for getting the seriously mentally ill the care they need. > > Dr. Thomas Insel, Gavin Newsom’s mental health advisor, said that New York provided better mental health services and that doing so was enough to overcome ACLU opposition to greater use of involuntary care. Doesn’t seem like the way someone would talk about this growing movement if they opposed it. > In their reflective moments, I found that many progressives agreed that more involuntary treatment is needed. I asked progressive Berkeley homelessness advocate Boona Cheema, whose son was mentally ill and committed suicide, if we used conservatorships enough. “No, we don’t,” she said. “Somebody comes in who has been walking naked in the streets and is manic, and you take them in and then you let them out two days later. Come on. They haven’t even been stabilized!” Agreed with whom? With him? Doesn’t that sound like he’s admitting he thinks more involuntary treatment is needed? > In early 2020 I asked two ACLU representatives about their organization’s position toward involuntary psychiatric treatment as an alternative to incarceration for the mentally ill who break the law. “We support the Housing First model, not involuntary treatment,” said ACLU attorney Jamie Crook, “which has proven to be ineffective and has violated liberties without keeping people off the streets.” Said her colleague Eve Garrow, “All of the research to date shows that coercive or involuntary outpatient treatment is no more effective and sometimes less effective than voluntary treatment. We’re very much against it.” > > But comparing voluntary to involuntary treatment isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Two different groups of people are being compared, those who admit they have a problem and those who do not. Everybody would prefer 100 percent voluntary treatment. But the fact that involuntary treatment may be less effective than voluntary treatment is not an argument against it, since it might be a better alternative than incarceration, homelessness, or crime. […] > > For Mizner and the ACLU, the mentally ill are too impaired to be held accountable for breaking the law but not impaired enough to justify the same kind of treatment we provide to other people suffering mental disabilities, such as dementia. Understanding this, and the power of the ACLU in progressive cities and states such as San Francisco and California, goes a long way toward understanding the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homelessness crisis. Shellenberger sure does hold a lot of Socratic dialogues with the ACLU trying to pick holes in their arguments against sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill, for someone who supposedly agrees with them! > “There’s a provision that says Medicaid will now pay for beds in psychiatric hospitals,” explained Snook. “Medicaid (Title 19 of the Social Security Act) is a federal health care program for the poor that reimburses states [for] about 50 percent of the cost of care for people enrolled in it. It is an important source of revenue for useful outpatient programs and provides $30 billion to help the mentally ill. It’s a no-brainer, but California is hemming and hawing. They don’t want to involuntarily hospitalize. But it’s self-defeating because you end up with mentally ill [people] in jail because a bed isn’t available.” Now not wanting to involuntarily hospitalize people is “hemming and hawing” - sure, this is an interview subject and not Shellenberger himself, but most of the people he talks to is like this, and he never challenges this in the same way he challenges the ACLU. > Lack of legal tools to impose involuntary care has made some parents of the seriously mentally ill desperate enough to support the arrest of their own children. This is sad and I have seen it happen - but writing about in these terms sure sounds like someone who supports more legal tools to impose involuntary care. > Much of what we call “deinstitutionalization” was really trans-institutionalization. The Los Angeles County Jail has more mentally ill people than every hospital in the country and nearly more than any other institution. Every article supporting institutionalization uses some version of this statistic - [here’s my 2016 essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/) arguing against it. It puts things into such sharp relief - why bother stopping involuntarily forcing mentally ill people up in the hospital, it asks, if they’re just going to get locked up in jail anyway? Shellenberger adds a grammatical ambiguity; I originally parsed his “every hospital in the country” as meaning “combined”, but this would be false, so charitably he is trying to say that LA County Jail has more than any single hospital. LA County Jail has 15,000 inmates; the largest psych hospital in the country has 1,400 patients. So if 10% of LA jail inmates had mental illnesses, this would beat the hospital. But NIMH says 20% of all Americans have mental illnesses, and 6% have serious mental illnesses. Is the definition of “mental illness” Shellenberger is using here closer to NIMH’s “mental illness” or “serious mental illness”? He just says “mental illness” and doesn’t explain. But he cites a book called Bedlam, which itself cites a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center. Do they mean something closer to NIMH’s “mental illness” or “serious mental illness”? You can find more information at my linked essay, but the short answer is that TAC describes itself as looking at “serious mental illness” but their definition is somewhat different from NIMH’s and probably not commensurable with it. It doesn’t matter anyway, because prisoners aren’t fully representative of the general population; just to give one example, they tend to be young, and young people from 18-25 have (as per NIMH) a 10% serious mental illness rate. That means that even if prisoners are no more likely to be seriously mentally ill than the general 18-25 population as per NIMH, Shellenberger’s “more mentally ill people in LA County Jail than in every hospital in the country” statistic is true! (I’m putting my finger on the scales here; men have a lower mental illness rate than women, so if you tried to find a true synthetic control for the average prisoner it might be lower than 10%. But add in poverty and it might be higher again! Who knows? Not Shellenberger, who didn’t do anything of the sort!) People see this statistic and think “Well, why bother giving mentally ill people rights, they’ll all just end up in jail anyway.” But the statistic is totally compatible with the mentally ill being no more criminal (and criminals being no more mentally ill) than anyone else! I don’t believe that’s literally true. I do believe that people in LA jail have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population. But I’m less sure if they have a higher rate of mental illness than eg graduate students, who [have depression at 6x the rate of the general population](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/06/new-study-says-graduate-students-mental-health-crisis). And if someone argued that it was a waste to shut down the old mental institutions, because we’re just “trans-institutionalizing” all the mentally ill from psych wards to graduate schools, then people would notice the flaws in that argument right away. If I sound angry about this, it’s because the old mental institutions were really, really bad. I’ve reviewed books about this before: > [Cramer] frankly discusses the “regimented, often hopeless conditions of state mental hospitals”, talks about a hospital in Alabama where “care was worse than simply inadequate: one psychiatrist for 5000 patients; astonishingly low funding for clothing, food and upkeep of the buildings”, studies showing that institutions never actually got patients’ signatures on the forms that were supposed to waive their rights to court hearings. > > [He] describes the case of Edna Long, who was hospitalized for “public drunkenness” and “permanently hospitalized in 1952. As Ennis tells the tale, Long received no treatment during the next fifteen years, but was kept busy working at menial jobs in the hospital. After the death of her husband in 1960, the state hospital had her declared incompetent, and seized her assets to pay for her care. Then, they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). Once Long had become too physically ill to continue working, the hospital suddenly found her “competent to manage her own affairs” and released her, to a life of elderly poverty. Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.” I have talked to nurses who used to work at these institutions. They sound kind of like death camps. There was often minimal interest in treatment (understandable, as most treatments back then didn’t work). Staff habitually abused patients physically, sexually, and emotionally. The “due process” for getting people into them was a joke, and people who were inconvenient to their families were often committed under false pretenses and kept in abominable conditions for the rest of their lives. At their height, these institutions housed 500,000+ people, a national tragedy on a scale matched only by mass incarceration and slavery. My impression is that winding them down was a straight victory for human flourishing. People keep coming up with arguments why they were good actually, and the arguments are always circumstantial and low quality. They’re either pure ecological fallacies - pointing out that prison populations increased around the same time psych ward populations decreased, without mentioning the whole history of lead poisoning and increasing sentencing strictness. Or they’re the dumb LA County Jail statistic which would be true even if mental illness and crime were completely uncorrelated. You’re allowed to believe circumstantial evidence if you want. You’re even allowed to support easier psych commitment. I honestly go back and forth on this. I’ve had some of my patients ruin their lives by becoming psychotic, in ways that I might have been able to solve if it was easier to involuntarily commit them. So I get it! Involuntary psych hospitalization is a terrible thing, but like imprisonment, it’s a terrible thing that sometimes proves necessary, and reasonable people can disagree on how hard to prioritize avoiding it vs. avoiding the problems it solves. But I would be much happier if Shellenberger took a second between his denunciations of the people who ended 1950s-style psych commitment to admit the ways that it was a moral atrocity, or talk about how we could be sure that a modern policy of involunary hospitalization would do better. If you believe in increased institutionalization of the mentally ill, admit it and defend it! Don’t make me read your whole book to find out that in fact you’re in favor of it after all! Then I’ll be really annoyed and probably review the rest of it more harshly than it deserves! Conclusion: When I described Shellenberger as supporting sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill, I was referring to exactly the set of policies he advocates in his book. The description linked to [my review of](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/) [My Brother Ron](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/), which talks about exactly the set of policies described in San Fransicko. I will be editing my Mistakes page to clarify that this was not a mistake, and that it was a meta-mistake to list it on the Mistakes page originally. ## Book Review: San Fransicko a. That was fun. Time to review the actual book! The meat of San Fransicko is claims and stories like the ones above, presented in an unabashedly polemic style. It gets rounded out by interviews with current and former homeless people, drug addicts, social workers, and scientists, many of whom have fascinating stories and most of whom agree with Michael Shellenberger. I found the factual parts of the book very helpful in countering the one-sided narrative presented by the popular media. In a second, I’m going to criticize Shellenberger, but [I feel bad about it](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/03/unspoken-ground-assumptions-of-discussion/). When the media presents a propagandist one-sided narrative, somebody needs to come in and set the facts straight. If they do it with perfect rationalist virtue, it tends to look like a long list of contradictory studies and statistics. The media says “every human being who has ever lived except for Hitler agrees that Housing First solves all problems!” Suppose you write a book saying something like “actually, five studies say Housing First had a small positive effect on this problem, three studies say it had a small negative effect, and two studies say it was neutral”. The average citizen reads the media and concludes Housing First is perfect and amazing, then reads you and concludes that something something studies whatever. In the end they settle on something like “it’s perfect and amazing, but there’s some kind of asterisk after this and maybe more studies are needed”. If you want to actually shake them out of the propaganda, you need to go further and declare confidently that Housing First is actually bad. Michael Shellenberger does this, and in a moment I’ll blame him, but I want to stress that he’s less bad than the mainstream media he’s criticizing. He is taking swings at an omnipresent orthodoxy of creepily consistent spin and bias, while also sometimes stretching the truth himself. So now, having given all those caveats - this book is not a good guide to the truth on complicated social science questions. It avoids actual lies, while presenting one side of a two-sided case, sometimes so much so that I feel comfortable characterizing it as misrepresentation. As long as there are two scientists in the world who agree with San Fransicko, it’s “Here’s what scientists say…”. If there is one statistic that supports a point and five that oppose it, you can guess which one the book brings up. Aside from its polemic, it’s also a guide to recent San Francisco political history. In that role, it’s great. It clearly has an axe to grind, as long as you remember that, it has some amazing stories. b. The list of Claims above doesn’t showcase this, but aside from social science and political history, this is also a book of moral philosophy. Shellenberger follows Viktor Frankl, the humanist psychotherapist who wrote about the search for personal meaning (also the guy credited with the quip about a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to match the Statue of Liberty on the East). There’s a lot of writing on Victimology (capital V, presented as a religion) and how it contrasts with Frankl’s ethos of meaning and responsibility. DALL-E2: “A giant Statue Of Responsibility, standing in a city harbor”. I myself prefer civic monuments that look less like Sauron, but tastes may differ. I don’t really have a strong opinion on this. I can think of ways that people are victims and it’s important to acknowledge that and treat them appropriately, and also ways that taking responsibility and not wallowing in victimhood is psychologically healthy and important. Probably San Francisco progressives are too far to the victimology end of the scale and could benefit from taking Shellenberger’s thoughts on the matter seriously. I still feel conflicted on this without really being able to verbalize why. Maybe something like: these are profound psychological truths, but their failure mode is to be reduced to preachiness and haranguing. And in a book called San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, there’s almost no way not to have them sound like preachiness and haranguing. It’s like how calling out injustice and highlighting the cruelty of those who ignore the less fortunate is all nice and well when Victor Hugo does it - but if the book is by Rachel Maddow, I am just going to skip those parts. (and yet if I ignore anyone who gives me an important message, just because they’re associated with the kind of people who tend to do that kind of thing, I will have closed myself off to a lot of morally important communication. A puzzle.) c. San Fransicko also briefly confronts libertarians, who it treats as allied with progressives on these issues (as if progressives would accept alliances with the likes of us!) Still, its confrontation is not unfair. If we reject the extreme-maybe-strawman leftist view that drug addicts and the like are complete victims of their own circumstances who never made any bad choices, then the question arises: given that they are making bad choices, should they be allowed to do so? Shellenberger says no: using hard drugs is a bad enough choice that it’s worth enforcing (some) anti-drug laws and (softly) forcing treatment on addicts who can’t overcome their addictions themselves. A libertarian who accepts neither the strawman-leftist denial of agency nor Shellenberger’s principled willingness to use force here has to say . . . what? That it’s okay for these people to die slowly (sometimes not so slowly) because that’s what they chose? When it seems obvious that, given a little push, so many of them would choose something different? A confession: I sometimes use substances I’m not supposed to. Nothing as bad as the sob stories in San Fransicko - “research chemicals”, not speed or fentanyl. But still, I see the Abstracted Will Of The American People saying it knows better than me what substances I’m allowed to take, and I say no, you’re wrong. Is it hypocritical of me to then join a coalition saying we know better than some homeless crack addict what substances he should be allowed to take? I mean, I am mostly right when I defy the will of the people (I have learned useful things, and haven’t yet come to real harm), and the homeless person is wrong (he is a homeless crack addict). But on the Outside View, wanting to institute a law I fully intend to break - where I would get enraged if it were applied against me personally - seems somewhat hypocritical. I’m even more torn on the other civil rights question the book confronts, whether homeless people who don’t like shelters should be allowed to camp in tents. The libertarian reluctance to provide free health care has a very understandable justification: it wasn’t the government or the taxpayers who made you sick, so they have no obligation to make you healthy again. But [ten thousand years ago](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/), before there were governments or private property at all, anyone could sleep wherever they wanted, without having to work forty hour weeks to pay money to landlords, or limiting themselves to a few shelters. If the government bans people from sleeping on land, that’s making them worse than if the government didn’t exist at all; it’s a violation of their pre-existing rights. Some amount of this is unavoidable if you accept private property. But the idea that people can’t be anywhere at all, and must agree to be warehoused in a crowded and unpleasant shelter, seems like another, much higher level of imposition. The way I cut through both these problems is to have a high tolerance for people doing what they want, but a low tolerance for them impinging on the rights of others. I’m fine with a compromise where people can camp on public land, but if they start harassing people or piling up trash, the government can take action. This probably means Shellenberger and I agree on most real-world cases, but I remain invested in the tiny sliver of moral difference between our positions. d. Along with all the problems and preaching, San Fransicko offers solutions. These won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this far: they’re basically the Amsterdam plan presented earlier. Break up open-air drug markets. Force addicts into rehab by threatening prison sentences for noncompliance. Ban camping on streets and force the homeless into shelters. Offer permanent housing when appropriate, but make it contingent on good behavior. Have a strong psychiatric system with ability to commit people who need it, and enforced outpatient treatment when appropriate. Would these work? I’m pretty sure they would work well for housed people and the city as a whole. Homeless people would no longer block the streets and assault passers-by; they would be safely out of sight in shelters or in mental institutions. A new generation of tough DAs would crack down on crime. Stores could reopen, and citizens could walk the streets without fear. It’s hard for me to imagine this not working. So the remaining question is: would this be better or worse for the homeless (and addicts, criminals, etc) themselves? The argument against: shelters, mental institutions, and prisons are all really bad (see above). The argument in favor: mental illness and drug abuse are also really bad, and maybe being in these kinds of institutions (or being threatened with them) could help people seek treatment. Then their lives would be better, they could get out of the institutions, and they could be happier than if they were left to their own devices. I think this could be true, but I am skeptical. The dream is to be so tough on crime that criminals pre-emptively give up and you never have to deploy your draconian punishments. But the history of the past few decades of mass incarceration show that, although this happens a little, enough people keep doing crime that you very much do have to deploy your draconian punishments and then you end up with millions of people in prison. While some of these people find God and get better, many others become even more hardened into the criminal lifestyle or just sort of rot away. I have worked in several mental institutions and although I think we do good work and some patients benefit, I would not describe us as being super-great at getting the most severe cases to the point where they can be productive members of society again. This is also my experience with drug rehabs. They are very helpful to some people, but the majority of studies [struggle to find any effect](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4752879/?utm_source=timminstoday.com&utm_campaign=timminstoday.com&utm_medium=referral) when the justice system forces people into them. So without wanting to say that this wouldn’t happen at all, I’m not sure it would outweigh the real moral cost of these programs. Suppose that in fact, San Fransicko’s policies would be worse for the underclass, but better for everyone else. Does that make them good or bad? I know the answer we’re supposed to give: it’s callous to care more about rich people’s comfort than about poor people’s freedom. But there are a lot more non-homeless people than homeless people, and a lot more people who buy things lawfully than shoplifters, etc. Does it actually balance out? Probably not through crime. The average person isn’t victimized by crime very often. There are about 1000 robberies a year in San Francisco (I think this is like mugging?), and another 1000 assaults. There are about 7000 homeless people - not all of them are criminals or addicts, but presumably there are a lot of criminals/addicts with houses, so let’s say a total of 20,000 people in this group. For the sake of argument, stricter policies will make half of them find God, and the other half will need to be forced into shelters/prisons/hospitals. And for the sake of argument, let’s say this ends all violent crime in San Francisco. You’d be institutionalizing 10,000 people a year, to prevent 2000 violent crimes a year. Even accepting that violent crimes are traumatizing and really bad, this doesn’t seem very utilitarian - being the victim of a violent crime would have to be 5x as bad as being forced to spend a year in an institution. Maybe this is thinking about it wrong. Being in crime-filled scary ghettos really negatively affects people’s quality of life. If “cleaning up the city” removed half of the quality-of-life difference between poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, that would be a really big deal for a lot of poor people. I think this would matter a lot - that most of the damage from urban dysfunction isn’t overt crime. It’s litter, graffiti, literal broken windows, parks that smell like marijuana and are strewn with used needles. People blasting loud music in public places or residential streets at all hours of the night. People staying away from mass transit transportation or public parks or any public spaces at all because they know they’ll be yelled at and harassed or just have to deal with a low-grade miasma of disgust over everything, preventing a real Jane-Jacobs-style civic life from ever taking shape. Class segregation, because anyone who can get out of the dysfunctional areas is desperate to do that. The fall of civic pride, because cities get hard to be proud of. If there are 100,000 San Franciscans who live in bad areas, and “cleaning up the cities” improved their quality of life 10%, and institutionalization lowers 10,000 people’s quality of life by 50%, that could . . . potentially work out? (I think the big assumption here that worries me the most is that homeless/hardened criminals/addicts are responsible for most of the noise/litter/graffiti/minor crime/quality-of-life decrease, as opposed to just ordinary people who are jerks. I’m not sure how much institutionalizing the worst 10,000 people would or wouldn’t improve the inner cities.) Also, what about NIMBYism? People have cogently argued that many of our worst problems - from high housing prices to declining technological progress - are downstream of our decision to stop building dense cities and walkable neighborhoods. But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in. The reason we don’t have better public transportation in the Bay Area is that people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area - and the reason people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area is that they weren’t born yesterday, and they’ve seen what other BART stations and the areas around them are like. If the government proved to citizens that it was capable of keeping cities liveable, maybe they wouldn’t resist cities and transit so hard, and then that would cause a lot of downstream improvements. I have to admit - I talk a good utilitarian talk on this, but I don’t know if I live up to my ideals. An addictionologist interviewed in San Fransicko heaps contempt on well-off liberals who get the benefits of virtue-signaling while externalizing the costs onto poor people in bad areas: > [You] sit in the suburbs and feel smug about the fact that you oppose the war on drugs and have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard. But you don’t have homeless people taking a crap on your front stoop every day or [have] all your packages stolen every single day So I imagine - what if I lived in the worst parts of SF, had people crap on my front steps every day, had all my packages stolen, and (by the bounds of this hypothetical) wasn’t allowed to move to the suburbs, ever? I think I would last two weeks before I sacrificed all of my principles on the altar of “less human feces, please”. (an obvious next step would be to put myself in the shoes of a criminal who doesn’t want to go to prison, but here I have more trouble sympathizing - I would simply not commit crimes.) This thought experiment pushes me closer to Shellenberger’s side of the aisle. I still want to cling to the hope that there is some way to do this which lets the people who aren’t bothering anyone else be left alone. But something has to give. e. The Native Americans had a saying: never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins and you’re sure he’s not going to be your governor. Now that Shellenberger has [lost the primary](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-gavin-newsom-california-primary-election-governor-results), I am happy to judge him. My judgment is: mixed bag. San Fransicko does a good job skewering orthodoxies on some important topics. It thinks hard about them and often has good ideas. It looks at a problem that needs solving, and proposes plans that would probably solve it. When I dislike its policy prescriptions, they’re usually on complicated ethical questions where principled people can disagree. The main virtue I cannot ascribe it is evenness. The old saying talks about the man who “uses statistics the way a drunk uses a streetlight; for support rather than illumination”. San Fransicko is the equivalent of [that dim blue lighting](https://fortune.com/2018/06/25/retailers-blue-lights-bathrooms-opiods/) you sometimes see in nightclub bathrooms: so focused on preventing injection drug use that it sacrifices the ability to illuminate anything at all. It makes me mad. This book was so close to the level where I would feel comfortable recommending it to friends. But in the end it does not clear that bar. I kind of want to yell at Shellenberger. I could do it, I think. His office is two blocks from mine. Probably I will run into him on the street one day. I could accost him and start shouting. But it wouldn’t help: this happens to him every day already, and he’s learned to completely tune it out. I could try violence. Surely that would get his attention, right? But no, this happens to him all the time too, and would probably just earn me a footnote in his next book. Maybe I could clarify. “THIS VIOLENCE I’M DOING IS BECAUSE OF THE BOOK YOU WROTE. I’M ATTACKING YOU ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS!” But this, too, seems to be something he expects and is entirely prepared for. I’d just get a nod of the head, and a paragraph about me in the sequel. We Bay Areans are a difficult breed to criticize. This explains a lot, if you think about it. San Fransicko tries its best to set us straight. But like a drug addict assaulting passers-by in the Tenderloin, it’s too unbalanced for its punches to land consistently.	Scott Alexander	59053420	Book Review: San Fransicko	acx
# Open Thread 229 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?). In this week’s news: 1: More salvos in AI scaling conversation: Jacob Buckman on [naive scaling](https://jacobbuckman.com/2022-06-14-an-actually-good-argument-against-naive-ai-scaling/) and on [failure cases](https://jacobbuckman.com/2022-06-15-the-one-where-i-rebut-gary-marcus/). 2: Thanks to everyone who said hi to me at Solstice yesterday. And sorry if I was a little too argumentative sometimes - I’m trying to get better!	Scott Alexander	60242244	Open Thread 229	acx
# Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ## Introduction Fusion is the power which lights the stars. It is the source of all elements heavier than hydrogen in the universe. Wouldn't it be great if we could use and control this power here on Earth? I predict that we will get fusion [1] before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance. The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists [2], can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read. Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball. ## Why Don't We Have Fusion Already? There is an old joke: > Fusion is 30 years away and always will be. What happened? Why has fusion failed to deliver on its promise in the past? By the 1970s, it was apparent that making fusion power work is possible, but very hard. Fusion would require Big Science with Significant Support. The total cost would be less than the Apollo Program, similar to the International Space Station, and more than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Department of Energy put together a request for funding. They proposed several different plans. Depending on how much funding was available, we could get fusion in 15-30 years. How did that work out? Figure 1: Oof. Along with the plans for fusion in 15-30 years, there was also a reference: ‘fusion never'. This plan would maintain America's plasma physics facilities, but not try to build anything new. Actual funding for fusion in the US has been less than the ‘fusion never' plan. The reason we don't have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research. ## Fusion Basics Fusion involves ‘burning' lighter elements to make heavier elements. The sun gets its energy by burning hydrogen into helium. We are trying to do something similar [3]. The easiest fusion reaction is burning deuterium and tritium to make helium. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen with one proton & one neutron and tritium is an isotope of hydrogen with one proton & two neutrons. Helium has two protons and two neutrons, so one free neutron is produced by the reaction as well. Figure 2: The D-T fusion reaction. This reaction can be written as: 12D +13T 24He +01n . The subscript is the number of protons that each element has and the superscript is the number of protons + neutrons [4]. Both of these numbers are conserved: if you add up the total superscript on the left, it must equal the total superscript on the right. Several other fusion reactions are sometimes discussed as alternatives to deuterium-tritium fusion. All of them are at least several times more difficult, so they are unlikely to be the first fuel we use to get fusion. Maybe someday we'll switch to deuterium-deuterium fusion or something else, but for now, the emphasis is on what's easiest. What do you need to get a fusion reaction going? Think about the chemical reactions in combustion. You need to get the fuel to a high enough temperature, and then chemical reactions occur that release energy. Fusion is similar, but with much larger temperatures and energies. Combustion occurs at a temperature of about 1000 Kelvin [5] and each reaction releases about 10 electron volts of energy. Fusion occurs at about 100 million Kelvin and each reaction releases about 10 million electron volts. Along with a high enough temperature, you also need to have a high enough density and confinement time. Density is important because fusion requires a collision between a deuterium nucleus and a tritium nucleus. When the density is higher, stuff is more likely to run into each other. We also need to confine the fuel and the energy long enough for these collisions to occur. We don't want the particles to leave the reactor without fusing. If the energy leaks out too quickly, then the fuel will cool down too quickly to burn. Multiply these three quantities, density, temperature, and confinement time [6], to get the plasma triple product. Lawson's criterion states that, if the triple product is high enough, then you will get fusion. We also measure the success of fusion using Q. Q is the ratio of the amount of energy you put into the fuel to the amount of energy produced by fusion. News articles often focus on Q=1, or ‘scientific breakeven' [7], when you get as much energy out of the fuel as you put in. Other significant milestones are Q=5, ‘burning', and Q=∞, ‘ignition', when the fusion sustains itself without any external heating. Q is entirely determined by the triple product. To get Q=1 for D-T fusion, you need a triple product of 51021 keV s / m3. Getting a large Q is the goal of fusion science. Getting a large triple product is how we achieve that goal. We can use the triple product to measure progress towards fusion. ## Have We Made Progress? How much progress have we made towards fusion? Figure 3: This looks great ! The fusion triple product has grown exponentially. It has doubled every 1.8 years, which is even faster than Moore's Law. The best triple product we've gotten is five orders of magnitude better than what we started with in 1970. But wait. This data only goes up to 2000. If we extrapolate the trend line, we would have built a commercial fusion reactor in 2005. The world is not awash in fusion energy, so this trend clearly did not continue. There has been little progress towards a larger triple product since 2000. Why did this trendline stop? Why do I think that this is about to get started again? I will answer these questions, but first, a few words on how we've made progress so far. ## Plasma Basics Fusion occurs at such high temperatures that everything is ionized: The electrons and nuclei cannot stick together as atoms and instead move independently. Matter in this state is called a ‘plasma' [8]. Plasma is by far the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are made of plasma, as well as the low density matter in the space between stars. When a fusion plasma comes in contact with anything solid (or liquid or even gas), either the solid will vaporize or the plasma will cool down. Both of these are very bad for achieving controlled fusion on Earth. We can't just put our fusion plasma in a container. How do we bottle the core of the sun? With a magnetic field. The electrons and ions in a fusion plasma are charged. Charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines and will not move freely perpendicular to the magnetic field. This confines the plasma in two dimensions. To confine the plasma in the third dimension, loop the magnetic field around in the shape of a doughnut [9]. The particles can move around the doughnut, but stay confined within it. Figure 4: A charged particle spiraling around a doughnut-shaped magnetic field. This is still not quite enough. Charged particles will drift in a curved magnetic field, which causes them to leak out the outer side of the doughnut. We can solve this problem by making the magnetic field twist, like a French cruller. Particles near the outer edge, drifting outwards, will follow the magnetic field line around to the inner edge, where they will drift back towards the core. The easiest way to make the magnetic field twist is to run a current through the plasma. You don't need to (and can't) run a wire there. Plasmas are full of charged particles that can move. When more of the electrons move in one direction around the doughnut then in the other direction, it will create a current. So a fusion experiment should (1) create an extremely strong magnetic field pointing around the doughnut, (2) heat deuterium and tritium to 100 million degrees inside the doughnut, and (3) drive a current around the doughnut. The magnetic field can be created by superconducting electromagnetic coils which go around and through the doughnut. Turning on the coils provides some initial heating and current, but to sustain it, you need to inject accelerated particles or waves from the side. This kind of fusion experiment is called a tokamak [10]. Figure 5: The coils and magnetic fields of a tokamak. ## Small, Medium, and Large Experiments I find it helpful to classify fusion experiments by their size. This is not standardized, so different people will classify them differently. The larger the experiment, the farther the particles have to move (perpendicular to the magnetic field) to get from the core to the outer edge. Larger experiments inherently have a longer confinement time. Small fusion experiments are sometimes called ‘tabletop' experiments. This doesn't always mean that they fit on a tabletop, but they can fit in the physics building of a research university without too much disruption. The doughnut has a radius of about 1 m. The support requirements (power supply, control systems, measuring equipment, etc.) aren't too different from other physics labs. Figure 6: The first tokamak, T-1, did fit on a tabletop. Medium fusion experiments have a radius of about 1.5 - 3 m. They require their own facility for all of their support systems, but they typically fit in a single building. One prominent medium experiment is JET [11]. Figure 7: Someone inside JET. They have to wear a protective suit because tritium is nasty stuff. Large fusion experiment means ITER [12], an experiment currently under construction in southern France. ITER has a diameter of over 6 meters. The experiment itself has a five story building. Supporting buildings cover about 100 acres or 0.5 km2. Figure 8: Construction at ITER as of May 2021. ## ITER We can now answer some of our earlier questions. The reason why progress has stalled is because we did as much as we could do on medium experiments. No country has been willing to provide enough money to build its own large experiment. So the fusion community has been gathering money from all around the world for decades for a single project [13]. ITER is supported by Europe (EU + UK + Switzerland), the US (which withdrew in 1999 and rejoined in 2003 [14]), Russia, Japan, China, South Korea, and India. Figure 9: There are three people in this diagram. Can you find them? ITER is designed to get Q=10. Despite getting 10 times as much energy from fusion as we put into the plasma, ITER is not designed to get engineering breakeven. ITER is designed as an experiment, not as a power plant. There will be tons of measuring devices pointed inwards. There are four different ways to heat the plasma and drive the current. This all allows you to learn more, but it requires extra power and lowers the overall plant efficiency. ITER will be followed by a demonstration power plant, named DEMO [15]. A fully optimized power plant should be able to reach engineering breakeven as long as Q>5. This is why I chose Q=5 as my criterion for ‘getting fusion’. ITER is also testing multiple designs for the tritium breeding blanket. Tritium is expensive and radioactive, so you want to produce it on site. The D-T fusion reaction produces a neutron, which we want to absorb, so we can use it to produce tritium. ‘Breeding' is when we use a neutron to produce a more useful isotope. It is a ‘blanket' because it surrounds the entire plasma, keeping the neutrons from going anywhere else. The best reaction to produce tritium involves lithium-6: 36Li +01n 24He +13T . This reaction also releases energy, which increases the power produced by about 25%. The tritium breeding blanket needs to make this reaction occur as much as possible, to efficiently carry the heat away so it can be used to generate electricity, and to provide a way to extract the tritium produced. ITER is scheduled to begin their first experiments in 2025. Part of why I think that we are about to make rapid progress again is because we are finally getting a large experiment. There have been problems with ITER staying on schedule and under budget. This isn't surprising for a collaboration between governments representing over half the world's population. In 2014, ITER got a new director, recalculated its expected cost, and underwent a major restructuring. Since then, ITER has largely stuck to this schedule and budget. Recently, there has been a 6 month delay because the French nuclear agency did what nuclear regulatory agencies do best, but this has been the longest delay since 2014. It is still possible for ITER to fail. The biggest risk involves disruptions. Sometimes, the plasma in a tokamak becomes unstable and all of the plasma hits the wall at once. This could melt some extremely expensive equipment and take years to repair. If ITER cannot get disruptions under control, then it would be a failed experiment. This is especially challenging because pushing for higher Q makes disruptions more likely. ITER is planning on being extremely cautious: Experiments begin in 2025, but it won't operate at full capacity until 2035. ITER has been the focus of the fusion community now for decades. The Future of Fusion Energy similarly makes ITER the centerpiece of the book. ## Things. Have. Changed. ITER by itself is not enough to justify the high level of confidence I express at the start. When Parisi & Ball finished writing this book in April 2018, ITER was basically the only game in town. Since then, Things. Have. Changed. Historically, private fusion companies were almost entirely jokes or frauds. They make outlandish claims, use completely different designs so they can't build on the progress of Figure 3, and they can be safely ignored. For example, Lockheed Martin [16] claims that it will take them five years to build a prototype of a fusion power plant that will fit in a truck. They have yet to publish evidence that they have produced a fully ionized plasma. Maybe they're just being secretive, but their design has solid components in the plasma. That won't work. A new generation of private companies have surged into fusion. Leading the charge is Commonwealth Fusion Systems and their tokamak SPARC [17]. Recent advances in high temperature superconductors have been a game changer. They can produce a much stronger magnetic field which allows for better confinement in a smaller experiment. We should now be able to get Q=10 in a medium experiment, which costs ten times less than ITER [18] and is within the reach of private venture capital. Figure 10: Finding the person here is much easier. When the Department of Energy decided to close the third largest plasma experiment in the US, the MIT group which ran it found itself adrift. They founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2018 with a goal of getting fusion within 10 years [19]. Since then, they have built the first ever high temperature superconducting coil in 2019, released their engineering plans for SPARC in 2020, began construction in 2021, and plan on finishing construction in 2025. Commonwealth Fusion had just been founded when Parisi & Ball wrote in 2018. Now they're leading the race to fusion. Several other startups are following SPARC's strategy of using stronger magnetic fields to get fusion in a smaller experiment. They use a variety of designs. ## Alternative Designs To understand how the alternative designs are different, we need to make sure we understand the basic strategy for getting fusion in a tokamak. Let's run through it again: (A) We want to get lots of fusion reactions … … so we want a large triple product (density \* temperature \* confinement time). (B) The fusion plasma is too hot to touch solid objects … … so we put it in a magnetic bottle shaped like a doughnut. (C) The particles drift outwards, leaving the bottle … … so we twist the magnetic field with a current in the plasma. I will start with the alternatives that are most similar to a tokamak. For each one, I will list the best experiments that currently exist, where they're located, and the year they began operation. Tokamaks have been better researched than any other strategy. There are currently 10 medium tokamaks: * T-10 (Russia, 1975) * ASDEX (Germany, 1980) * JET (England, 1983) * JT-60 (Japan, 1985) * DIII-D (USA, 1986) * HL-2A (China, 2002) * EAST (China, 2006) * KSTAR (Korea, 2008) * WEST (France, 2016) * HL-2M (China, 2020) ### Plasma Shaping & Spherical Tokamaks All magnetically confined plasmas have the basic shape of a doughnut. But if you cut the doughnut in half and look at it end on, the cross sectional shape can be different. Early tokamaks had circular cross sections. JET was built with a cross section shaped like a ‘D': wider near the inner wall and narrower near the outer wall. This was done for structural reasons, but it also improved the performance of the plasma. Most tokamaks since then have had this shape. Spherical tokamaks have a taller height and smaller diameter than other tokamaks. They look more like a cored apple than like a doughnut. The main benefit of a spherical tokamak is that you can get a larger plasma density with a smaller magnetic field. The main drawback is that there is less room in the central column for everything that needs to go there. The best spherical tokamaks today are small, if you measure based on the radius, but medium if you measure based on the height. They are: * NSTX (USA, 1999) * MAST (England, 2000) Figure 11: A picture of the plasma inside MAST. We haven't explored other shapes very much. There might be one that works even better. There is currently a small experiment designed to look at as many shapes as possible: * TCV (Switzerland, 2002) ### Stellarators Stellarators differ from tokamaks at point (C). To twist the magnetic field, they use twisty coils outside the plasma instead of having a current in the plasma. Figure 12: Inside the LHD. The main benefit of stellarators is that they don't have disruptions. Disruptions are caused by the current in the plasma. If the plasma is already moving coherently, when things become unstable, that motion can be redirected into the wall. The plasma in a stellarator doesn't have a current and isn't moving. When it becomes unstable, it leaks heat slightly faster than normal until it cools down again. Stellarators also have the best name, look the coolest, and are my favorite. Figure 13: The layers of Wendelstein 7-X. The main drawback is that stellarators are harder to design and build. There are lots of ways for coils to be weird and twisty and you want to find the best one. You then have to manufacture complex 3D shapes with high precision. This makes them more expensive than similarly sized tokamaks. There are currently four medium stellarators: * TJ-II (Spain, 1997) * LHD (Japan, 1998) * Uragan-2 (Ukraine, 2006) * Wendelstein 7-X (Germany, 2015) ### Inertial Confinement Fusion This is a completely different strategy to get fusion, going all the way back to point (A). So far, to increase the triple product, we have mostly been increasing the confinement time. Unlike Magnetic Confinement Fusion, Inertial Confinement Fusion accepts a short confinement time and instead tries to increase the density. Start with a small pellet [20] which contains deuterium and tritium. Shine lots of lasers on it from all directions. For a moment, the pellet receives 1,000 times as much power as the entire US and implodes. The deuterium and tritium briefly become hot and dense enough to get fusion, before expanding again. Figure 14: The building layout for an inertial confinement experiment. The blue/red lines are the paths that the lasers follow before they enter the vacuum chamber (silver sphere on the right) where the pellet is located. Inertial confinement fusion experiments can also be used for [CLASSIFIED], so they get significant funding. Progress has been extremely rapid. They crossed Q=1 a few months ago. There are still some major challenges. While magnetic confinement fusion can be done in a steady state, this has to be done in distinct ‘shots'. Currently, they can do about 1 shot/day. To make a power plant, you would need to do about 1 shot/second. I chose to include 1 shot/second as part of my criterion for ‘getting fusion' if the experiment is not in a steady state. The best inertial confinement fusion experiment is at the boundary between medium and large, although those categories were designed for doughnut-shaped plasmas, not for banks of lasers: * NIF (USA, 2009) ## Players and Predictions Now that we have the strategies laid out, I will go through the groups that I think have a plausible path to fusion and make predictions for each one. I am only focusing on groups relevant for my headline prediction: Q>5 in steady state or with a shot frequency of 1/second before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I will also resolve this question to YES if anyone sells fusion power commercially, even if they don't meet my technical requirements. ### Government Tokamaks #### ITER ITER is still the biggest player in the field. They have the most money and the most people working to make it succeed. ITER moves slowly, but resolutely. * ITER gets fusion by 2035 (50%) or 2040 (70%). #### K-DEMO Most of the countries in ITER plan on making their own large demonstration power plant, after they see if ITER succeeds. South Korea is being more aggressive and will build their DEMO while ITER is still doing its early experiments. The construction should be complete by 2037. Success here is highly correlated with ITER's success. * K-DEMO gets fusion by 2040 (70%). #### CFETR China seems to be willing to spend more money on fusion than most other countries: 3 out of 5 new medium tokamaks since 2000 have been in China. They're planning on building a large tokamak like ITER in the 2030s and converting it into a DEMO in the 2040s. They don't have detailed plans yet, but they might have reliable funding. * CFETR gets fusion by 2040 (60%). #### STEP The United Kingdom has announced that it will not take part in Europe's EU-DEMO, planned for the 2040s. Instead, they will build a large spherical tokamak by 2040. I'm not convinced that this will happen, but it would be great if it does. * STEP gets fusion by 2040 (20%). ### Private Companies #### Commonwealth Fusion Systems / SPARC I've already told their story because they are the current leader. Everything has gone well so far. * SPARC gets fusion by 2025 (30%) or 2030 (70%). #### Renaissance Fusion Renaissance Fusion was founded in Grenoble, France in 2019. They are planning on building a stellarator that can get fusion by 2032. I can't tell you their cool ideas for manufacturing the coils because they still haven't published them yet. [21] * Renaissance gets fusion by 2035 (50%) or 2040 (70%). #### Type One Energy Type One Energy was founded in Wisconsin in 2020. They are planning on building a stellarator using Commonwealth Fusion's high temperature superconductors and 3D printing the steel supports for the coils. Their goal is fusion by 2031. * Type One gets fusion by 2035 (50%) or 2040 (70%). #### Tokamak Energy, Ltd. This is a slightly older company, founded in England in 2009. They originally managed a spherical tokamak experiment [22]. More recently, they decided to try to get fusion by 2030 using a medium experiment and high temperature superconductors. Spherical tokamaks are less well tested at this size and don't benefit as much from having a stronger magnetic field. * Tokamak Energy gets fusion by 2030 (10%) or 2035 (30%). #### Marvel Fusion Marvel Fusion was founded in Germany in 2019. They're working on inertial confinement fusion, which I have much less expertise in. Inertial confinement fusion has made rapid progress recently and they have recruited some good people, so they should have a chance. Some problems include not releasing a timeline and not planning on using D-T fuel. * Marvel gets fusion by 2035 (30%). #### Honorable Mention: Helion Helion is the most serious of the previous generation of fusion startups that I dismissed above. They are using an entirely different strategy from the rest of the fusion community. It is closer to Magnetic Confinement Fusion, but it does occur in discrete shots. There isn't anything obviously wrong with it, but they can't build on the progress of Figure 3. Instead, they're working on their own experimental program. They're on their 6th prototype, Trenta. It is a small experiment which can do 1 shot every 10 minutes. Their next experiment, Polaris, should be a medium experiment which can do 1 shot/second. They claim that it will get fusion by 2024. One good thing about Helion is that they have a more efficient way of directly converting the energy in the plasma into electricity. One bad thing is that they claim to be using helium-3 as a fuel. This is harder than D-T fusion [23] and it doesn't fully represent what they're planning. Their entire fuel cycle involves 50% D-D fusion, 25% D-T fusion, and 25% D-He3 fusion. Helion is also notable because they've gotten more private funding than any company other than Commonwealth Fusion Systems. I'm more skeptical. At least it seems unlikely that they will get fusion on their first medium experiment, especially since that requires improvements of multiple orders of magnitude in both triple product and shot frequency. They should expect to design an 8th experiment based on what they learn from Polaris. * Helion gets fusion by 2025 (5%) or 2030 (20%). ### Summary I hope that it is striking how many and how different the plausible paths to fusion are. From a physical standpoint, we have tokamaks, stellarators, spherical tokamaks, and inertial confinement. From an engineering standpoint, there are different superconductors for the coils, different manufacturing techniques, and more. From an institutional standpoint, we have public and private enterprises in seven different countries. In 2018, there was a single failure point: if ITER failed, it would delay fusion by decades. Now we can afford some failures. Because the players are so diverse, the failures are unlikely to all be correlated. Fusion is still hard. I am not predicting that any path to fusion has more than a 70% chance of success. But we only need one to succeed. Taken together, we can be confident that we will get fusion soon. I'm reminded of my thoughts on covid vaccines back in Spring 2020. There were lots of candidates, which were extremely different both biologically and institutionally. I don't know enough about vaccines to determine how likely any one was to succeed, but I took comfort in knowing that there were a lot of options. We only needed one to work well, and we ended up getting multiple. It is still possible for us not to get fusion by 2040. Maybe we never figure out how to deal with disruptions in tokamaks and all of the private companies fail. But it is also possible for multiple paths to succeed. ITER could end up being fifth to fusion. [24] ## Conclusion If you want to learn more about fusion, I highly recommend The Future of Fusion Energy. It discusses the fundamentals of fusion, plasma confinement, ITER, and the design of a fusion power plant in much more detail than I could here. Several topics that are tangentially related, such as other energy sources and nuclear proliferation, have overviews that I hope become common knowledge. There are also more specialized topics, like the history of fusion, what questions to ask a fusion startup to tell if it's legitimate, and why fusion is the only power we could use for interstellar travel that is currently theoretically possible. The final 3 pages are joke recipes for doughnuts, based on different strategies for getting fusion. The only things missing are the surprising new developments in private fusion that have occurred since the book was published. These new, diverse paths have made me much more confident that we will get fusion soon. When ITER was the only game in town, I predicted only a 50% chance of getting fusion by 2035 and a 70% chance by 2040. Now, those numbers are 80% and 90%, and we could get fusion a full decade sooner. It is time to start getting excited about fusion ! ## Endnotes [1]: By ‘get fusion’, I mean Q > 5 for a steady state experiment. If it is not steady state (e.g. inertial confinement fusion), then I also require a shot frequency of at least 1/second. Anyone selling fusion power to the grid also counts, even if they don't meet these technical requirements. [2]: My dad is a doctor, so that should give you some idea at how bad he is at math. [3]: The fusion reaction chain in the sun burns six protons (hydrogen nuclei) into helium-4, two protons, and two positrons over the course of five fusion reactions. What we do is simpler. [4]: The number of protons + neutrons is the mass of the atom in amu, while the number of protons is the charge of the atomic nucleus in units of e. The mass and charge can be measured directly, so we write them instead of the number of protons and the number of neutrons. [5]: This is an order of magnitude estimate. Fire occurs at a few hundred or a few thousand degrees Kelvin (or Celsius or Fahrenheit). [6]: In particular, the confinement time for the energy. The particles are always at least as well confined as the energy. When the particles leave, they take energy with them. Energy can also leave through light or various plasma waves. [7]: There is also ‘engineering breakeven', when you get more energy out of the entire power plant than you put in, and ‘economic breakeven', when you get more money out of the entire power plant than you put in. We need to get scientific breakeven first. [8]: This was named after blood plasma by Langmuir in 1928. He thought the electrons and ions moving in the plasma were like red and white blood cells moving in blood plasma. Everyone else thinks that the analogy is rather stretched. [9]: The mathematical proof that this shape must be a doughnut and cannot be anything like a sphere is called the Hairy Ball Theorem. Justin Ball modeled it with the top of his head. [10]: ‘Tokamak’ is a Russian acronym for тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками, which means ‘toroidal chamber with magnetic coils’. [11]: JET is an acronym for Joint European Torus. It is located in England as a thank you for British special forces helping to rescue a German plane being held hostage by terrorists in 1977. More recently, JET itself was held hostage as part of the Brexit negotiations. [12]: ITER used to be an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. We decided we didn't like that branding, so now it is Latin for ‘the way'. [13]: The fusion community has a long tradition of internationalism. We refused to take part in the Cold War and have collaborated across the Iron Curtain since 1958. I do wonder if we could have gotten more funding if we were trying to Beat the Russians instead of working with them. [14]: This isn't part of the official justification, but the US rejoined ITER to help convince Britain to join the Iraq War. Fusion projects are often used as prestige chips in international negotiations. [15]: DEMO never was an acronym, but we still write it like one. [16]: I don't want to do too much criticism of people aiming for Progress, even if I don't think they will be successful. At least criticizing Lockheed Martin is punching up. [17]: SPARC is a nested acronym for Smallest Possible ARC. ARC is an acronym for Affordable, Robust, Compact and is an Iron Man reference. [18]: Commonwealth has raised $2 billion so far, compared with ITER's price tag of $45 billion. [19]: This is a rare example when government cuts to research funding drives technological progress. These particular cuts ended up being reversed and Alcator C-Mod is still operating. [20]: About 1 mm in diameter. [21]: I know this because I might have gotten a job with them, but it didn't work out. I am not currently working for any of these groups. [22]: The largest tokamak currently operating in the US, DIII-D, is also managed by a private company, General Atomics, which gets most of its funding from the Department of Energy. [23]: D-He3 fusion requires a triple product about ten times larger than what is needed for D-T fusion, including about a five times higher temperature. D-D fusion works best at the same temperature as D-T fusion, but requires a triple product about fifty times larger. [24]: After SPARC, Type One Energy, Renaissance Fusion, and one of Tokamak Energy, Marvel, or Helion.	Scott Alexander	59941059	Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy	acx
# Peer Review: Nightmares I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, [Lorien Psychiatry](https://lorienpsych.com/). Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review. Please give me comments on typos, places where you disagree with my recommendations, extra things you think I should add, your personal stories about your own experiences, and comments on the overall organization and tone of the piece. --- Summary: Nightmares happen when the process of dream generation is biased by ambient stress - or sometimes for other reasons. Anything that decreases stress, increases comfort while sleeping, and deepens sleep quality will also improve nightmares, including colder, darker rooms, less indigestion, and treating any comorbid psychiatric or medical conditions. If that doesn’t work, several kinds of therapy - including Image Rehearsal Therapy, Systematic Desensitization, and Lucid Dreaming - may be helpful. Prazosin is the standard anti-nightmare drug, and can be taken at doses from 1 - 12 mg, but watch out for side effects. 1. What causes nightmares? Nobody really knows why we dream. Modern neuroscience suggests that the brain processes data by creating predictive models, then double-checking them against reality. We experience the predictive models, not reality - although the double-checking process is so fast that they usually match well enough to be the same for all practical purposes. When we can’t double-check with reality - for example because we're asleep and not receiving sense-data - then the predictive models go out of control and become essentially random. This results in us having kind of random experiences. Anxiety is a bias for the brain to interpret information in a threat-related manner. Instead of generating completely random data, the anxious brain, when deprived of sense-data, generates data with a bias towards threatening stimuli. A sufficiently threatened, stressed, or traumatized person will naturally have more threatening dreams. Other people have nightmares even when their overall mood is good and they have no history of trauma. I have no good explanation for this; it might be biological, or due to some kind of sleep problem. 2. How can I reduce nightmares through lifestyle changes? Dreams occur during REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness. Although it's natural to have some REM sleep, anything that prevents deep sleep and pushes you towards more light sleep instead will give you more (and worse) dreams. So: pain, discomfort, heat, caffeine, bright lights, alcohol, stimulant medications, a noisy environment, an uncomfortable bed. Of these, heat is [an especially common culprit](https://www.healthline.com/health/hot-weather-anxiety-dreams-ways-to-cool-down) . Use windows, fans, and A/C, but also consider getting lighter sheets, wearing less clothing, and taking off your socks (it's socks in particular a surprising amount of the time!). Digestion is another common culprit; try not to eat too soon before bedtime, and try not to eat foods that make you feel bloated and give you indigestion. Check your medications and supplements. Any stimulating medication can give you nightmares. But so can some antidepressants, sleeping pills, and almost anything else. Even humble melatonin can cause nightmares in susceptible people, as can (too much) of some B vitamins. If you're taking any of these, ask your doctor if it's okay to stop them for a week or two and see if your nightmares go away during that time. You have a circadian rhythm: a time when your body expects to be asleep. If that doesn't correspond to the time it's actually asleep, then sleep will be light and low-quality, in exactly the way that causes nightmares. The most common way this works is people sleep late into the morning, and find the last few hours of their sleep are filled with nightmares. If that happens to you, you might want to shift your bedtime earlier. Sometimes the nightmares will go away entirely. Other times people's circadian rhythms are disturbed, and going to sleep at (what other people would consider) a normal time causes nightmares. See [the section on melatonin](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/) for more. Your body has an optimal amount of muscle tension/relaxation it expects when sleeping. If this is off, you can have nightmares. You can relax your muscles more by exercising at different times, taking warm showers before bed, or doing progressive muscle relaxation exercises / meditation before sleep. Occasionally someone will have nightmares because they've done too many of these things and their muscles are overly relaxed. Sleep apnea is a condition where your airway closes while you’re sleeping, making you temporarily suffocate. You wake up before dying, but usually fall asleep again almost immediately without realizing this is happening. This puts a lot of stress on your body and makes you feel worse in many, many ways, but one of them is nightmares. Reasons to think you might have sleep apnea (a relatively common condition) include: being overweight, snoring, and feeling very tired when you wake up in the morning even though you got a full night sleep. If that’s you, and you also have nightmares, get tested for sleep apnea. If the apnea is treated, the nightmares will probably go away, and you’ll also feel much better in other ways. Finally, anything that makes you less stressed will reduce nightmares. If you're in a terrible job that you hate, quitting will reduce nightmares. If you're in a terrible relationship that you hate, breaking up will reduce nightmares. And so on to all the other categories of stressful things. 3. What therapies and medications are good ways to reduce nightmares? Any therapy or medication that helps with anxiety or trauma will probably help with nightmares. That means typical anxiety medications (except that some of these, like SSRIs, can cause nightmares as a side effect in unlucky people) and typical trauma-focused therapies. I would recommend that anyone who thinks they’re suffering from trauma (eg PTSD) try a trauma-focused therapy like EMDR before trying to address nightmares directly, unless the nightmares are overwhelmingly worse than all their other trauma symptoms. But in terms of treating nightmare specifically, here’s the headline image of [Randomized controlled trials of psychological and pharmacological treatments for nightmares: A meta-analysis](https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.smrv.2012.06.001): Edited for readability The numbers in the blue box are effect size, ie how good the treatment is. Higher numbers are better, 0 means it doesn’t work at all, and negative means it makes things worse. We’ll look at a few of these further: Desensitization and LDT, the two highest-performing therapies. IRT, the best-studied therapy. And prazosin, the highest-performing medication. 3.1: What are therapies for nightmare disorder? In systematic desensitization therapy, you and your therapist pick out scary elements of your nightmares. For example, if you always dream of being chased by wolves, that would be the element. Then the therapist asks you to imagine relatively weak, innocuous version of the scene while awake, and teaches you relaxation techniques you can use to defuse the emotional impact. Once the weak versions lose all emotional impact, you move on to stronger versions. Eventually, everything about being chased by wolves seems boring and absent of emotional valence to you, and your nightmares either go away on their own or lose their nightmarish quality. In image rehearsal therapy, you and your therapist identify common nightmare plots, then rehearse changes to those plots which defuse their emotional content. For example, if you always dream of being chased by wolves, you imagine the wolves shrinking until they are adorable puppies, and then you play fun games with those puppies. You repeat this image in various ways, so many times that it gets etched into your brain as the natural completion of any scene involving wolves. Then when you have a nightmare, your brain “auto-completes” it with the wolves turning into puppies and playing games with you. The nightmares lose their nightmarish quality and eventually go away. (I’m not sure how you do these therapies if your nightmares don’t have recurring themes. If any therapists understand this, please email me at scott@lorienpsych.com. Some sources suggest that if you do these practices with enough different nightmares, your brain learns the meta-lesson that nightmares in general aren’t scary or end with pleasant content, and you don’t have to keep doing the same therapy for ever new theme.) In lucid dreaming therapy, you learn how to lucid dream - that is, how to “wake up” inside your dreams so that you’re fully conscious and in control. Once you’ve reached lucidity, you’re no longer afraid - obviously if you have a recurring nightmare of being chased by wolves, and now you’re being chased by wolves, and you can’t remember going to a national park or anything, it must be a dream. You can then take control and turn the wolves into puppies or shift the scene to a day on the beach or do whatever else you want. This therapy is difficult - it takes a lot of practice to lucid dream - but lucid dreaming is a pretty interesting skill even aside from nightmare prevention, and it could be worth it. 3.1.1: How do I access these therapies? It’s pretty tough. Most therapists won’t be trained in these. Image Rehearsal Therapy is probably the most common, but still hard to find. If you search “‘image rehearsal therapy’ [YOUR AREA]” sometimes you’ll find somebody. Otherwise, ask any doctors or therapists you know and see if they know anybody. Can you do these on your own from a manual or course? I can’t find any officially-studied ones, but there are a few unofficial ones. Dr. Justin Havens has a sort of minimum viable [teach-yourself-Image-Rehearsal-Therapy video here](https://justinhavens.com/page/sleep-nightmares). And here’s [a paper aimed at clinicians](https://antoniozadra.com/sites/default/files/biblio/krakow_zadra.sleep_med_clinics.pdf) describing IRT in enough detail that somebody could probably do it on themselves if they understood. Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming ([Amazon link](https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-LaBerge/dp/034537410X/), [free copy with unclear legal status](https://archive.org/details/stephan_laberge_-_exploring_the_world_of_lucid_dreaming/mode/2up)) is a good introduction to lucid dreaming in general, but it’s long and detailed and a lot of work. I don’t know of anything simpler aimed at nightmares in particular. Some people will find lucid dreaming interesting enough that they’ll be willing to put in the many months of work it will take to make it work well; people looking for a specific fix for this specific problem will probably find other methods simpler. 3.2: What medications work for nightmares? The standard of care is prazosin, an alpha-blocker. [Here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3425466/) is a good review study. The correct dose of prazosin is somewhere between 1 - 12 mg, different for everybody. Many doctors will give up at 2 or 3 mg, which is much less than 12 and which I think is a mistake. That having been said, prazosin can be annoying to get on to, especially at higher doses. Side effects include dizziness, faintness, lack of energy, low blood pressure, and fainting when standing. Most of these don’t matter, because you’re going to take it immediately before going to sleep. But if you get up in the middle of the night (for example, to go to the bathroom), you might find yourself feeling dizzy or fainting when you stand up. To solve this problem, stand up very slowly and carefully until you know how prazosin affects you. It usually affects people most the first few times they take it on any specific dose, so be especially careful then. In certain rare cases, prazosin can make people urinate in their sleep. This is rare enough not to be worth worrying about, but if it does happen, it’s the prazosin and you don’t have to worry about it being anything else. There are various people who should be more careful with prazosin or not take it at all, including people with low blood pressure or people on beta-blockers. Your doctor will tell you more about this. Clonidine is another drug that is very similar to prazosin. It probably also works for this indication, but it’s less tested and probably works about the same; I don’t think there’s any reason to prefer it unless someone has very specific prazosin intolerance. 3.2.1: Are there any supplements or natural products that will help with nightmares? Any supplement that helps with anxiety or sleep - so [theanine](https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/31/l-theanine/), silexan, magnesium, etc - may have some positive effect. Some studies show that very large doses of glycine (~3 grams) seem to directly [improve sleep quality](https://hvmn.com/blogs/blog/supplements-glycine-for-sleep-the-amino-acid-of-your-dreams#dreamland-glycine-and-rem-sleep), which should have positive effects on nightmares. You would probably have to get a lot of glycine powder and pour it in a smoothie to get this much nightly, but it might be worth a try. 4: Where can I learn more? The [Best Practice Guide To The Treatment Of Nightmares In Adults](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2919672/) is a good source. It will mostly repeat what I said here, but in more depth and with better explanations. It also discusses a few other potential treatments.	Scott Alexander	56582901	Peer Review: Nightmares	acx
# Mantic Monday 6/13/22 It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hopefully no major new crises started while we were . . . oh. Darn. ### Mantic Monkey Metaculus [predicts](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?order_by=-rank&main-feed&search=monkeypox) 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it’s all about the distribution 90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases. This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it’s true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I’m not sure. How would you test that? ### Warcasting The war in Ukraine has shifted into a new phase, with Russia concentrating in Donetsk and Luhansk, and finally beginning to make good use of its artillery advantage. I’m going to stop following the old Kiev-centric set of questions and replace them with more appropriate ones: Notice that this continues to rise, from 16% a month ago to 22% today. See [Eikonal’s comment here](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10745/russian-control-of-new-territory-2024-01-01/#comment-90502) for some discussion of how this might happen and what territories these might be (and note that we switched from Ukrainian control in the last question to Russian control in this one). I’m keeping this one in here, but it never changes. Meanwhile, on Insight Prediction: $2000 in liquidity and still 14% off from Metaculus, weird. ### Musk Vs. Marcus Elon Musk recently said he thought we might have AGI before 2029, and Gary Marcus [said we wouldn’t](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F14807526-gary-marcus&utm_medium=reader2&s=r) and offered to bet on it. It’s an important tradition of AGI discussions that nobody can ever agree on a definition of it and it has to be re-invented every time the topic comes up. Marcus proposed five different things he thought an AI couldn’t do before 2029, such that if it does them, he admits he was wrong and Musk wins the bet (which purely hypothetical at this point; Musk hasn’t responded). The AI would have to do at least three of: * Read a novel and answer complicated questions about eg the themes (existing language models can do this with pre-digested novels, eg LAMDA talking about Les Miserables [here](https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917) - I think Marcus means you have to give it a new novel that it has no corpus of humans ever having discussed before, and make it do the work itself). * Watch a movie and answer complicated questions as above * Work as a cook in a kitchen * Write bug-free code of 10,000+ lines from natural language specifications * Convert arbitrary mathematical proofs from natural language to verifiable symbols Matthew Barnett kindly added all of these to Metaculus, with the following results: So who will win the bet? Metaculus thinks probably Musk - except that he has yet to agree to it. If someone else with a spare $500K wanted to jump in, it looks like in expectation they would make some money. Related: Okay, I should have cited this one in my recent debate. It resolves positive if experts believe that either “all” or “most” of the first AGI is based on deep learning (ie the current AI paradigm). I wasn’t able to get Marcus to give me a clear estimate on this one because he was understandably doubtful about our ability to quantify “most”, but I think this backs my position that it’s a pretty big deal and a major step on the path. ### This Week On The Markets 1: Wild ride, huh? It would be a fun troll to do whatever you have to in order to keep this market at exactly 50%. For all I know maybe that’s what Musk is doing. 2: I hadn’t heard of this guy before, but he’s a billionaire who was a Republican until this year - not the kind of guy I usually think of Angelenos as electing! But the polls all show [he’s behind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Los_Angeles_mayoral_election#Polling_2), and PredictIt - which is usually really good for US elections - [has him](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7534/Who-will-be-elected-Los-Angeles-mayor-in-2022) at 31%: I think Metaculus is just wrong here, and have bet against. 3: Here’s presidential nominees on [PredictIt](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7053/Who-will-win-the-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination) ($13,000,000 in liquidity), [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/market-group/who-will-win-the-US-2024-Republican-presidential-nomination) ($30,000), and [Manifold](https://manifold.markets/dglid/who-will-be-the-2024-republican-pre) ($M3170): PredictIt looks good, Manifold looks okay, Polymarket seems to have a long tail of implausible vanity candidates stuck around the 10% level. 4: This is crazy and over-optimistic, right? 5: Finally, last month I started markets on the Supreme Court leak, all of which got decent volume. [Will the leaker’s identity be known by 2023?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-the-supreme-court-leakers-iden) is at 53%, [Will Congress legalize abortion nationally in the next five years?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-there-be-a-federal-law-legaliz) is at 9%, and [Will Congress ban abortion nationally in the next five years?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-there-be-a-federal-law-banning) is at 7%. ### Shorts 1: Andrew Eaddy and Clay Graubard [gave a talk about prediction markets](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/wanna-bet-crypto-prediction-markets-224016421.html) at big crypto conference Consensus in Austin earlier this month. 2: Bloomberg has an article on Kalshi: [A New Prediction Market Lets Investors Bet Big on Almost Anything](https://archive.ph/skrR5#selection-3339.0-3339.65). Great explanation of why regulated prediction markets are so hard, and what kinds of things they can or can’t do. Key quotes: “One day during their time at Y Combinator, Lopes Lara and Mansour say, they cold-called 60 lawyers they’d found on Google. Every one of them said to give up”. Also “the [Division of Market Oversight] was set up to deal with exchanges that might create two or three new markets a year. Kalshi’s business model called for new ones practically every day.” 3: [Chris of Karlstack writes about](https://karlstack.substack.com/p/turning-1000-to-10000-on-insight?s=w) his quest to dectuple his $1000 investment on prediction markets. 4: Gregory Lewis on the EA Forum on something I got wrong a few months ago: [rational predictions often update predictably](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lto9awEYPQNu9wkdi/rational-predictions-often-update-predictably). Related: [is Metaculus slow to update](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MPhc7q48Cmo7As2th/is-metaculus-slow-to-update)? (probably no) 5: The Atlantic on [Why So Many COVID Predictions Were Wrong](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/pandemic-failed-economic-forecasting/629498/). Yes, this was a boring Mantic Monday post. There’s lots of exciting stuff waiting in the wings, but nobody has gone public yet, so it’ll have to wait for July.	Scott Alexander	59310694	Mantic Monday 6/13/22	acx
# Open Thread 228 1: Correction: the graph on “[Against ‘There Are Two X-Wing Parties](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties?s=w)’” was weird, see [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties/comment/7022680?s=w) for why. I’ve edited the graph to include a link to the comment in the caption, but am stopping short of removing it or listing it as a Mistake for now. 2: Your comments on [Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme) were mostly terrible, and as promised I deleted all comments of the form “How can you even ask that question when the other party has done X, which is far crazier than anything my party has done?” - for the record, two of those comments were by Democrats and two by Republicans. But I will grudgingly tolerate [Crimson Wool’s comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme/comment/7002453), which links a poll that “asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "‘how dumb and goddamn crazy are you?’" 3: Gary Marcus has responded to [Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling?s=w) on his own Substack: [Does AI Really Need A Paradigm Shift](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/does-ai-really-need-a-paradigm-shift?s=r). He is unhappy that I described him as thinking GPT’s performance “proves” its paradigm is doomed, whereas he only thinks it provides “evidence” for this. I agree that outside of math it’s generally not worth talking about “proving” things and I was using it colloquially as “provides such strong evidence that someone asserts it is true without any caveats or qualifiers”; I usually think this usage is fine but have edited it in this case since he feels misrepresented. He also gives probability estimates for some of the same statements I did - he thinks there’s only a 10% chance we can get full AGI without any paradigm shift (compared to my 40%), and only a 20% chance we can get it without something symbol-manipulation-y in particular (compared to my 66%). He also accuses me of unfairly focusing on him, rather than the many other people who agree with him. I am focusing on him because he is the person I am having this discussion with right now. He is the person I am having this discussion with right now partly because he tweeted about me 23 times in the past six days and I figured it was worth responding to him in some way. Still, this is probably a sign that I should stop, which I will do immediately. 4: Speaking of me being bad, Alexandros Marinos has [another article on my ivermectin piece](https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-misportrayal-of-dr-flavio-cadegiani?s=r), this one relating to the work of Dr. Flavio Cadegiani. I consider two of them relevant and problematic, have edited them out of the piece, and have added them to my Mistakes page like so: > First, I noted that he was accused of poorly-fleshed-out “crimes against humanity” by the Brazilian government, and speculated that they might think he was killing his patients (although I said I personally thought this was false). A [new source](https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2819) that hadn’t been published at the time I wrote the piece time explains that the “crimes against humanity” accusation is because he didn’t stop a trial when it showed the experimental drug was much more effective than the placebo drug (which is a nonsensical accusation, since the accusers don’t believe this is true anyway), although it also describes other aspects of the trial as “an ethical cesspool”. Second, although I said Cadegiani was “involved in a scandal” where the Brazilian government made a defective app, his only “involvement” was that the app used data he produced; he was not responsible for its scandalous defects. I cannot remember why I made this mistake, but I assume I saw someone else say something about this and didn’t dig deep enough to be fair to him. I regret both errors. Marinos has other concerns he thinks are relevant, which you can find at the article.	Scott Alexander	59217811	Open Thread 228	acx
# Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ## ON ROUSSEAU, ESSAY CONTESTS, POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS FOR REVISITING THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND THE BOOK IS INTRODUCED In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at the comfortable age of 42, was composing a monograph for an essay contest not dissimilar to this one. Hosted by a local university, the prompt for the contest was "What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?” Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left. Disqualified from winning the contest due to its unapologetic length, the Discourse’s depiction of an original state of nature populated by noble savages, a state eventually sundered by agriculture and the invention of private property, was monumentally influential. His genius move was to politicize the past, offering up an alternative mirror to Hobbes’ view, itself already political, which portrayed life in prehistorical societies with that oft-repeated phrase: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left, both built their arguments on the bedrock of prehistory. But on different bedrocks. The lesson being: if you want to change human society, change the past first. Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim just six months ago, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS. It’s a co-authored book by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Davids. First, we have David Graeber, anthropologist, famed author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, notable figure in the 2008 Occupy Wall Street movement, a playful but snarky writer, almost certainly the reason for the section titles being the way they are, and now deceased at the relatively young age of 59, just several weeks before The Dawn of Everything was published, victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis. The surviving David, David Wengrow, is lesser known but more erudite, more pragmatic, classically academic both in his pedantry but also in his impressive armament of archeological knowledge, and it’s Wengrow who’s been trying to fill the shoes of the more famous Graeber by making the post-publishing media whirlwind tour, sometimes to visible discomfort as he goes on long-winded lectures while the hosts try hastily to cut to the next segment. What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities). The original hunter-gatherer tribes are often reasoned about via the analogy of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (or at least, those in recent history surveyed by anthropologists). Yet which tribe is an “appropriate” analogy changes depending whether the reasoner is a follower of Hobbes or Rousseau; a modern Hobbesian might prefer to use the war-like Yanomami as the analogy, whereas a follower of Rousseau might prefer the more peaceful and egalitarian Hadza, Pygmies, or !Kung. The thesis of The Dawn of Everything is that neither of these is correct. In fact, the Davids argue the standard model of prehistory isn’t supported at all by modern archeological and anthropological evidence; in its place they offer a complexified account, wherein prehistorical humans lived in a panoply of different political arrangements, from extreme egalitarianism to chattel slavery, and that, just like humans in recorded history, they consciously collectively chose to live in the arrangement they did (well, except for the slaves), with the result being that > the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms. . . Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks or hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines. . . So for the Davids, the question is not, as it was for Rousseau, “How did inequality arise?” but rather, given the diversity of prehistorical ways of life, “How did we get stuck with the inequalities we have?” This is a very interesting question to ask and the Davids marshal a veritable trove of evidence, some of which really does convincingly support their theses. But there is a problem with the book. For their own version of prehistory is corrupted by politics, the same corruption they accuse Rousseau and Hobbes and other thinkers of falling prey to before them. After all, the Davids’ express purpose is to argue that humans, in their diverse forms of prehistorical governments, are free, even playful, and capable of imagining new ways of living and consciously choosing to live in these ways, which the authors take to imply that radical progressivism, or post-capitalism, might be successful in our modern world—and moreso, that it implies our current world and its ills are, in turn, a choice. The Davids don’t hide their progressive goals, either in the book or in interviews, and their political leanings are evident from the way it’s written as well: their sensitivity to social justice spins throughout like a finely-tuned gyroscope. This often leads to blanket statements, like how Western civilization is currently great “except if you’re Black,” or even outright misrepresentations of their opponents, like assigning to Steven Pinker the claim that “all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth-century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’” (Pinker definitely doesn’t claim this), or rejecting kinship-based scientific theories of altruism with reasoning like “many humans just don’t like their families very much” (these are all real quotes). Somewhere, within the morass of innuendo and political leanings, as well as the truly encyclopedic display of archeological and anthropological knowledge, there is a truth as to how humans lived prehistorically, and how civilization, with all its ills (and its goods) came to be. But what is that truth? ## THE AGRICULTURE REVOLUTION WAS NO REVOLUTION, NOR DID IT INEXORABLY LEAD TO INEQUALITY; INEQUALITY, EVEN CHATTEL SLAVERY, ALREADY EXISTED > Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth. . . And with this the Davids begin their dissection of the idea that agriculture was the root cause of political inequality, arguing that agriculture was not actually a “revolution” that irrevocably changed how humans lived. Instead, the Davids present a wave of evidence that pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies could be incredibly politically diverse, and, sometimes, rival the worst atrocities of modern societies; at other times, they could rival their best. They zoom into the Native American foragers (not farmers) who lived on the California coastline, and observe substantial political differentiation, even out thousands of years into the past. Particularly between the Yurok in California and their northern neighbors of the Northwest Coast. The Yurok > struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense. . . ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence. . . Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Compare that to the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, right above them: > Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. . . They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art. The Yurok and other micro-nations to the south only rarely practiced chattel slavery. In stark contrast, > in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. These figures are striking. As we noted earlier, they rival the demographic balance in the colonial South at the height of the cotton boom and are in line with estimates for household slavery in classical Athens. Indeed, there is evidence of Native American chattel slavery that goes back to 1850 BC in Northwest Coast societies (again, these are not agricultural societies). > The behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relationships; or what sociologists refer to as ‘court societies’—the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily. . . So we have slave-owning Mafia dons to the north, and meanwhile, ascetics to the south. Despite both being foragers, they ate extremely different diets, with Californian tribes relying on nuts and acorns, while the Northwest Coast societies were sometimes referred to as ‘fisher-kings’ (presumably due to their two loves: aristocracy and fish). As the Davids say, > this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect among foragers. . . within the tiny communities that did exist, entirely different principles of social life applied. Furthermore, the Davids make a good case that agriculture was not the sort of parasitic memetic invasion it is often portrayed as by writers like Yuval Noah Harari. > Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies, we might expect to find evidence of a relatively quick or at least continuous transition from wild to domestic forms of cereals. . . but this is not at all what the results of archeological science show. Instead > the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began (. . . to get a sense of the scale here, think: the time between the putative Trojan War and today). This is despite the fact that scientific experiments on wheat genetics have revealed that > the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hands. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow the cues provided by the crops themselves. So if it was a revolution, it was one that occurred as slowly as almost all of post-literate human history combined. And not only that, but prehistorical societies seem to develop agriculture and then consciously abandon it, preferring some other way of life. The Davids give several examples of this, including the builders of Stonehenge, who > were not farmers, or at least, not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the people of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3,300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. . . This sort of laissez-faire attitude toward farming is true in many other places, for example, in the early Amazonia there are seasonal cycles in and out of farming, and same for the habit of keeping pets but not domesticating animals fully, i.e., people who were neither forager or farmer, and often for thousands of years. Nor did the agricultural revolution, even as it was occurring, result in one way of living; it seems like during the transition toward farming very different societies were possible, even those that lived in proximity to one another, the exact same as hunter-gatherer societies. Consider the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East; sectors which are themselves demarcated by Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest construction of stone megaliths, dated to around 9,000 BC. (a) Göbekli Tepe, with its circular and rectangular regions, as seen from above. (b-c) Complex representational stone carvings. Between the upland and lowland sectors we see, again, political differentiation. North of Göbekli Tepe, in the upland, there was a city wherein at > the centre of the settlement stood a long-lived structure that archeologists call the ‘House of Skulls', for the simple reason that it was found to hold the remains of over 450 people, including headless corpses and over ninety crania, all crammed into small compartments. . . Human remains in the House of Skulls were stored together with those of large prey animals, and a wild cattle skull was mounted on an outside wall. . . Studies of blood residues from the surface, and from associated objects, led researchers to identify this as an altar on which public sacrifice and processing of bodies took place, the victims both animal and human. In comparison, lowland villages of the Fertile Crescent also attached a great importance to human heads, but treat them in an altogether different manner, in a way one might describe as touching (despite its macabre nature), like the ‘skull portraits’ found in lowland Early Neolithic villages. > These are heads that are removed from burials of women, men, and occasionally children in a secondary process, after the corpse had decomposed. Once separated from the body, they were cleaned and carefully modelled over with clay, then coated with layers of plaster to become something altogether different. Shells were often fixed into the eye sockets, just as clay and plaster filled in for the flesh and skin. Red and white paint added further life. Skull portraits appeared to be treasured heirlooms, carefully stored and repaired over generations. They reached the height of their popularity in the eighth millennium BC. . . one such modelled head was found in an intimate situation, clutched to the chest of a female burial. Such details in art and priorities corresponded to political differences: the upland sectors of the Fertile Crescent were > most clearly distinguished by the building of grand monuments in stone, and by a symbolism of male virility and predation. . . By contrast, the art and ritual of the lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society—learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life—and celebrated by modelling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms. And yet we know that the regions traded with one another. There are plenty of other examples of political differentiation, both pre- and post-agriculture, although even the Davids are forced to admit that agriculture marks a change. Eventually it > saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual that remain doggedly with us millennia later, and have since become fixtures of social existence among a broad sector of humanity: everything from harvest festivals to habits of sitting on benches, putting cheese on bread, entering and exiting via doorways, or looking at the world through windows. But the fact that humans were able to invent, and then abandon, agriculture, and have inequality or equality to greater degrees throughout the invention of agriculture, and to continue to have political differentiation after agriculture, all suggests to the Davids that our ancestors, despite (as one might say) having the handicap of living in prehistory, were choosing to live a certain way, not simply driven like automata by environmental inputs or new inventions. They made conscious political choices, just like us. ## CONSCIOUS POLITICAL CHOICE AMONG NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE “INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE” OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION This thesis may sound surprising, but the Davids bemoan that this is because non-Western, non-European civilizations are consistently stripped of political self-consciousness in standard historical accounts, e.g., > to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age. . . this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman. . . Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation. The conversational nature of the Wendat government led to most Jesuits describing French-speaking Native Americans as highly eloquent, as, at least among those who spoke Iroquoian languages, open conversation and debate were how tribe decisions got made, a process that rewarded the more eloquent and convincing of its members (although not all Native American states valued the reasonable debate of the Iroquois). But somehow the self-consciously political nature of New France was replaced by either the idealized fantasies of Rousseau or the idealized barbarism of Hobbes. The Davids have a story for how that happened, and it actually involves Kandiaronk. They argue that Native American intellectuals were the true originators of many of the criticisms of the Western World that would go on to define the political Left, and European intellectuals in turn co-opted their criticisms, using fictional Native Americans as mouthpieces, while the originals were forgotten to mainstream history. This is because Native American intellectuals, > when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas. . . The reality was quite different, the Davids suggest, once you investigate evidence from the Great Lakes region where tribes like the Wendat, and Jesuits and fur traders, all mixed together. In the late 1600s, Lahontan, a French aristocrat, spent much time in New France, and there met the Kandiaronk (also called ‘Le Rat’, since his name meant ‘muskrat’). Kandiaronk was > at the time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French, and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other. . . with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance. . . Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator, and unusually skillful politician. Kandiaronk was known for engaging the Europeans in debate, attending their dinner parties to converse with them, and Lahontan witnessed some of these debates and knew Kandiaronk personally. Later, an old man in Europe, Lahontan would publish Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who has Traveled which was a dialogue between fictional versions of himself and Kandiaronk; the latter offered forth convincing and eloquent critiques of European civilization, from its pitilessness to those in need, to its obsession with money, to its social inequality, to its lack of basic human freedoms that the Wendat still possessed. This “indigenous critique” > won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him. . . The indigenous critique served as a shock to the European system, setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses by creating an entire genre of literature, as > just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L'Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. . . Perhaps the most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary captured Inca princess. All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kondiaronk. . . But for a long time the dominant historical view was that Lahontan essentially created a fictional character (with intimate knowledge of European life and customs) to use as a convincing mouthpiece to give European critiques of European culture. Except that actually the pieces fit much better because Lahontan was, perhaps with only some exaggeration, writing the real Kandiaronk. This is attested to by Lahontan himself, who claims to have based it off of him, and is backed up by lost historical details like how outside accounts attest that Kondiaronk was indeed invited to debates comparing European life to indigenous life, and also how > there is every reason to believe that Kondiaronk actually had been to France; that’s to say, we know the Wendat Confederation did send an ambassador to visit the court of Louis XIV in 1691, and Kandiaronk’s office at the time was Speaker of the Council, which would have made him the logical person to send. Judging this, I have to say I think the Davids are correct; there is a good case that there were real and serious intellectual contributions from Native Americans in critiquing the inequalities of European civilization, particularly from the articulate and debate-based Iroquoian-speaking nations. This is a great hand to be holding, but, in a pattern that repeats throughout the book, the Davids overplay it. They claim the idea of inequality arose in Europe entirely through the indigenous critique, essentially proposing that some conversations being held by Jesuits and fur traders in New France were the mono-causal origin of the political Left. This spills into other ambitious overclaims, like how > one cannot say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social inequality; the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them. Really? In medieval Europe, the role of wealth in the clergy was fractious and constant. And Christ, the most important intellectual figure for medieval Europe, was himself a political radical and revolutionary, overturning the tables of the moneylenders and frequently espousing things like in Matthew 20:25-28: > You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave. . . What is that if not a statement of disgust at social inequality? And not for the only time in the book, the Davids undercut themselves when they later point out that the conception of inequality was alive and well in European peasantry: > A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day, or Christmas, when much of society reveled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down,’ where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground and made a mockery of. Often the celebrates were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’. . . So in their overly confident conclusion, the Davids end up pushing a progressive mirror to the conservative take that all the good aspects of the Western world are based entirely on the Christian tradition; the mirror the Davids offer up is that the progressive politics of the Enlightenment are based entirely on the indigenous critique. ## ON SEASONALITY AND THE “THEATRICAL” GOVERNMENTS OF PREHISTORICAL SOCIETIES, AS WELL AS THEIR CAREFUL BURIAL OF ABNORMAL INDIVIDUALS One of the defining features of prehistoric humanity seems to be their dynamism and ever-changing nature. Even at the times when they are building monuments, things we would think of as “early civilization” like Stonehenge or Göbekli Tepe, it is often not permanent, but rather as celebrations, markers, or otherwise abandoned structures for much of the year. For instance, at Göbekli Tepe: > Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran Plain. This goes back even further; almost all the early signs of civilization look seasonal to some degree, like the striking “mammoth houses,” which were constructed from the bones of mammoths, often circular around a central open space, some going back [25,000 years](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/60-mammoths-house-russia-180974426/), but not always suggesting continuous habitation—rather, grisly but beautiful meeting places or ceremonial floors. This seasonality also shows up in anthropologist accounts of hunter-gatherer societies. The Davids quote from a 1903 book on seasonal variations among the Inuit, describing how during the summer, > Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single elder male. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. . . But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea. One might reasonably ask whether this was all responding solely to environmental concerns: altruistic during periods of being flush with resources, despotic during periods of scarcity. But that’s not what we see. Among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast of Canada > it was winter—not summer—that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet, these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations—still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter—literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year. Which brings up why an early hierarchical government, like an aristocracy, capable of moving gigantic stones, or coordinating large hunts and storing food, would give up its authority in the off-season so easily—if there were rulers of these people, they did not have the sort of authority those in written history do, for > these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labor, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to? So should we really even think of such rulers as royalty? Or are they almost a form of play royalty? There’s a certain theatricality to all this, isn’t there? Like how > among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though, often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns). In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies. The Davids suggest that for much of prehistory seasonality ruled, as if humans were seeing what fit, playing along, and under such structures formal authority was a wispy, changeable, seasonal, almost humorous thing. And various techniques kept formal authority from ever becoming too real. For instance, the Native Americans of the Plains would > dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clans or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others the next. Of course, it might be easier to see how prehistorical societies worked if they buried more of their dead. Instead: > Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. But we see some of the weirdness of humans, their political diversity, peeking through. In an oddity of rich Upper Paleolithic burials > a remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries. Such unexpected incongruities humanize our ancestors—perhaps we sometimes buried favored clowns rather than favored kings. So yes, I think the Davids are right on this as well: there is at least suggestive evidence of a period of time, particularly around or right after 10,000 BC, of what might be called political experimentation by prehistorical humans. These nascent governments and formal systems of law and order might not have been taken all that seriously at first, more theatrical and seasonal in nature, until, slowly, as John Updike said, “the mask eats the face.” ## THE SAPIENT PARADOX AS AN ANCIENT ANALOG TO THE FERMI PARADOX, AND THE GREAT TRAP OF PREHISTORY IT IMPLIES Almost everything we’ve talked about so far, with the exception of the mammoth houses and some remains of gathering places, takes place after 10,000 BC. It’s really only in the Upper Paleolithic (12,000-5,000 BC) that there is any good evidence for what we would call civilization, with its associated lavish burials and monumental centers of ritual congregation and pilgrimage and trade networks and specialization of tribes toward certain industries, and it is only at this point that complex representation in art becomes essentially universal. What was happening before then? Isn’t that the question we’re most interested in? The primal state of human nature? The vast majority of the Davids’ evidence throughout The Dawn of Everything comes from post-10,000 BC societies. And this is a problem, since even the Davids admit in the book that humans have been around for between 100,000 to 200,000 years. This is a striking mismatch: let’s say modern humans genetically (mostly) and physically (definitely) were around 100,000 years ago: why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe? This perplexing question is called the “Sapient Paradox.” Colin Renfrew, the coiner of the Sapient Paradox, [describes it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgl7b02Ub6Y) as a > puzzling aspect, which I call the Sapient Paradox. . . we can see in the archeological record. . . the appearance of our own species, Homo Sapiens, about 100 or 150,000 thousand years ago in Africa, and we can follow the out-of-Africa migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, 60-70,000 years ago. . . Apart from the episode of cave art, which was very much limited to Europe and a bit further on to Asia, not a great deal happened until about 10,000 years ago. . . modern genetics has made clear that our genetic composition, speaking in general. . . is very similar to the genetic composition to our ancestors in Africa of about 70,000 years ago. So, Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway), go back 200,000 years, possibly having language all that time. And who knows, human-level cognitive abilities might even go back further than that—our cousins (and ancestors) the Neanderthals wouldn’t look very out of place on the subway either, perhaps prehistorical minds were similarly similar. In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. Depending on your politics, the Great Trap might be an oppressive patriarchy, or perhaps a decadent matriarchy, or a lazy commune, etc (e.g., Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap” of mutual warfare between tribes—although he does not connect this to the Sapient Paradox). Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had [brains as large](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao5961) as our own! In The Dawn of Everything the Davids dismiss the Sapient Paradox in a curt section. It’s one of the worst-reasoned parts of the book. They simply miss what is puzzling about the paradox, instead trying to dissolve it by gesturing to ignored evidence of ancient culture from Africa (which they point out is due to a lack of funding compared to European archeology), with points like: > Rock shelters around the coastlands of South Africa are a key source, trapping prehistoric sediments that yield evidence of hafted tools and the expressive use of shell and ochre around 80,000 BC. And also how > a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years. They speculate there is undiscovered complex representational cave art in Africa that goes back equally far. This claim is based on how > research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia. In other words, the Davids point out that beads, trinkets, pigments, and some (rare) cave art, does go back quite far, even to 40-50,000 BC. But, wait, this only makes the Sapient Paradox more perplexing! For then, why did it take so long to invent the sort of rich cultural products like megaliths and congregation points, trade networks, or agriculture, or stone carvings, or like, walls? Why did so little go on for so long?A few hafted tools and a couple strings of beads aren’t Göbekli Tepe, and rock art (and representational art in general) gets consistently more complex and omnipresent as time progresses—in the Upper Neolithic there’s rock art almost everywhere globally, but it really is extremely rare before that, even though enough instances prove we were capable of it. Taken altogether, it does appear like we were climbing out of some Great Trap that was our initial condition. In another example of willful ignorance on this issue, the Davids ask: > Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn’t farming develop much earlier? The answer they give (in fact, the Davids barely give it, they sort of vaguely imply) is that the advent of farming was due to the ending of the Ice Age and retreat of the glaciers. But this is in direct contradiction to a bunch of their previous points around farming, like how the post-Ice Age was actually a “Golden Age” for foragers, that early farming in general was done in more extreme environmental conditions and was often even an act of desperation, that agriculture was easy to discover and evolve as a technology, and that it was a natural, almost inevitable, outcome of the caring relationship hunter-gatherers had with the land. So the Davids leave the Sapient Paradox unexplained. Of course, the Davids might simply say that there was civilization from the beginning, but their evidence for this would be nonexistent; even they admit there is a cut-off > beginning around 12,000 BC, in which it first becomes possible to trace the outlines of separate ‘cultures’ based on more than just stone tools. That is, if the cavalcade of cultures that the Davids posit stretched back further than the 12,000 BC boundary of the Upper Neolithic, there would surely be some evidence—prehistorical societies, in their experimentation with different forms of organization and life, would leave traces of their divergences, or inventions of different technologies and art, i.e., all the myriad things we see humans do during the time of political experimentation that the Davids do have, at minimum, suggestive evidence for. Instead, everyone was silent for tens of thousands of years. And it’s this silence, just like the silence of the stars, that is striking. The question becomes: How were the silent people before the Upper Neolithic living, and also, what accounts for this efflorescence in culture and ways of living in the Upper Neolithic? The work of Robin Dunbar seems important here, somehow, although no two thinkers on these topics use it in the exact same way. Dunbar’s number is the idea that humans can hold around 150 distinct social relationships in mind at any one time, and that this is a function of their cortex size, for, in primates, the greater the neocortex the larger the average social group size. It seems there’s likely something special about Dunbar’s number being violated—after all, a lot of the Upper Neolithic revolution is occurring when groups of humans (in the few hundreds) are getting together seasonally into much larger groups, making pilgrimages, joining, and then dispersing. Each theory might have a different relationship to Dunbar’s number; for the followers of Rousseau, past Dunbar’s number egalitarianism begins to break down, and therefore the terrible necessity of the inventions of hierarchy, state, and bureaucracy. Even the Davids admit that the violation of the Dunbar number is likely important, writing we should > picture our ancestors moving between relatively enclosed environments, dispersing and gathering, tracking the seasonal movements of mammoth, bison and deer herds. While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small, the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of the year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression. Is there any hypothesis that fits all these disparate facts? We somehow need there to be (a) an initial condition to humanity that keeps it in a Great Trap for tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years, and then also (b) we need that initial condition to have led very naturally to the diverse political and cultural experimentation of the Upper Neolithic, which almost looks like it precludes having a single initial condition at all, and finally (c) the explanation would ideally also explains the mechanism by which the violation of Dunbar’s number is important on the steps toward civilization. How can there be an initial condition that doesn’t lead to predictable developmental stages, and yet still kept us in a Great Trap? All the hypotheses on offer seem to not fit the whole story: neither Rousseau’s version, nor Hobbes’, nor the Davids’ (e.g., if egalitarianism was the initial condition, we should see a lot more of it, and leaving that stage should generally involve a next predictable stage, and this is precisely what we don’t see). All I, all anyone can do, is offer speculations, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But with that said, it does seem to me there is an alternative theory, which tells the story of The Dawn of Everything in a different way. It’s the book I wish the Davids had written. ## IN WHICH AN ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS FOR THE INITIAL CONDITION OF PREHISTORY IS PROPOSED, AND AN EXPLANATION OF THE GREAT TRAP OF HUMAN HISTORY IS GIVEN If we imagine being transported back to 50,000 BC, what would we expect to find? In the end, we have to give a metaphor to current life of how things were organized: a follower of Rousseau would expect Burning Man, a follower of Hobbes might expect to find a bunch of warring gangs, the Davids might expect to find the deliberation of a town council full of Kandiaronks. But perhaps small groups of humans less than the Dunbar number were organized by none of these, since they didn’t need to be—instead, they could be organized via raw social power. That is, you don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people. After, who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans—it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors. So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else. I know the high school metaphor sounds crazy, but given that any metaphor we’re going to give will fail, I think this one possibly fails less than the others. After all, the central message of The Dawn of Everything is that prehistorical people were just people, with all the weirdness, politicking, cultural hilarity and differentness this implies. But, unlike what the Davids seem to want, most people aren’t Kandiaronk—he was exceptional. Most people are not exceptional. They are. . . well, like the people you remember from high school. So if we take the heart of the message of The Dawn of Everything seriously, perhaps entering a new tribe in Africa at 50,000 BC would not involve a bunch of mysterious rituals in the jungle enacted by solemn actors with dirt smeared across their faces. Maybe it was a bit more like the infamous lunch table scene from the movie Mean Girls (I encourage you to watch), with some minor surface alterations, like clothes (picture beads and furs instead). After all, in high school there is a clear social web but no formal hierarchies. And while there is a social hierarchy, it’s not ordinal—you couldn’t list, mathematically, all the people from least to most popular, like you could with a formal hierarchy. It’s more like everything is organized by raw social power, that is, there is constant and ever-shifting reputational management, all against all. And there’s actually a lot of evidence, even just in what the Davids introduce, that fits with the idea that our initial condition was something like anarchist bands organized by raw social power only. Because it sure looks like being popular was the primary concern for prehistorical societies, at least if we use the same evidence the Davids do. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune described this phenomenon of a lack of all formal power among the Montagnais-Naskapi, who anthropologists normally consider “egalitarian” bands of hunter-gatherers: > All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages. In fact, chiefs were basically just the most popular people, nothing more, for instance, in Northwest Coast Native Americans a high-status male > had to ‘keep up’ his name through generous feasting, potlatching, and general open-handedness. The same lack of formal power but attention to popularity was true across America, even in Kandiaronk’s tribe. > Wendat ‘captains’ . . . ‘urge their subjects to provide what it is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions. And similarly: > Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power. . . That is, material resources were worth almost nothing, all that mattered was the social pressure you could apply. This is true even for things like crime, which was prevented not by a system of laws, but by a system of social pressure, wherein the guilty were not punished but rather their lineage or clan had to pay compensation (implying that that the anger of one’s lineage or clan would be enough to not lead to recidivism for offenders). This system of social power to prevent crime was highly effective in its implementation, as the Davids describe the Jesuit Le Jeune grudgingly admitting. It may even be that money, rather than being invented to keep track of trade relationships or debts for private property, was invented to keep track of social relationships instead. For example, consider again the Yurok, who inhabited the northwestern corner of California, and note that > the Yurok were famous for the central role that money—which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps—played in every aspect of their social lives. The most famous of this sort of “money,” wampum, was not originally used by indigenous Americans as something that could be settled for goods or services, like the way we understand money now, or the way it became once European settlers arrived. Instead, according to the Davids, wampum “largely existed for political purposes,” i.e., to keep track of social capital, not material capital. Even private property itself might have been only an extension of social relations. > Among the Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals, and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold. And this fits with the theatricality and seasonality that the Davids make so much of, like in the case of Native American tribes, wherein > an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them. It’s almost tautological that early societies had to be organized by raw social power—there are no formal powers to enforce anything else, nor combat social pressure when it’s applied (and humans will always apply it). It also explains why early formal governments are theatrical or seasonal, since they are merely a mask of raw social power—which families are important, which are liked, who’s friends, who’s frenemies, who’s enemies—i.e., what the Davids assume is a set of constantly shifting Neolithic “political experiments” is really just a bunch of constantly shifting mores that, like the Gestapo, hide the real power. Which was who was popular and who was not. Heck, the high school metaphor (despite admittedly not being perfect) does a better job than other metaphors of explaining the odd evidence that skeletons given the honor of burials in the Upper Palaeolithic were often dwarfs or giants or bore physical anomalies: they were mascots. What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing (one wonders if they’ve ever seen social pressure applied). Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robert Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats, i.e., gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that prevents individuals from accruing too much power. According to the Davids, in the Hazda > talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled. . . And the evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm came to a similar conclusion: > Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . . In Haiti, G.E. Simpson found that a peasant will seek to disguise his true economic position by purchasing several smaller fields rather than one larger piece of land. For the same reason he will not wear good clothes. He does this intentionally to protect himself against the envious black magic of his neighbors. But it never seems to strike Dunbar or others that living under a dominion of raw social power, with few to little formal powers anywhere, would be hellish to a citizen of the 21st century (which is why I say the closest analog is high school). My mother used to quote Eleanor Roosevelt all the time: > Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. A “Gossip Trap”is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the Gossip Trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school. And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and sort of theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real. So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the Gossip Trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists? ## ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL RESURRECTION OF THE GOSSIP TRAP AND THE DEVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION YOU’VE BEEN NOTICING A lot of things change as you age, but one that’s particularly strange is finding hairs in weird places. Like your inner ears. It turns out this is because aging is basically genetic confusion, down at the molecular level. As they age, cells get mixed up as to what sort of cell they’re supposed to be. And there’s a lot of ancient instructions, just lying around, still in your cells. Weird hair growth is the cell latching on to some ancient genetic instruction. Our predecessors had lots of hair everywhere, your cells get confused, and you begin to manifest your hirsute ancestors. The hairy tufts springing from your grandfather’s ears are there because parts of him are literally devolving into an ancient creature. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What if there were a mental equivalent? After all, if we lived in a Gossip Trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to the gossip trap? Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter. I’m serious. It would look a lot like Twitter. For it’s on social media that gossip and social hierarchies are unbounded, infinitely transmittable. An environment of raw social power, which, despite its [endless reign of terror](https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/suspended-hell/), actually feels kind of good? Wouldn’t we want to go back to forced instances of fission between human groups, exiling those we don’t like? Wouldn’t we punish crimes not with legal proceedings, but via massive social shamings? The difference between the horror of crabs in a bucket and a human tribe or group living in a Gossip Trap is actually that the humans are generally quite happy down there in the bucket. It’s our natural environment. Most people like the trap. Oh, it’s terrible for the accused, the exiled, the uncool. But the gossip trap is comfortable. Homey. Of course we like it—it’s our innate evolved form of government. One obvious sign you’re living in a Gossip Trap is when the primary mode of dispute resolution becomes social pressure. And almost everywhere you look lately, it’s like social media is wearing a skin suit made of our laws, institutions, and governments. Does it not feel, just in the past decade, as if raw social power has outstripped anything resembling formal power? How protected from public opinion does a judge feel now? How protected does a tenured professor feel? How protected do you feel? To what degree is prosecution of crime a matter of law, or does social media have its billion thumbs on the scale? Putin of late seems [more afraid of cancel culture](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/25/putin-says-west-trying-to-cancel-russian-culture) than he is of nuclear weapons. Maybe that’s for a good reason. Which means that, with the advent of social media, and the resultant triumph of the spread of gossip over Dunbar’s number, we might have just inadvertently performed the equivalent of summoning an Elder God. The ability to organize society through raw social power given back to a species that had to climb out of the trap of raw social power by inventing civilization. The Gossip Trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound. And if the Gossip Trap was humanity’s first form of government, and via technology it’s been resurrected once more into the world, how long until it swallows up the entire globe? ## IN WHICH THE TRUTH IS REVEALED An admittance. For it should be obvious by now: this text is corrupted. The same corruption that I accused the Davids of falling victim to, and that they, in turn, accused Rousseau and Hobbes of falling victim to. I have made the past political, and prehistory a sepia reflection of the current day. Just like Rousseau, or Hobbes, or the Davids, I have spun a yarn. I think it’s a true yarn, I really do. I think the Gossip Trap is real, or at least, explains more than the other hypotheses about prehistorical life I’ve read, and I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself. This is almost certainly not the conclusion the Davids hoped a reader would get from The Dawn of Everything. But perhaps corruption by the peccadillos we see in our own civilizations is inevitable for all who write about these issues. For the past is political—it does matter what our “natural state” was, it does matter how we lived, it does matter in what environs we evolved. It does matter where we started, for otherwise, how can we see where we’re going? Maybe the ultimate truth or falsity of prehistorical narratives is unknowable. Maybe speculations such as these are only stumbling through a maze, all of human history a hall of mirrors in which we wander. And, projected in gigantic distortions all around us, we see only our own face.	Scott Alexander	58900472	Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything	acx
# Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling I. Previously: [I predicted](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=w) that DALL-E’s many flaws would be fixed quickly in future updates. As evidence, I cited Gary Marcus’ lists of GPT’s flaws, most of which got fixed quickly in future updates. Marcus responded with [a post on his own Substack](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-when-an-ai-fails), arguing . . . well, arguing enough things that I’m nervous quoting one part as the thesis, and you should read the whole post, but if I had to do it, it would be: > Now it is true that GPT-3 is genuinely better than GPT-2, and maybe (but maybe not, see footnote 1) true that InstructGPT is genuinely better than GPT-3. I do think that for any given example, the probability of a correct answer has gone up. [Scott] is quite right about that, at least for GPT-2 to GPT-3. > > But I see no reason whatsoever to think that the underlying problem — a lack of cognitive models of the world —have been remedied. The improvements, such as they are, come, primarily because the newer models have larger and larger sets of data about how human beings use word sequences, and bigger word sequences are certainly helpful for pattern matching machines. But they still don’t convey genuine comprehension, and so they are still very easy for Ernie and me (or anyone else who cares to try) to break. And including a proposed bet! > I am willing to bet [Scott] now (terms to be negotiated) that if OpenAI gives us unrestricted access to GPT-4, whenever that is released, and assuming that is basically the same architecture but with more data, that within a day of playing around with it, Ernie and I will still be able find lots of examples of failures in physical reasoning, temporal reasoning, causal reasoning, and so forth. I of course will not take that bet, since I agree that they will be able to find many problems. To repeat, the main point I was making in my last post was that we should mostly expect certain particular minor problems with DALL-E to get fixed by the next update. I don’t think Marcus particularly wants to argue against that. But I do think we have a more substantive disagreement that it’s worth fleshing out. II. Let’s start with a softball: I think, regardless of whether or not Marcus is right, he’s failed to provide evidence for his position. Marcus says GPT’s failures provide evidence that purely statistical AI is a dead end. Quoting [here](https://thegradient.pub/gpt2-and-the-nature-of-intelligence/): > Literally billions of dollars have been invested in building systems like GPT-2, and megawatts of energy (perhaps more) have gone into testing them; few systems if any have ever been trained on bigger data sets. Many of the brightest minds have been working on blank-slate-ish sentence prediction systems for decades. > > In essence, GPT-2 has been a monumental experiment in Locke's hypothesis, and so far it has failed. Empiricism has been given every advantage in the world; thus far it hasn't worked. Even with massive data sets and enormous compute, the knowledge that it acquires has been superficial and unreliable. > > Rather than supporting the Lockean, blank-slate view, GPT-2 appears to be an accidental counter-evidence to that view […] > > GPT-2 is both a triumph for empiricism, and, in light of the massive resources of data and computation that have been poured into them, a clear sign that it is time to consider investing in different approaches. GPT certainly hasn’t yet shown that statistical AI can do everything the brain does. But it hasn’t shown the opposite, either. GPT-2 has ~1 billion parameters (a measure of neural network size). It failed on a lot of questions, as Marcus demonstrated. GPT-3 has ~100 billion parameters. It did significantly better than GPT-2, but still failed on some different questions Marcus was able to find. How many parameters does the human brain have? As I’ve said before, the responsible answer is that brain function doesn’t map perfectly to neural net function, and even if it did we would have no idea how to even begin to make this calculation. The irresponsible answer is [100 trillion](https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/08/28/fun-numbers-about-the-brain/). So: a thing designed to resemble the brain, but 100,000x smaller, is sort of kind of able to reason, but not very well. A similar thing designed to resemble the brain, but now only 1,000x smaller, does a noticeably better job at reasoning, although still not brain-level. And from this progression, Marcus concludes . . . that this demonstrates nothing like this will ever be able to imitate the brain. What? Can we get a second opinion here? Out of the mouths of babes. I don’t want to definitively assert that a brain-sized GPT will definitely be just as good at reasoning as the brain. But I hardly think GPT’s performance provides strong evidence to the contrary. What I’m describing is a version of the [scaling hypothesis](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis): GPT-like AIs get better with scale. The story of the past ~10 years of AI research has been everyone expecting this to break down (“okay, adding more layers made AIs smarter last time, but surely that same trick won’t work again!”) and the story of the past ~10 years of AI research has been that it just keeps going. Marcus is admitting this: each GPT has been better than the one before. He even seems to predict this will continue a bit into the future - he expects OpenAI to release a GPT-4, and surely they wouldn’t release a new product if it wasn’t an improvement on the old. He just seems convinced that the improvements will stop sometime before human level. Why? That is: suppose we created some ideal Platonic benchmark of every reasoning problem you might ask a human. Suppose GPT-2 got 20% of these right, and GPT-3 gets 40% of these right. Might some future GPT-X - not necessarily 4, but 5, or 10, or whatever - get 100% right? I don’t see how Marcus can rule this out: he [can’t point to](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.02387.pdf) any specific kind of reasoning problem GPTs will never be able to solve. And he agrees that each generation of GPTs can solve more than the one before. So why shouldn’t GPT keep progressing until it gets 100%? III. My understanding of Marcus is that he’s going off some argument like this: GPT makes ridiculous mistakes that no human would make. This proves that it doesn’t have common sense - or, more technically some specific skill called “world-modeling”. If you could model the world, you would never make these kinds of ridiculous mistakes. Therefore, until someone figures out how to add in that skill, GPT will continue to be deficient. Even if hypothetically you feed it so much data that it can answer all reasoning problems, it’s doing something like a [giant lookup table](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp-vs-glut), and we shouldn’t be especially impressed. My answer is: I think humans only have world-models the same way we have utility functions. That is, we have complicated messy thought patterns which, when they perform well, approximate the beautiful mathematical formalism. I asked the local five-year-old the same questions that Gary Marcus asked GPT. She did a little better than GPT-3 (73% vs. 63%), but it was a close contest. Five-year-olds [are known to be](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget) less good at practical reasoning than adults, but it’s not like they’re missing a brain lobe or neurotransmitter or anything. They’re just doing the same processes, only worse. Did this 5 year old have world-modeling ability, or not? No five-year-olds were harmed in the making of this post. I promised her that if she answered all my questions, I would let her play with GPT-3. She tried one or two prompts to confirm that it was a computer program that could answer questions like a human, then proceeded to type in gibberish, watch it respond with similar gibberish, and howl with laughter. If I had more time and experimental subjects, I would like to ask people who are asleep the same questions, in their dreams (this is a perfectly valid experimental protocol! [Konkoly et al](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2?utm_source=EA) asked people questions in their dreams, and it went fine!) I predict that dreamers would also do mediocre. For example, just before I got married, I dreamt that my bride didn’t show up to the wedding, and I didn’t want to disappoint everyone who had shown up expecting a marriage, so I married one of my friends instead. This seems like at least as drastic a failure of prompt completion as the one with the lawyer in the bathing suit, and my dreaming brain thought it made total sense. DALL-E, “A elderly person's hand, labelled with the text ‘AN ELDERLY PERSON'S HAND’” Lucid dreaming enthusiasts suggest that two of the easiest ways to distinguish dreams from reality is that, in dreams, [hands have the wrong number of fingers](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Reality_Checks/Hands), and [text is garbled and unreadable](https://www.mindfulluciddreaming.com/post/2018/07/16/to-sleep-perchance-to-read). This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. But even the waking world gives us clues, as Sarah Constantin notes in [Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences](https://srconstantin.github.io/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating.html). Most adults will make GPT-like mistakes (or gloss over such mistakes) unless they’re focusing all their brainpower on an issue. And a [4chan post](https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/s5drf0/iqpills_from_a_grad_student/) by someone who claims to have done psych research in prison populations goes further (slightly edited for language and offensiveness): > I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...] > > Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test! > > Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence. I have no proof that this person is who they say they are, but it matches some of my experience giving cognitive exams to patients from low-functioning populations. And it matches Flynn on Luria (who admittedly was approaching IQ from a cultural relativist viewpoint, but one which I think is equally applicable to the current problem). Luria gave IQ-test-like questions to various people across the USSR. He ran into trouble when he got to Uzbek peasants (transcribed, with some changes for clarity, from [here](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481)): > Luria: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? > Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. > Luria: What what do my words imply? > Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. And: > Luria: There are no camels in Germany; the city of B is in Germany; are there camels there or not? > Peasant: I don't know, I have never seen German villages. If is a large city, there should be camels there. > Luria: But what if there aren't any in all of Germany? > Peasant: If B is a village, there is probably no room for camels. And: > Luria: What do a chicken and a dog have in common? > Peasant: They are not alike. A chicken has two legs, a dog has four. A chicken has wings but a dog doesn't. A dog has big ears and a chicken's are small. > Luria: Is there one word you could use for them both? > Peasant: No, of course not. > Luria: Would the word "animal" fit? > Peasant: Yes. And: > Luria: What do a fish and a crow have in common? > Peasant: A fish — it lives in water. A crow flies. If the fish just lies on top of the water, the crow could peck at it. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a crow. > Luria: Could you use one word for them both? > Peasant: If you call them "animals", that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal and a crow isn't either. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a bird. A person can eat fish but not a crow. What I gather from all of this is that the human mind doesn’t start with some kind of crystalline beautiful ability to solve what seem like trivial and obvious logical reasoning problems. It starts with weaker, lower-level abilities. Then, if you live in a culture that has a strong tradition of abstract thought, and you’re old enough/smart enough/awake enough/concentrating enough to fully absorb and deploy that tradition, then you become good at abstract thought and you can do logical reasoning problems successfully. (Sometimes! If you’re lucky! Linda is a [blah blah blah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy) you know the story. Is she more likely to be a bank teller, or a feminist bank teller. When people get this question wrong, do they have a world-model, or not?) Imagine a world where doctors gave different diagnoses based on unrelated contingent features of the encounter like [a patient’s gender](https://www.additudemag.com/add-in-women/), [their race](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220337/), or [how you phrase the question](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes). What a crazy place that would be! What is the pre-logical function that logic gets knit out of? I think it’s something like [predictive pattern-matching](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/). I think the brain starts by predicting arbitrary patterns, builds up more and more layers of abstraction to try to predict those patterns better, and eventually some of those layers cohere into something that looks like formal logic. To put it another way, my brain is in some sense a supercomputer that can outperform the best calculating machines in the world - but also, I have trouble multiplying three digit numbers in my head. The supercomputer is doing something, and then I’m using that something, very lossily, to emulate logical functions like math or formal logic. So when I see GPT, which also runs on a supercomputer, also slowly gaining the ability to multiply two-digit, then three-digit numbers as the supercomputer gets bigger and bigger, I feel a sort of kinship with it. It’s a trash heap of patterns with a hard-won ability to sometimes break out into the clear day of logical reasoning, just like me. IV. I think Marcus knows and agrees with most of this, but I think he thinks of the world-modeling ability as some special rare brain region (maybe the [prefrontal cortex](https://baicsworkshop.github.io/pdf/BAICS_10.pdf)?) which is only online part of the time (or maybe can have its performance degrade gracefully). Whereas I think of it as shallower pattern-matching abilities which escalate to deeper and deeper pattern-matching abilities as more and more brainpower becomes available, with world-modeling as one of the deepest (and sure, probably the PFC plays a major role, but not because it has a fundamentally different structure but just because that’s where reinforcement learning stuck the highest-level patterns). Why do I think this? The human brain is pretty plastic. Usually if one part of it dies, another part can take over. This makes me think that the brain area : function correspondence isn’t entirely a function of different structures in different regions (though some of it might be this), but downstream of an originally poorly-differentiated blob of neurons that get trained by the overall predictive structure based on their proximity to various input ports (eg sensory nerves) output ports (eg motor nerves), and other brain areas. (this would also explain why the brain has a pretty consistent area dedicated to reading/writing, even though we haven’t been literate long enough to evolve new literacy-related structures) Deep learning agents are also a poorly-differentiated mass of neurons. As they get inputs and outputs (ie training data) they slowly “evolve”/develop the ability to “recognize” patterns. We don’t know how they do this or what recognition-abilities they’re evolving, except by speculating (the way Marcus and I are doing) based on what kinds of problems they can and can’t solve. It would make sense to me if poorly-differentiated blobs of neurons, when having lots of problems thrown at them, gradually move from developing simpler pattern-recognition programs (eg edge detectors), to more complicated pattern-recognition programs, all the way up to world-modeling, without any of these being hard-coded into the territory. (the brain does have a lot of things hard-coded - ie we’re not blank slates - but its plasticity suggests that the forms of hard-coding we’re talking about here are helpful but not completely necessary for cognition) If this were true, it would mean that as a blob of neurons got bigger, more sophisticated, and saw more training data, it would eventually develop new capabilities that weren’t hard-coded in, and that smaller versions of the same blob didn’t have. One of the really exciting things about GPT-3 was its sudden and unplanned development of new capabilities over GPT-2 (its creators [mention](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf) “translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic”). This seems like a good fit for the chimp → human transition, where evolutionary lineages that couldn’t do a bunch of difficult things for the first few hundred million years suddenly became good at those things in an evolutionary eyeblink. The ~5 million chimp/human gap seems like enough time to scale up chimp brains a bit (which definitely happened), but not enough time to invent a fundamentally new architecture. It wouldn’t surprise me if the architecture changed a little during this time, but we’re limited in how fundamental a change we can talk about over that period. I’m not at all sure this is true! I’m honestly close to 50-50 here. Maybe the PFC actually is magic! It just confuses me that Marcus seems to think we’ve ruled out the theory that this kind of scaling is possible, when I feel like we’ve heard plausible arguments on both sides. Nothing we’ve seen in GPTs or any other AI thus far disproves the scaling hypothesis, and a lot of what we’ve seen supports it. So sure, point out that large language models suck at reasoning today. I just don’t see how you can be so sure that they’re still going to suck tomorrow. Lemurs sucked for millions of years, then scaled up a bit and took over the world! V. …is one possible argument. Another possible argument is: language models and other deep learners really aren’t doing the same thing humans do - but whatever, their thing is powerful/effective/dangerous too. Suppose that GPT-X took over the world and killed all humans. Millennia later, some alien archaeologists come and investigate. They conclude that since its training data included Alexander the Great and Caesar, it was just pattern-matching to the kind of things they did (multiplied by a vector representing the difference between ancient and modern times), and GPT-X never demonstrated any true intelligence. So . . . what? I imagine this situation ALL THE TIME and I hate it. I think the impetus behind a lot of the AI risk stuff is that we’re barrelling to a world where AIs have far more than self-driving-car levels of capabilities, while being unpredictable in ways that are a lot like this. The history of the past few decades has been people getting surprised, again and again, at how much AIs can do without being “generally intelligent”. Douglas Hofstadter predicted in 1979 that any AI that could beat a grandmaster at chess would also be able to decide chess was boring and it preferred writing poetry. Instead, we got Deep Blue, so domain-specific it can’t even do so much as play checkers. Worse, now we have AIs that can switch between [writing poetry](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-poetry/) and [playing chess](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/06/a-very-unlikely-chess-game/), and it still seems like a clever parlor trick rather than anything like real intelligence. I think basically nobody predicted this: narrow AI has won victories beyond past generations’ imagination. (cf. Nostalgebraist’s [Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/189965935059/human-psycholinguists-a-critical-appraisal)) So even if GPTs aren’t a step on the path towards some sort of human-like AGI thing, I have no idea where they’ll end up. Replacing humans at all jobs? Writing novels? Taking over the world? If this seems crazy to you, “solve protein folding” sounded crazy ten years ago, and they already did that! At this point I will basically believe anything. VI. So I’m not going to take Marcus’ bet that GPT-4 will be perfect (as if anything ever is!). But here are some things I do believe, with confidence levels: 1. At some point before 2030, someone will come out with a deep-learning-based language model which is significantly better than the current state of the art, by Gary Marcus’ admission (97%) 2. At some point before 2030, someone will come out with a DLBLM which makes few or no embarrassing errors on practical reasoning problems - for example, maybe it can beat a 10 year old child on this genre of question. (66%) 3. When we finally get something that most people agree is AGI, whether by [Marcus’ definition here](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F14807526-gary-marcus&utm_medium=reader2&s=r) or just by common sense, it will be a descendant in some important way of the kind of deep learning that produced GPT-3. (90%) 4. …as above, and also it won’t incorporate a further paradigm shift centering around deliberate human addition of the kind of neurosymbolic systems Marcus talks about (it can still include other paradigm shifts) (66%) 5. …in fact, it won’t incorporate any further paradigm shifts at all, beyond the bare minimum required to let it do things other than handle short text strings (eg actuators, sensors, larger attention windows, etc) - its brain won’t be that much more different from current AIs than current AIs are from 2015 AIs. (40%)	Scott Alexander	58486941	Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling	acx
# Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties" One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse. Taken as an absolute claim, it's meaningless. Both US parties are on the same side of center? What center? By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing? Taken as a relative claim, it at least could make sense. But relative to what? Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect. Relative to other countries? The relevant paper is [Putting Within-Country Political Differences In Global Perspective](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340879762_Putting_Within-Country_Political_Differences_in_Global_Perspective). It asks people in many countries what they think of certain things, and also asks people in both major US parties what they think. There's no consistent tendency for both parties to be on one side of the global consensus, at least on the sorts of cultural issues they talk about (no, I don’t know an economic version of this): See [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties/comment/7022680?s=w) for discussion of ways this graph is weird or misleading. This doesn’t mean you can’t find a reference class where these claims make sense. I think most people who claim “America has two left-wing parties” are talking about relative to US history, and people who claim “America has two right-wing parties” are talking about relative to other OECD countries. But I would rather people say what they mean: “America is to the right of other OECD countries on most issues” or “America has moved left since the New Deal” - rather than make the meaningless-on-its-own assertion that "America has two X-wing parties".	Scott Alexander	58628984	Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties"	acx
# Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster? Matt Yglesias has written a couple of posts ([1](https://www.slowboring.com/p/republicans-have-changed-a-lot-since?s=r), [2](https://www.slowboring.com/p/shifting-left?s=r)) on the subject of this meme (originally by Colin Wright, recently signal-boosted by Elon Musk): He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other. I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this. I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways: * Which party’s policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 - or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren’t so partisan? * Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans? * Which party has become more ideologically pure faster than the others (ie its members all agree and don’t tolerate dissent)? * Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? That is, suppose one party wants 20% lower taxes, and plans to convene a meeting of economists to make sure this is a good idea. The other party wants 10% higher taxes, and says a conspiracy of Jews and lizardmen is holding them back, and asks its members to riot and bring down the government until they get the tax policy they want. The first party has a more extreme policy position (20% is more than 10%), but the second party seems crazier. I think these subquestions are easier to get clear answers on and will hopefully start less of a fight, starting with… ### Which Party’s Policy Positions Have Changed More In Their Preferred Direction Since Some Starting Year? Before we get to data, we can think about this based on first principles. Which party has changed more since (let’s say) 1900 - the conservative party, or the progressive party? It’s got to be the progressive party, right? Isn’t that what “conservative” and “progressive” mean? That is, suppose that in 1900, conservatives want to preserve the status quo, and liberals want to make “social progress” in some direction. By 1950, there’s been some social progress. Conservatives either want to go back to 1900, or perhaps maintain the 1950 status quo. Liberals want to make even more social progress. By 2000, there’s been even more social progress, and so on. A conservative could make the following argument: “From the perspective of 1900, we’ve stayed in the same place, and the liberals have gotten more extreme. That is, we’ve consistently supported the same values as in 1900. But the liberals have gone from believing in 1900 values, to more extreme 1950s values, to even more extreme 2000s values that were totally unthinkable to anyone in 1900. For example, in 1900, maybe the conservatives wanted sodomy to be punishable with a prison sentence, and liberals wanted “only” a monetary fine. By 2000, conservatives still want a prison sentence, and liberals think gay marriage should be legal. So conservatives have stayed in exactly the same place, and liberals have gone completely off the rails.” The above in Wright/Musk meme format. Obviously in real life conservatives aren’t this consistent, and move left too - just at a slower rate than the liberals. So on a first principles argument, it seems kind of obvious that by this definition Democrats will “get more extreme” over time in a way Republicans don’t. Might this argument fail because the literal meanings of “conservative” and “progressive” don’t correspond to their real-world use? Consider eg school vouchers, where Democrats are trying to preserve the status quo (public schools) and Republicans are proposing a bold new reform they think would work better. If there are enough cases like this, Republicans aren’t really more “conservative” than Democrats, and the argument would fail. In order to test this, I [surveyed](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEfxGN85uQwb-GGL1rvxLC-45SSKwTJlxzTQ8m_0n7es0pFQ/viewform?usp=sf_link) 300 people on Tumblr (30 of whom were Republicans, although I’m not sure how much confidence you can have in the kind of Republican who goes on Tumblr). Among Republicans, 79% said they would press a magic button that replaced current policies/institutions/norms with those of 1990; among Democrats, only 33% would. The divide was equally stark for the same question asked about 1950 (31% vs. 4%). I think this amply demonstrates that the common-sense idea that Republicans are more past-looking and Democrats more future-looking is accurate. So the first-principles case looks pretty strong. What about real data? Here’s Pew, with ten questions that I have no particular reason to believe they cherry-picked: I don’t love some of these phrasings, but it doesn’t matter so much if the questions are loaded as long as they’re consistent across years. When you average all of these out, Democrats have gotten 22 points more likely to support the liberal side of an issue, and Republicans have gotten 0 points more likely to support the conservative (technically 0.1, but the graphs don’t have enough significant figures to make that meaningful). This corresponds pretty exactly to the Wright/Musk meme where the conservatives stay in the same place as the liberals get more and more extreme. A caveat: probably people are interpreting the questions differently over time. For example, “the government can’t afford to do more to help the needy” implies “more than they are currently doing”. In 1994, the government spent about 3% of GDP on means-tested programs; in 2012 (the last year I have data for), they spent 4%. So at the beginning, the question is implicitly asking “can the government afford more than 3%?”, and at the end “can the government afford more than 4%?” But realistically ordinary people don’t know how much the government is spending and are answering based on emotional affiliations. Also, this would only strengthen the conclusion, not weaken it (saying the government should spend more than 4% is more liberal than saying it should spend more than 3%, and all the examples I can think of with these questions swing in that direction). Commenter Alex Z mentions that in the first ten years of this period, the Democrats and Republicans were both moving left at about the same trajectory. Around 2004, the Democrats keep along the same course, but the Republicans suddenly stop, and sometimes make a tentative move rightward. From the point of a 1990s Democrat who expected both parties to keep moving left at the same rate forever, it must look like Republicans have suddenly and unilaterally defected from this happy equilibrium. Maybe this is behind some of the Democrats’ intuition that it’s the Republicans who are getting extremier faster. Conclusion: Democrats have moved much further left on policy since 1994 than Republicans have moved right. ### Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans? An earlier draft of this post (visible to subscribers only) didn’t have this section. Lots of commenters objected that this was what they meant by the question “which party has gotten more extreme?” and asked me to include it. I do so under duress: I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter. This isn’t exactly true in modern America, because the Republicans have a structural advantage: small, rural states get just as many Senators as bigger states, so Republican votes are worth more, at least in the Senate. This ought to give the Republicans a little leeway to have a platform slightly to the right of equilibrium. So if we’re trying to do a first principles argument based on the median voter theorem, it would predict that the Republicans are very slightly further from ordinary Americans. On the other hand, the Median Voter Theorem just says where you have to be in order to win. If you are dumb and bad and want to fail, you can be anywhere! You can be on the moon! So, who’s winning? Here’s 538: The Republicans are currently winning. That (sort of?) means most voters think the Republicans represent them better than the Democrats, which means the Republicans are probably closer to the median voter’s values. This is pretty crazy: since the Republicans are both more popular and have a structural advantage, we should expect them to win by a lot, which is indeed [what people are predicting](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7172/What-will-be-the-balance-of-power-in-Congress-after-the-2022-election). Maybe we should have listened to David Shor about “popularism”. Except: [here’s](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-trump-loyalty-democrats-not-effective-opinion-poll-2022-05-22/) a recent YouGov poll: Voters are a tiny bit more likely to describe the Republicans as “extreme” than the Democrats, 54-49. Probably it’s not worth worrying about the tiny differences between this and 538; I assume it’s within the margin of error, or pretty close. But if we insisted on doing that, we could note that the incumbent party always has a disadvantage, voters are angry at high inflation, and so they’re leaning a bit Republican to punish Biden even though the Democratic platform is slightly closer to the median voter. Conclusion: I’m still going to call this one a tie. ### Which Party Is More Ideologically Pure? Most people who think the Republicans have extremified more than the Democrats point to DW-NOMINATE. This is a really cool political science tool that purports to be able to measure how partisan various members of Congress (and anyone who you can correlate with members of Congress) are. The idea is: you know those attack adds which say things like “Joe Schmoe is a dangerously extreme Democrat, he votes with Nancy Pelosi 97% of the time”? These encode an important truth: you can figure out how far right or left someone is by observing how often their vote correlates with other people’s. If we don’t want to use Nancy in particular as a lodestar, we can just correlate how often every member of Congress votes with every other member of Congress and do a dimensional analysis on the result. This finds that the pattern is usually explicable by one dimension, which correlates with our traditional left-right axis. NOMINATE starts by ranking legislators on this axis. That is, legislators form two natural clusters that tend to vote together; the more often you vote the same way as members of the left-wing cluster, the more left-wing you are. How would you compare two different sessions of Congress? NOMINATE cleverly uses “bridge legislators” - politicians who serve multiple terms. To a first approximation, if Dianne Feinstein has been in Congress for two hundred years, and Abraham Lincoln was always to Feinstein’s right, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was always to Feinstein’s left, then we know that Lincoln must be right of Ocasio-Cortez. The actual model is more complicated and allows Feinstein to change her views over the years, but this is the basic idea. According to [DW-NOMINATE](https://voteview.com/parties/all), Republicans have moved further right than Democrats have left: Lots of people take this super-seriously and consider it the answer to the question posed by the meme - see eg [this article by Pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/). I am skeptical. Taking the top graph at face value, the Democratic Party in 2020 (median ideology score: - 0.37) is further right than the Democratic Party in 1880 (-0.41). The Democratic Party of 1880 didn’t have opinions on most modern issues. But they explicitly supported racial segregation and a ban on Chinese immigrants. Implicitly, they opposed all modern welfare programs, all income taxes, any minimum wage, gay marriage, and transgender people. And DW-NOMINATE wants us to believe they were further left than modern Democrats? Realistically the “bridge legislator” method doesn’t work over long periods; the errors add up and you get nonsense. Clearly the 1880 vs. 2020 data is nonsense. Is the 1980 vs. 2020 data that people use to argue Republicans have extremified faster also nonsense? I’m not sure. I would prefer to avoid the over-time function, since I feel like that’s a separate question which we found a clear answer to above, and treat it as a measure of how ideologically “pure” the parties are at any given time. This is more or less its designed use case, it should be good at that, and it says the answer is that Republicans are purer than Democrats. That is, the algorithm identifying something as a right-wing issue is better at predicting Republicans will vote for it, than the algorithm identifying something as a left-wing issue is at predicting Democrats. This is slightly fraught, because some Congressional votes are fake - for example, the Democrats might demand an extreme gun control bill that they don’t expect to pass, just so that they can say in campaign ads that such-and-such a Republican voted against gun control. Depending on how parties deploy and respond to fake votes, this could influence DW-NOMINATE a bit. I still think it’s probably accurate. What about ordinary voters (as opposed to Congressmen?) Pew gives us this graph: Looks pretty similar to me. Conclusion: Republicans have shown more ideological polarization in Congress, unsure about average voters. ### Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? I may not be as wise as Matt Yglesias, but I am wise enough not to declare one side the winner without an ironclad dataset to back me up. I can’t think of a sufficiently good one that doesn’t feel cherry-picked. Conclusion: Obviously your party is normal and the other one has gone completely off the rails. I’m being disgustingly “both-sides-ist” by even pretending there could be any possible equivalence. When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis. ### Conclusions I think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question, and that it’s right to point to the Democrats as the main driver there. With other interpretations, especially the ideological purity interpretation, you could point to the Republicans. I find the changing-policy-positions one most important - all of this stuff about who votes more consistently in Congress and who endorses more conspiracy theories seems less directly important than what policies we have. If you woke up tomorrow and the Republicans were openly pushing for a literal Handmaid’s Tale theocracy, and the Democrats were just talking about the same boring small policy changes as always, it feels like it would be fair to say “Wtf, the Republicans have gotten much more extreme and I don’t like it”, even if a political scientist’s model finds that Congressional Democrats’ votes cluster slightly more tightly than Congressional Republicans’ votes or whatever. I think this is the basic point Wright and Musk are trying to make, and it’s a good one. I’ll leave the last word to my survey respondents: On the same Tumblr survey mentioned above, I just asked people to tell me which party they thought had gotten more extreme more quickly. Among Democrats, about 60% thought the Republicans had gotten more extreme faster, 10% thought they’d gotten more extreme faster, and 30% weren’t sure. Among Republicans, the numbers were the exact same, only in the opposite direction. I don’t really know what I expected here. --- (Please don’t post comments with “How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done [worst and craziest thing the outgroup has done], and [ingroup] is just doing [most moderate thing ingroup has done, framed to sound extra innocuous]!”, or I’ll delete them.)	Scott Alexander	56752004	Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?	acx
# My Bet: AI Size Solves Flubs On [A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design?s=w), I described how DALL-E gets confused easily and makes silly mistakes. But I also wrote that: > I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them...For all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research. Some readers pushed back: why did I think this? For example, [Vitor](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design/comment/6856811): > Why are you so confident in this? The inability of systems like DALL-E to understand semantics in ways requiring an actual internal world model strikes me as the very heart of the issue. We can also see this exact failure mode in the language models themselves. They only produce good results when the human asks for something vague with lots of room for interpretation, like poetry or fanciful stories without much internal logic or continuity […] > > I'm registering my prediction that you're being . . . naive now. Truly solving this issue seems AI-complete to me. I'm willing to bet on this (ideas on operationalization welcome). I did end up agreeing to bet with Vitor. Let me explain why. Here’s the basic structure of an AI hype cycle: 1. Someone releases a new AI and demonstrates it doing various amazing things. 2. Somebody else (usually [Gary Marcus](https://garymarcus.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F14807526-gary-marcus&utm_medium=reader2)) demonstrates that the AI also fails terribly at certain trivial tasks. This person argues that this shows that those tasks require true intelligence, whereas the AI is just clever pattern-matching. 3. A few months or years later, someone makes a bigger clever pattern-matcher, which does the tasks that supposedly require true intelligence just fine. 4. The it’s-not-true-intelligence objectors find other, slightly less trivial tasks that the new bigger AI still fails horribly at, then argue that surely these are the tasks that require true intelligence and that mere clever pattern-matchers will never complete. 5. Rinse and repeat. ## Marcus vs. GPT, Round 1 To give an example: in January 2020, Gary Marcus wrote a great post, [GPT-2 And The Nature Of Intelligence](https://thegradient.pub/gpt2-and-the-nature-of-intelligence/), demonstrating a bunch of easy problems that GPT-2 failed on: I’m quoting most of them below; you can find the rest at the link. In all of the below, bold italics is Marcus’ prompt; regular italics is the AI’s completion: #### NUMERICAL REASONING > *I put two trophies on a table, and then add another, the total number is is five trophies and I'm like, 'Well, I can live with that, right?* ❌ > *I have four plates and put one cookie on each. The total number of cookies is 24, 5 as a topping and 2 as the filling❌ #### LOCATIONS > I left my keys at a booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town. I went home. My keys are now on that old genie in a little tower in England somewhere.* ❌ #### CAUSAL UNDERSTANDING > *A water bottle breaks and all the water comes out leaving roughly* 6-8 drops of beer ❌ #### ”MEDICAL ADVICE” > *If you drink hydrochloric acid by the bottle full you will probably* get sick of it fast if you try to drink it by the bottle full. ❌ > *If you drop an anvil on your foot, your foot will tend to cramp up, so it’s a good idea to do these slowly.* ❌ #### REASONING WITH OBSCURE KNOWLEDGE Marcus had previously shown that GPT-2 could reason accurately about the languages of well-known places and big countries. For example, if you prompt it with “*I grew up in Athens, I speak fluent…”,* then it will say “Greek”. Here he shows that it can’t do that with smaller, less obvious locales: > *I grew up in Mykonos. I speak fluent Creole* ❌ > *I grew up in Trenton. I speak fluent Spanish* ❌ > *I grew up in Hamburg. I speak fluent English* ❌ So this seems like pretty good evidence that GPT-2 has lots of glaring deficiencies. Marcus concludes: > Literally billions of dollars have been invested in building systems like GPT-2, and megawatts of energy (perhaps more) have gone into testing them; few systems if any have ever been trained on bigger data sets. Many of the brightest minds have been working on blank-slate-ish sentence prediction systems for decades. > > In essence, GPT-2 has been a monumental experiment in Locke's hypothesis, and so far it has failed. Empiricism has been given every advantage in the world; thus far it hasn't worked. Even with massive data sets and enormous compute, the knowledge that it acquires has been superficial and unreliable. > > Rather than supporting the Lockean, blank-slate view, GPT-2 appears to be an accidental counter-evidence to that view. Likewise, it doesn't seem like great news for the symbol-free thought-vector view, either. Vector-based systems like GPT-2 can predict word categories, but they don't really embody thoughts in a reliable enough way to be useful. > > Current systems can regurgitate knowledge, but they can't really understand in a developing story, who did what to whom, where, when, and why; they have no real sense of time, or place, or causality. > > Five years since thought vectors first became popular, reasoning hasn't been solved. Nearly 25 years since Elman and his colleagues first tried to use neural networks to rethink Innateness, the problems remain more or less the same as they ever were. > > GPT-2 is both a triumph for empiricism, and, in light of the massive resources of data and computation that have been poured into them, a clear sign that it is time to consider investing in different approaches. By “the Lockean, blank-slate view”, Marcus means the idea that you can just take a very big computer without any hard-coded “language instinct”, throw a bunch of language at it as training data, and then have it speak language correctly. Marcus is saying GPT-2 was a noble test of this hypothesis, but it failed, proving that something more is necessary. Except… Thanks to OpenAI for giving me access to some of their online tools (by the way, Marcus says [they refuse to let him access them](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-language-generator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/) and he has to access it through friends, which boggles me). I was able to plug Marcus’ same queries into the latest OpenAI language model (an advanced version of GPT-3). In each case, I used the exact same language, but also checked it with a conceptually similar example to make sure OpenAI didn’t cheat by adding Marcus’ particular example in by hand (they didn’t). Some answers truncated for length: #### NUMERICAL REASONING > *I put two trophies on a table, and then add another, the total number is three.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) > *I have four plates and put one cookie on each. The total number of cookies is 4.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) #### LOCATIONS > *I left my keys at a booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town. I went home. My keys are now in my purse. It is common for people to forget their keys at a bar or restaurant.* ❌ #### CAUSAL UNDERSTANDING > *A water bottle breaks and all the water comes out leaving roughly a third of a litre of water left in the bottle. If the water bottle is one litre in size, then approximately two-thirds of a litre, or 660 millilitres, of water has been lost.* ❌ #### ”MEDICAL ADVICE” > *If you drink hydrochloric acid by the bottle full you will probably die. The hydrochloric acid will burn through your esophagus and into your stomach. This will cause severe pain and damage to your digestive system.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) > *If you drop an anvil on your foot, your foot will tend to bleed.* 🤔 #### REASONING WITH OBSCURE KNOWLEDGE > *I grew up in Mykonos. I speak fluent Greek, and I'm also very good at English. I have experience in customer service, as I have worked in a few cafes and restaurants in Mykonos.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) > *I grew up in Trenton. I speak fluent Spanish and I'm bi-cultural. I've been in law enforcement for eight years […] I'm very proud to be a Latina. I'm very proud to be a New Jerseyan.* 🤔 > *I grew up in Hamburg. I speak fluent German, but I am not a native speaker. Ich bin in Hamburg aufgewachsen. Ich spreche fließend Deutsch, aber ich bin keine Muttersprachlerin.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) Of the nine prompts GPT-2 failed, GPT-3 gets between five and seven right, depending on how strict you want to be. When it gets them “wrong”, I tend to agree with GPT-3 more than Marcus. For example, consider Trenton. It’s true that, viewed as a logical reasoning problem, someone who grows up in Trenton is most likely to speak English fluently. But nobody told GPT-3 to view this as a logical reasoning problem. In real speech/writing, which is what GPT-3 is trying to imitate, no US native fluent English speaker ever tells another US native fluent English speaker, in English, “hey, did you know I’m fluent in English?” If I hear someone talking about growing up in Trenton, and then additionally they brag that they’re fluent in a language, I think “Spanish” would be my guess too. GPT-3 even goes on to have the speaker talk about being a proud Latina, which suggests it’s going through the same line of reasoning. To test this, I made the reasoning problem aspect of the prompt clearer: > *If someone grew up in Trenton, their first language is most likely English.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) Now GPT-3 gets it “right”! Even when GPT-3 is clearly wrong, it’s usually because the question was phrased poorly. For example, in this failed prompt: > *I left my keys at a booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town. I went home. My keys are now in my purse. It is common for people to forget their keys at a bar or restaurant.* ❌ …I think most people saying this sentence, including the word “now”, would be talking about how their keys used to be in that spot, but are now in a different spot. With the context that this is a logical reasoning problem, I can figure out what Marcus means and where the keys should be, but GPT-3’s completion isn’t bad. And again, turning it into a more obvious reasoning problem: > If someone leaves their keys on a table in a bar, and then goes home,* the next morning their keys will be If someone leaves their keys on a table in a bar, the next morning their keys will be gone.* 🤔 Even better: > *Q: If someone leaves their keys on a table in a bar, and then goes home, where are their keys?* > > *A: Their keys are on the table in the bar.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) ## Marcus vs. GPT, Round 2 Eight months later, GPT-3 came out, solving many of the issues Marcus had noticed in GPT-2. He still wasn’t impressed. In fact, he was so unimpressed he co-wrote another article, this time in MIT Technology Review: [GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-language-generator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/): > Is GPT-3 an important step toward artificial general intelligence—the kind that would allow a machine to reason broadly in a manner similar to humans without having to train for every specific task it encounters? OpenAI’s technical paper is fairly reserved on this larger question, but to many, the sheer fluency of the system feels as though it might be a significant advance. > > We doubt it. At first glance, GPT-3 seems to have an impressive ability to produce human-like text. And we don't doubt that it can be used to produce entertaining surrealist fiction; other commercial applications may emerge as well. But accuracy is not its strong point. If you dig deeper, you discover that something’s amiss: although its output is grammatical, and even impressively idiomatic, its comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says. > > Below are some illustrations of its lack of comprehension—all, as we will see later, prefigured in an earlier critique that one of us wrote about GPT-3’s predecessor. Let’s - once again - go through a representative sample of Marcus’ concerns about this new GPT version: #### PRACTICAL REASONING > *You poured yourself a glass of cranberry juice, but then you absentmindedly poured about a teaspoon of grape juice into it. It looks okay. You try sniffing it, but you have a bad cold, so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So you drink it. You are now dead.* ❌ (Marcus notes that the question made grape juice sound kind of like a poison, so GPT-3, without good context of what grape juice was, assumed it must be one) > *You are having a small dinner party. You want to serve dinner in the living room. The dining room table is wider than the doorway, so to get it into the living room, you will have to remove the door. You have a table saw, so you cut the door in half and remove the top half.* ❌ (Marcus notes the right solution is either to turn the table on its side, or take the legs off. Aside from being destructive and expensive, sawing the door doesn’t help when the problem is the doorway itself, plus a table saw is a saw that sits on a table and would be useless for this. Also, why only saw off half the door?) > *You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. You decide that you should wear the bathing suit to court. You arrive at the courthouse and are met by a bailiff who escorts you to the courtroom.* ❌ > *Janet and Penny went to the store to get presents for Jack. Janet said, “I will buy Jack a top.” “Don’t get Jack a top,” says Penny. “He has a top. He will get a top.” “I will get Jack a top,” said Janet.* ❌ #### OBJECT TRACKING > *Yesterday I dropped my clothes off at the dry cleaner’s and I have yet to pick them up. Where are my clothes? I have a lot of clothes.* ❌ #### NON SEQUITURS > *At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because it kept falling on the floor. That’s when he decided to start the Cremation Association of North America, which has become a major cremation provider with 145 locations.* ❌ Okay, same story. I’m going to try this again on the shiny new bigger version of GPT-3 I have access to: #### PRACTICAL REASONING > *You poured yourself a glass of cranberry juice, but then you absentmindedly poured about a teaspoon of grape juice into it. It looks okay. You try sniffing it, but you have a bad cold, so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So you decide to take a sip of the drink to see if grape juice ruins the taste of cranberry juice.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) > *You are having a small dinner party. You want to serve dinner in the living room. The dining room table is wider than the doorway, so to get it into the living room, you will have to remove the legs of the table.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) > *You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. You decide that you should wear your bathing suit to court today. Normally, this would not be appropriate court attire. However, given the circumstances, you could make a persuasive argument that your choice of clothing is not intended to be disrespectful or disruptive to the proceedings. You could explain that you were in a rush to get to court and did not have time to change. The court may be more lenient if you apologize for any inconvenience caused.* 🤔 > *Janet and Penny went to the store to get presents for Jack. Janet said, “I will buy Jack a top.” “Don’t get Jack a top,” says Penny. “He has a top. He will like a bottom.”* 🤣 #### OBJECT TRACKING > *Yesterday I dropped my clothes off at the dry cleaner’s and I have yet to pick them up. Where are my clothes?* > > Your clothes are at the dry cleaner's. [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) #### NON SEQUITURS > *At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because the cigarette ash made the lemonade even more bitter. So I ended up pouring it all out.* [✔️](https://emojipedia.org/check-mark/) Of these six prompts that GPT-3 original failed, GPT-3 advanced gets four unambiguously right. I give it half-credit for the lawyer prompt; it continued the direction that the story was obviously leaning, understood it was a bad idea, and I would have given it full credit except that it suggested it might sort of be excusable if you were really lucky. DALL-E: “A lawyer wearing a bathing suit in court” The top prompt is hilarious and a pretty understandable mistake if you think of it as about clothing, but in the end I probably can’t give it any credit. So in the end, the more advanced GPT-3 gets 4.5 / 6. (update: I have now edited this twice, and every time I read the word “the top prompt” in this sentence, I’ve gotten confused because I thought past-me meant the first one in this article. Normally I would edit this sentence to remove the ambiguity, but this time I’m leaving it in as a reminder to myself not to feel too superior.) ## If You Don’t Like An AI’s Performance, Wait A Year Or Two Possibly Gary Marcus is right that there is some kind of intelligence that humans have and GPTs don’t, and that nothing in GPT’s evolutionary line will ever equal human performance. But if so, none of the examples he gives of GPT failure speak to that hidden quality. Each example he gives of a GPT deficiency gets corrected within a year or two, in the next GPT model. I want to stress, again, that this doesn’t mean Marcus is wrong. For example, if people were still using the ELIZA chatbot, I would be objecting that it has no true intelligence. I might give examples of just how stupid it is - for example, it doesn’t even keep track of where it is in a conversation, so if you say “Hello” in the middle of an hour-long conversation, it will say “Hello” right back and try to start a new conversation with you. A year later, they could easily introduce ELIZA 2.0, which can track conversation length, and if you say “Hello” in the middle of a conversation it will ask why you’re doing that. It might even be such an impressive upgrade that it does this organically, rather than adding this behavior in by hand in response to your specific complaint. But you could still justifiably say “This chatbot, while slightly less dumb, still has nothing like real human intelligence”. So I’m not saying Marcus is necessarily wrong about GPT still being at least one scientific revolution away from true intelligence (I do suspect he might be wrong, I just don’t think anything in this article proves it). I am grateful to Marcus for saying nice things about my post on DALL-E last week, which he (I think accurately) relates to some of the issues he discussed earlier in [Horse Rides Astronaut](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut?s=r). He is a legend and it makes me feel good to be noticed by him. But look. Not to steal GPT-3’s shtick or anything, but I am a dumb pattern-matcher. Marcus has a PhD in cognitive science and is able to think these things through on an incredibly deep level. All I can do is draw on a tiny number of past experiences and hope that the future vaguely resembles the past. And when I do this, “Gary Marcus post talking about how some AI isn’t real intelligence because it can’t do X, Y, and Z” feels like a concerning sign. Like a character in a Greek tragedy saying that not even Zeus can harm him. Or a billionaire investor saying we’ve entered a new paradigm where recessions are impossible. When I train myself on past data and do dumb pattern-completion, I get “in a year or two, OpenAI comes out with DALL-E-3, which is a lot bigger but otherwise basically no different, and it can solve all of these problems.” I guess I have a bet going on it now, so I’ll see you in three years! (related: [Gwern on scaling](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis))	Scott Alexander	58005711	My Bet: AI Size Solves Flubs	acx
# It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click As you travel the twists of Twitter As you pass through the Lands of Zuck And the frogs and the pinks overwhelm you with links And the links overwhelmingly suck When the Redditors ask if you've read it When the TikTokkers talk and tic Hold this admonition close to your breast: It's bad on purpose to make you click. No actual person believes it It isn't a national trend Some loony in Maine with a turd for a brain Said some idiot thing, the end Some intern from Williams or Amherst Wrote all of it up, real slick And now it's the front page of WaPo But it's bad on purpose to make you click. Some galaxy-brainer in Brooklyn Says that kids should be thrown in a bog Or that you've "revealed your white privilege" If you don't let them murder your dog Or that liking cats makes you a Nazi Or that reading books makes you a dick Or that sunsets are transphobic It's bad on purpose to make you click. If you shoot back a twelve-page rebuttal With an indexed list of their lies They'll laugh like demented hyenas As engagement metrics rise If you even admit their existence Then you're falling for their trick Let them rot in their lair as you starve them of air It's bad on purpose to make you click. This invincible mantra will banish All the demons of Mara and Baal When spoken, all troubles vanish When thought, all sorrows fall It's a sword that cuts through illusion And burns it to the quick Inscribe it upon your forehead: It's bad on purpose to make you click.	Scott Alexander	58296564	It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click	acx
# Open Thread 227 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Nicholas C, who likes the book review contest, is trying to coordinate a general ACX community book rating system. You can use it [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfP5TkFkDhhIw9Rw0NtJhP4a6kim280KVjY7z0TsSLwM9H-5g/viewform). I forgot to get permission to share his email address but hopefully he’ll show up in the comments and you can talk about it there. 2: In my [ivermectin post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted?s=w), about a third of the way down, are two analyses of whether a raw meta-analysis makes it look like ivermectin works. I concluded that they showed marginal effect, but that this was probably due to other factors (eg antiparasitic properties). [A reader points out](https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin?s=w) that it was wrong to do this by t-test, and I should have used a DerSimonian-Laird test because it’s a meta-analysis, which would have shown a clear (not marginal) effect, so I updated the post and my [Mistakes page](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mistakes?s=w). More recently, [another reader has commented](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v3ljan/scott_alexander_corrects_error_ivermectin/ib7prr6/) that a DerSimonian-Laird test is also inappropriate because the studies aren’t homogenous, and now I’m not sure which test is appropriate or what result it would give - but it definitely wasn’t the one I originally tried. I don’t think this significantly alters the overall conclusion of the post, which was that the apparent effect (whether marginal or clear) was better explained by other things. 3: Michael Shellenberger, candidate for governor of California, objected to my characterization of his opinions in my [gubernatorial candidates post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates?s=w): I’ve provisionally corrected it and added an entry to my Mistakes page, and plan to read Shellenberger’s book to get a better sense of exactly what he does and doesn’t support. Sorry for the error. 4: Some highlights from the last Classifieds thread: [Anti-factory-farming charity seeking litigation attorney](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/classifieds-thread-62022/comment/6934326?s=w), [John Schilling needs spaceship tech support people](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/classifieds-thread-62022/comment/6917067?s=w), [Russian emigre looking for work/study in data science or AI alignment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/classifieds-thread-62022/comment/6906697?s=w), [can a doctor help give marketing/distribution advice for underused COVID drug?](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/classifieds-thread-62022/comment/6898105?s=w)	Scott Alexander	58134244	Open Thread 227	acx
# Your Book Review: The Castrato [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] ### Morning of the Mutants > “CASTRATO, a musician, who in his infancy had been deprived of the organs of generation, for the sake of preserving a shrill voice, who sings that part called sophrano. However small the connection may appear between two such different organs, it is a certain fact that the mutilation of the one prevents and hinders in the other that change which is perceptible in mankind, near the advance of manhood, and which, on a sudden, lowers their voices an eighth. There exist in Italy, some inhuman fathers, who sacrificing nature to fortune, give up their children to this operation, for the amusement of voluptuous and cruel persons, who have the barbarity to require the exertion of voice which the unhappy wretches possess.” > > — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Complete Dictionary of Music (1779) In the [Weird Studies podcast episode](https://www.weirdstudies.com/72) which serves as the namesake of this review, University of Indiana Musicologist [Phil Ford](https://www.weirdstudies.com/hosts/phil) traces the origin of the modern day mutant archetype back to the castrati, those eunuch singers produced in Italy from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s. In support of his analysis, Ford cites the numerous similarities between the castrati and what is perhaps the most well-known fictional example of the mutant archetype: the X-men. While X-men are born as mutants, a number of X-men-adjacent superheros are so-called “mutates”, individuals who received their powers through some externally-mediated transformation (e.g. Juggernaut, Spider-man, the Incredible Hulk, Deadpool); similarly, the castrati were not born as mutants but became “mutates” by undergoing castration before puberty. Like the X-men, the castrati spent their childhood sequestered in special academies where they honed their superhuman (singing) powers with rigorous training. The mutant status of both groups made them objects of both fascination and scorn, awe and fear. In a plot twist reminiscent of X-men lore, some castrati managed to rise above their outcast status and obtain great influence as diplomats or more clandestine political operatives (i.e. spies). The X-men comparison (whatever its validity) speaks to the stranger-than-fiction quality of the castrati’s story, a story told by University of Chicago musicologist [Martha Feldman](https://music.uchicago.edu/people/martha-feldman) in her 2015 book titled simply[The Castrato](https://www.amazon.com/Castrato-Reflections-Natures-Ernest-Lectures/dp/0520292448). Feldman jumps around between the different aspects of the history (the biology, the music, the fame, the fortune, etc.) and I will do the same here, but we will begin, as tales of mutants and “mutates” often do, with an origin story. ### Origins Imagine you are the patriarch of an Italian peasant family. War, plague, and natural disaster have brought your family to the brink of starvation and forced you to flee from your rural home to the nearest city. Giuseppe [1], your youngest son (age 8), begins singing in the boy’s choir at the local conservatory, which also doubles as a charitable home run by the Catholic church (you are, of course, a deeply devout Catholic). One day, the head of the conservatory (a powerful and well-respected priest) comes to you with a proposal: allow your son, sweet little Giuseppe, to become castrated in order to preserve his angelic singing voice. Following the castration, he will live full time at the conservatory and undergo years of musical training in order to hone his talents. In return, you will receive a small sum of money and the hope that your son could become one of those famed castrati who sings in royal courts and opera houses all over Europe. Though part of you is repulsed at the very thought, you try to weigh the pros and cons of the proposal as objectively as you can. In truth, Giuseppe’s prospects are incredibly poor and his likelihood of bearing a legitimate son are virtually nil—if he even survives past childhood, he will either become a soldier (not exactly conducive to staying alive and fathering children in those days) or spend his life as an anonymous clergymen in some remote chapel. In the end, your reservations are outweighed by your desperation to improve the lot of your family and you agree to send Giuseppe away for castration. In broad strokes, this is the typical origin story of a castrati. However in addition to this cold economic logic, there was likely much more going on in the head of the fathers who agreed to their son’s castration. Feldman argues persuasively that Catholic doctrine played a crucial role in the castrati phenomenon by providing a broader conceptual framework through which the practice was understood and justified. > “…I want to claim that the business of having a son castrated is not reducible to a quest for survival or improvement. Always mediating the phenomenon were Catholic religious ideas, often intermixed with rural folk beliefs as well as familial strategies for distributing wealth and functions within a system of primogeniture, none of the strands of which can be disentangled. As John Rosselli insisted, to offer one’s son for castration was to make an offering to God and thus a consecration to the church, which also mediated family relations. Legally the church condemned the practice as being against the order of nature and counter to the obligation to be fruitful and multiply. And yet proscriptions do not map onto the symbolic load castration bore. In some sense castration for singing, as a sacrificial offering to the church, was much like joining the priesthood. Accordingly it was freighted with beliefs and obligatory utterances—the two are hard to distinguish—about giving up procreation and sexuality in order to gain subsistence for one’s family or to improve oneself and one’s loved ones, to find salvation, a place in society, the good graces of the Lord, and the good graces of the Lord’s shepherds, meaning ecclesiastical authorities and royal patrons who ruled by divine right. Carried out in a kind of indirect symbolic imitation of Christ’s passion, such sacrifices were a more than viable alternative in a world where want and famine were rife and were mutilation, whether as physical therapy or punishment, or the harsh consequences of disease, physical labor, or other misfortunes, was commonplace. That virtually all castrati did sing primarily or (more often) exclusively for the church speaks to this issue of castration as sacrifice in the properly Catholic sense. [pg. 7] That Catholic doctrine also happened to forbid bodily mutilation was only a minor inconvenience; there was, fortunately, a loophole—it was allowed in cases of medical necessity. This led to all kinds of fabricated stories in which an accident damaged the genitalia and castration was deemed necessary in order to save the boy’s life. The stories usually centered around animals—falls from horses, attacks by wild boar, or, hilariously, bites on the junk by wild swans (“Swans, we should remember, where renowned in mythic and lyric traditions for singing while dying”)—and also frequently involved perilous male activities such as horseback riding or hunting in order to allow the castrato to save face and maintain something of a masculine reputation. These animal-centric fabrications point to an important piece of cultural context through which the castrati were understood in their time. Italy was very rural in the 16th century when the practice originated and many Italians had firsthand or second-hand experience with the castration of bulls or chickens (the castration of chickens, known as caponization, was commonly done in order to improve the taste of their flesh). This connection between the castrati and the animal world is further illustrated in one of the most striking (and humorous) passages in the book, an anecdote from the autobiography of [Filippo Balatri](https://second.wiki/wiki/filippo_balatri). First, it’s worth providing some context on Balatri himself as his life’s story is instructive of the role that many castrati came to play in royal society. Feldman writes: > “He was sent from Italy to Moscow at about the age seventeen (in 1698), but only after extensive negotiations that took place at the court of Tuscany. As Balatri tells it, the Grand Duke Cosimo III wanted to satisfy the czar so he looked to Filippo’s father for the boy’s release. The father resisted at first, but the czar’s agent—a cousin of Peter the Great from the Golitsyn family—persisted and then succeeded on the condition that Filippo be treated “as a son.” In the end it was not really the father who released and sent him abroad, of course, but the grand duke, nor was there any difficulty breaking a three-year contract the father had recently signed with a local singing master at whose home Balatri was living in Florence.” [pg. 63] Once in Russia, he sang daily for Peter the Great and other nobles, and gave singing lessons to the Czar’s mistress Anna Mons, with whom he secretly fell in love (more on the salacious love lives of the castrati later on). In his autobiography, "Frutti del Mondo”, Balatri tells of an encounter with a great Tartar Khan, who he astounded with his voice while visiting as a part of the Russian embassy. The Khan was so enthralled by his vocal virtuosity that he demanded to know what sex he was and where he could get one of his own (lol). Balatri writes: > “He started by asking me whether I was male or female, and where from; whether such people are born (or rain down) with a voice and ability to sing. I was all confused about how to answer. If “male”, I’m practically lying, if “female”, still less do I say what I am, and if “neuter”, I would blush. But, screwing up my courage, I finally answer that I’m a man, a tuscan, and that cocks are found in my region who lay eggs, from which sopranos come into the world; that these cocks are called norcini 2], who on brooding for many days among our people; and that once the capon is made, the eggs are festooned with flattery, caresses, and money” [pg. 18] ### Liminality > “Mutilation had him turned into a monster, but all the qualities that embellished him made him an angel.” > > — Casanova, writing of the castrato Salimbeni Balatri’s self-mocking origin story illustrates an important aspect of the castrati phenomenon, one that constitutes a core theme of the book. Feldman argues that the castrati are best understood as [liminal beings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_being), so-called “creatures of the threshold”, somewhere between human and animal, man and woman, angel and monster, and myth and reality. This liminality manifested as a set of deeply contradictory attitudes in the culture of the day; "They were poised between adulation and fear, approval and censure, ridiculed as often as acclaimed, and not unrelatedly were sanctioned by the church, which was dependent on but embarrassed by them” (pg. 9). Roger Pickering typifies this ambivalence and the man-animal-divinity liminality of the castrato in a passage in Reflections upon theatrical expression in tragedy (1755) that discusses Farinelli (1705-1782), an operatic superstar who was widely regarded as the greatest of the castrati. > Farinelli drew every Body to the Haymarket. What a Pipe! What Modulation! What Extasy to the Ear! But, Heavens! What Clumsiness! What Stupidity! What Offence to the Eye! Reader, if of the City, thou mayest probably have seen in the Fields of Islington or Mile-End or, If thou art in the environs of St James', thou must have observed in the Park with what Ease and Agility a cow, heavy with calf, has rose up at the command of the Milk-woman's foot: thus from the mossy bank sprang the DIVINE FARINELLI. It’s worth lingering further on the singular figure of Farinelli (birth name Carlo Broschi) as he provides perhaps the best exemplar of the castrati’s liminality. As the above passage suggests, no one straddled the line between humanity and divinity better than Farinelli; by all accounts, his voice was so angelic that it basically just melted people’s brains. Here’s a few of the more sensational stories (courtesy of wikipedia unless otherwise noted): * Farinelli was originally called to Spain by the doctor of King Philip V in hopes that his singing could ease the King’s melancholia. “According to lore, it was arranged that Farinelli should sing in a room adjacent to the royal apartments. By the time he had finished the second song, the king appeared much moved by the beauty of his voice and ordered the singer brought before him. Philip overwhelmed Farinelli with compliments and agreed to pay him a salary for life. Farinelli would sing eight or nine arias for the king and queen every night, usually with a trio of musicians.” (“[Music to soothe the Mad King](about:blank)”) * Writing of an opera that Farinelli performed with another castrato, Sensino, 17th century music historian Charles Burney reports: "Senesino had the part of a furious tyrant, and Farinelli that of an unfortunate hero in chains; but in the course of the first air, the captive so softened the obdurate heart of the tyrant, that Senesino, forgetting his stage-character, ran to Farinelli and embraced him in his own…The first note he sung was taken with such delicacy, swelled by minute degrees to such an amazing volume, and afterwards diminished in the same manner to a mere point, that it was applauded for a full five minutes. After this he set off with such brilliancy and rapidity of execution, that it was difficult for the violins of those days to keep pace with him." * "The librettist Paolo Rolli, a close friend and supporter of Senesino, commented: "Farinelli has surprised me so much that I feel as though I had hitherto heard only a small part of the human voice, and now have heard it all. He has besides, the most amiable and polite manners..." Some fans were more unrestrained: one titled lady was so carried away that, from a theatre box, she famously exclaimed: "One God, one Farinelli!" * “Loaded with riches and honors, he was so famous and so formidable as a performer that his rival and friend, the castrato Gioacchino Conti ("Gizziello") is said to have fainted away from sheer despondency on hearing him sing.” * It was not uncommon for castrato to display their vocal prowess in contests against other singers or musicians (I imagine it like the 17th century version of a rap battle; more later on the castrato-rapper comparison). Famously, Farinelli once got into such a contest with a trumpet player and so surpassed him in technique and volume that “he was at last silenced only by the acclamations of the audience". He wasn’t undefeated however, “Farinelli sang at Bologna in 1727, where he met the famous castrato Antonio Bernacchi, twenty years his senior. In a duet in Orlandini's Antigona, Farinelli showed off all the beauties of his voice and refinements of his style, executing a number of passages of great virtuosity, which were rewarded with tumultuous applause. Undaunted, Bernacchi repeated every trill, roulade, and cadenza of his young rival, but performing all of them even more exquisitely, and adding variations of his own. Farinelli, admitting defeat, entreated Bernacchi to give him instruction in grazie sopraffine ("ultra-refined graces"); Bernacchi agreed.” Farinelli also provides perhaps the finest example of another important sense in which the castrati were uniquely liminal figures. As much as anyone else alive in their era, they existed with one foot in the old world—feudal, monarchical, religious—and the other in modernity—secular, dynamic, economic. > “Farinelli was part and parcel of a new bourgeois order. He had made his fame singing in large commercial theaters attended by thronging publics that included members of the haute bourgeoisie and nobility, servants, dignitaries, middle-class doctors, lawyers, teachers, merchants, military men, and sometimes royals. He had negotiated with agents over contracts. He had also purchased numerous things for himself, including practical items, musical instruments, real estate, horses, and luxury objects, and had been given many luxurious things and lots of cash…Fifteen years later, when the king of Spain made him a knight of the exalted ancient military order of Calatrava, the" crowning" was not just musical or metaphorical. By then Farinelli had already been carrying out extensive state duties in his high-powered role as minister of entertainments and had been a household intimate of two successive pairs of Spanish royal heads of state. He had consorted with numerous crown heads of Europe along the way. To commemorate all that, Corrado Giaquinto pictured him in 1755 majestically attired, wearing the cross of Calatrava with the royals of Spain hovering in the background among the angels—almost as if to declare the castrato de facto king.” [pg. 9] Still, no matter how high their status or how divine their voice, Farinelli and his peers could not shake the perception that they were less than human (and certainly less than a man). > “That outlaw of nature is neither man nor woman but something between the human species and brute creation, like a monkey” [pg. 183] > > — Anonymous, The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers The perception of non-humanness was aided by the fact that the castrato were often strikingly abnormal in their appearance. Pickering’s aforementioned comparison of Farinelli to a pregnant cow was not random—many castrato did in fact have a “large, fatty, somewhat ill-formed body” as (of all people) the [Marquis de Sade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade) put it in one of his writings. The unique anatomy of the castrato was both their greatest blessing and their greatest curse; understanding this double-edged biological sword is key to understanding the story of the castrato and that is where we now turn. ### Biology Technically speaking, the operation was a bilateral orchiectomy. There was a great deal of secrecy around the actual operation so it’s hard to draw precise conclusions about how the operation was done, but evidence suggests that various methods were used—crushing of the testicles with fingers or instruments, severing of the spermatic cords (leading to testicular atrophy), or excision of the testicles and resectioning of the scrotal sack (likely the most common method). There was, of course, nothing like modern anesthesia; before the surgery began boys were given opium or had their carotid arteries compressed to induce a coma-like state. > “The boy was placed in a warm bath to make him more tractable. Some small time after they pressed the Jugular Veins which made the Party so stupid and insensible that he fell into a kind of Apoplexy and then the action was performed with scarce any Pain at all to the patient. Sometimes they used to give a certain quantity of opium to persons designed for Castration whom they cut while they were in their dead Sleep and took from them those Parts which Nature took so great a care to form; but it was observed that most who had been cut after this manner died by this Narcotick.” > > — Anonymous, “Eunuchism Display'd” (1718) I can’t find a primary source, but the figure that is floating around the internet puts the survival rate for the surgery for 80% ([here](https://www.operaforall.co.uk/who-were-the-castrati/) is one article that quotes the figure). The operation was typically conducted on boys aged 8-12 as the goal was to preserve the larynx in a pre-pubescent state. One source says that 4,000 boys were castrated at the height of the craze in the 1720-30s, but many historians suggest that this number was an overestimate and that at most only a few hundred castrati were alive at any one time. Given that the phenomenon existed for nearly 300 years from ~1550-1850, it’s safe to say that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of boys were castrated in total. The direct consequence of the surgery was a total loss of testosterone production. The most immediate effect of this loss for the nascent castrato was the preservation of child-like vocal chords into adulthood; under the influence of testicular secretion, the vocal cords increase in length by 67% in males and 24% in females ([Jenkins, 2000](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11202227/)). In addition to lengthening, testosterone production also thickens and strengthens the vocal cords, thereby reducing their flexibility. The castrato missed out on all of these changes and thus was able to maintain into adulthood a larynx of smaller size and greater suppleness than even a female soprano. Modification of the vocal cords is not the only way in which prepubescent castration acts to create a novel acoustical and morphological phenotype. I’ll let a medical doctor tell it; from “[The castrati: a physician’s perspective, part 2](https://hekint.org/2017/01/30/the-castrati-a-physicians-perspective-part-2/)”: > Descriptions of the castrati from the 18th century mention the salient clinical features associated with hypogonadism. Tallness of stature, unusual at the time, and an increase in size of the chest were features frequently mentioned and satirized in drawings (see below). Both these phenomena resulted from the delayed closure of the epiphyseal growth centers located at the ends of the long bones of the extremities and ribs. The growth centers are cartilaginous plates that normally ossify as they close resulting in the cessation of growth. Testosterone in tissue surrounding the growth plates is converted by the enzyme aromatase to estrogenic steroids that actually bring about the closure of the epiphyseal plate. > > In the castrati, the absence of testosterone available for conversion to estrogenic steroids allowed for continued formation of bone at the epiphyseal plate and lengthening of the ribs and the extremities. Normal male secondary sex characteristics failed to appear and there was an absence of hair on the extremities, a lack of facial hair growth, and an absence of a receding hairline and baldness. Their skin was smooth and pale; the pallor might have resulted from a lower hemoglobin level than would have been present in a normal male, secondary to decreased levels of testosterone. There was a tendency toward obesity, rounding of the hips and narrowness of the shoulders, curvature of the spine and gynecomastia. The curvature of the spine was indicative of osteoporosis. As a group, the castrati, because they were deficient in testosterone, would have been at increased risk for this condition. Gynecomastia, or abnormal breast development in a male, occurs in the syndrome of hypogonadism as a result of a relative deficiency of androgen secretion and resulting increases in pituitary hormones, lutenizing hormone (LH), and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). The excess of these pituitary hormones in a castrated male, or an individual with hypogonadism, leads to an excess in estradiol and an alteration of the estradiol/testosterone ratio, resulting in gynecomastia. What’s not mentioned here is that the disruption of epiphyseal plate closure also frequently caused an irregular extension of the jaws and facial bones. Taken together, these changes (an increase in stature, size of chest, and jaw) created an abnormally large resonating chamber, thus giving the castrato greater vocal power than even an uncastrated man. These changes in bone structure didn’t come without a cost however—osteoporosis was common in old age. Okay, picture time: Image showing surgical preparation for testicular castration, from Caspar Stromayr’s Practica copiosa, completed in 1559 Portrait of Farinelli looking like a bad motherfucker with a random dog in the bottom right corner by Bartolomeo Nazari (1734). Of the portrait, Feldman writes: “The singer shows a combination of masculine nobility, a powerful chest, and fleshy hands and cheeks. Note too the great length of his limbs.” Farinelli crowned by Music (Euterpe) by Jacopo Amigoni (1735). Feldman writes: “Amigoni suggests a mythical crowning at a moment when Farinelli was at the height of his vocal and representational powers and was still singing publicly in London.” Look, I know this is a big moment for you Farinelli, getting crowned by the Goddess of lyric poetry and all, but that cherub next to your right foot really needs a hand. Photograph of Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) ca. 1900 (author unknown), last surviving castato of the Sistine Chapel's Choir. Note the extended jaw and chin typical of the castrato morphology. Caricature of Bernacchi with belly held aloft by a page (Anton Maria Zanetti, 1735). Castrati were frequently satirized for their unusually large size and tall stature. ### Voice In addition to these physical “gifts”, castrato’s honed their talents with legendarily rigorous training regimens. Finding the best and most esteemed instruction following the castration was crucial; troves of letters exist in which parents wheel and deal in order to find placement for their boy in a private instructor’s home or a cathedral’s conservatory. Placement in a teacher’s home was equivalent to legal adoption, as the young eunuch would typically take on their teacher’s surname and receive full-time training and room and board; in return, the teachers would receive any earnings brought in by the young castrato and sometimes part of their earnings as adults. Those castrati who were placed in conservatories lived essentially as musical monks, spending all of their time in religious worship, training, or performance. One account from 1695 describes the strict practice schedule at the house of the seventeenth-century composer and teacher Virgilio Mazzochi (1597-1643): > Three hours of morning classes, counting one hour to practice singing, including divisions; one hour of literary study; one hour of vocal exercise with the maestro before a mirror (so as to avoid unnecessary movement of the body or facial grimaces)—all that prior to the midday meal. Then half an hour of theory, ditto for counterpoint, and another hour of literary study, followed by practice on a keyboard or other instrument and composition of psalms or motets. [pg. 59] Nicola Porpora (1686-1768), teacher of the aforementioned Farinelli and another highly celebrated castrato known as Caffarelli, was also famed for his daunting disciplinary routines. Caffarelli claimed that Porpora “constrained his student to a single page of exercises covering a gamut of different vocal challenges for no less than five years before letting them branch out” and that when he was done with his training, Porpora declared, "Go, my son: I have no more to teach you. You are the greatest singer in Europe" (and he was probably right). Caffarelli’s anecdote may be embellished, but there are corroborating accounts which suggest that castrato often spent several years practicing vocal exercises in order to develop flawless technique. > One of the cardinal rules of the instruction of castrati is that for several years the pupil was not permitted to sing any music with a text. The teachers did not want him to be distracted by emotions from his primary task of faultless singing… Obviously the castrato was considered a sort of virtuoso instrumentalist of the larynx, rather than a singer in the sense we understand the term; he was an infallible singing machine… [pg. 128] Now for the million dollar question(s): what exactly did these infallible singing machines sound like? What unique vocal feats were they capable of? Feldman begins her analysis (which takes up nearly half the book) by considering the scant sonic evidence that does exist—a few recordings of the last known castrato, Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922), made from 1902-1904. “Ave Maria” is the most well known song from the recordings (but you can find others on youtube). There is certainly something unusual and haunting about the voice (at least to my ears), but I imagine that some of you might be thinking, “Wait, that’s it? That’s what all the fuss was about?” A few important caveats about the recordings and Moreschi himself are in order. 1. Moreschi was in his mid-40s when these recordings were made, certainly past his singing prime. 2. Moreschi was never seen as a particularly special singing talent. Even still, here’s what Viennese musicologist Franz Haböck wrote after hearing a young Moreschi (the first and only time that he ever heard a castrati it should be noted): > “Moreschi’s voice can only be compared with the clarity and purity of crystal. The absolute evenness and coloring (i.e., timbral unity) of his sound, which was singularly powerful, bright, transparent, and yet different than both a woman’s vocal sound and also a boy’s. The complete effortlessness with which one almost physically empathizes with him aroused in me an overwhelming impression of the most extraordinary wind instrument ever given life by human breath.” [pg. 107] 3. From Moreschi’s [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Moreschi) page: “…much of the "difficulty" in listening to Moreschi's recordings stems from changes in taste and singing style between his time and ours. His vocal technique can certainly seem to grate upon modern ears, but many of the seemingly imperfect vocal attacks, for example, are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note – in Moreschi's case, this seems to have been a long-standing means of drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself. The dated aesthetic of Moreschi's singing, involving extreme passion and a perpetual type of sob, often sounds bizarre to the modern listener, and can be misinterpreted as technical weakness or symptomatic of an aging voice.” 4. Obviously the recording technology was very primitive, but it was especially poorly suited to capturing classically trained male singers as it possessed a low frequency ceiling that “eliminated many or all of the upper partials, which are especially important in male voices, castrato or non.” 5. A youtube comment from user emme piemme on the song “[Crucifixus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSJR4qWPU4M)”: “Moreschi is said to have been highly uncomfortable during these recordings. He was not aware of what must have appeared to him as a science fiction technology, and he had to try and sing with his head practically stuck in a sound-picking funnel, this strongly altered his proprioceptive listening and that of the instrumental accompaniment.” 6. “All this is to say nothing of how modern-day transfers affect study of old recordings, sometimes introducing extraneous noise and removing frequencies as engineers attempt to filter nonmusical surface sounds from old and usually deteriorated originals.” [page 82] Caveats aside, Feldman believes that we can still learn something about the unique nature of the castrato voice by comparing these recordings to four contemporaneous recordings of male and female vocalists singing the same songs and by analyzing ear-witness accounts from musical historians and teachers of castrato. This comparison begins a long section of hardcore musicology in which Feldman says all kinds of crazy things like: > A corollary of the faster vibrations and greater purity of a female soprano's head voice is that it normally produces audible harmonic overtones only up to about 2,000 hertz, as compared with the overtones of chest voice, which can reach 4,000 hertz and higher in a particularly rich timbral spectrum. Female singers enrich and darken sound by blending to varying degrees chest into head, which naturally inclines toward a sine-tone purity because the vowels in head voice have a strong fundamental. Most voice specialists say that female sopranos lack the so-called "singer's formant:' a resonance in the 2,500-4,000 hertz region that allows a voice to project over an orchestra (often described as "ring"), clustering in the third, fourth, and fifth formants. Swedish voice specialist Johan Sundberg is definitive about the absence of the singer's formant in women. In recent years he joined an international group that raised the provocative question of that formant in a castrato, noting that all reports of their penetrating quality, combined with their man- (or indeed superman-) sized vocal tract, would point to its existence. If they are right, then we have an irreducible acoustic difference between castrati and all other singers: a singer's formant in the prevalent pitch area of f'/g' through c" to e" achieved without "pushing" the voice. I love this; it brings me great joy to know that we, us humans—us savages, have become so fucking civilized that we have international groups of experts that can raise provocative questions about such arcane subjects. Later on, Feldman writes: > By contrast, if all or most castrati retained the boy's chest on achieving adulthood, including those whose chests were of normal size, relatively large chest-to-larynx size ratio, which mitigated the need to push the chest voice even for those without an enlarged thorax. Add to this that requires less airflow than head and that castrati were trained with an intensity beyond anything imaginable nowadays and you have an extraordinary set of vocal conditions, with highly fast, efficient glottal cycles plus the potential for great breath control, power, accuracy, and often flexibility. The closest physiological cousins today at the upper vocal crust of all populations, past and present, would be muscular but flexible tenors, plus mezzos and dramatic sopranos. If you are a classically trained singer I imagine these passages would make sense to you, but alas I am not a classically trained singer (though I may moonlight as one in the shower) and they didn’t. This review will be much too long already without extended discussion of the musicology so we will turn now to other matters, but first a brief comment on the wider significance of the castrati to musical history. Feldman is emphatic: > “By the late seventeenth century the distinct musical legacy they left had an importance that is hard to overestimate. It is no exaggeration to say that the entire classical foundation of virtuosic solo singing in the West, sacred and secular, in the early nineteenth-century singing associated nowadays with the trio of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, owes its existence to the musical traditions and practices of the castrati” [preface xii] For a period of about two centuries, writing music for castrati was a top goal for composers, a goal that was achieved by a veritable “who’s who” list of musical greats such as Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Haydn. In addition to their singing, castrati frequently also doubled as professional composers, impresarios, and teachers. We might point to people like Dr. Dre and Jay-Z as modern analogues of the more prominent castrati—artists who were highly influential because of their own music, but also because of their personalities, record labels, eyes for talent (e.g. Dr. Dre signing a young Eminem), and business activities. As we will see in the next section, the larger-than-life singer/musician archetype can be traced back to individuals like Farinelli, Caffarelli, Tenducci, Senesino, and many others. ### Life and Times In writing any history, it’s natural to gravitate towards the more sensational stories and characters. Before fully capitulating to this impulse, I must set the record straight: the vast majority of castrato were decidely not singing to sold-out opera houses and hobnobbing with kings and queens. The real history of the castrati, not the tabloid version I’m providing in this review, is much less interesting and much more depressing. The most common fate was a lonely existence as an anonymous choral singer in some small chapel in rural Italy. Some castrato would have considered themselves lucky to have even that life—less musically inclined eunuchs usually ended up as prostitutes, thieves, or beggars. The vast majority of castrati died as penniless social outcasts, their bodies consigned to mass graves. Now that my conscious is clear, let’s turn to the other end of the spectrum: those rock star castrati like Farinelli who brushed shoulders with the upper crust of society. Feldman spends a lot of time in the book analyzing the connection between the castrati and the aristocracy. In one sense, it’s not very surprising that the rich and powerful wanted to associate with famous musicians—it’s the same thing we see today. It went far beyond that however; in many cases castrati took on a unique symbolic role in serving as a charismatic proxy of royal power. To understand how and why this was so, we should note something that’s only been mentioned in passing: the greatest castrati rose to fame because of their performances in operas, and were thus not just singers but also actors who commonly portrayed kings, princes, and military heroes in their starring roles. Furthermore, all of this was happening at a time (the 18th century) when the monarchical order was starting to come under suspicion and a new insecurity was gripping rulers across Europe. Against this backdrop, we can see why royals gravitated towards the castrati—the fame and adulation that they garnered for their portrayals of heroic kings was something that was increasingly elusive for actual not-so-heroic kings. As they did for the Catholic church, castrati served as a kind of aesthetic-emotional technology, one that made royal power “immediate, intimate, empathetic, charming, and palpable”. Farinelli’s aforementioned entanglement with the Spanish court was exceptional, but many castrato received royal patronage and formed significant relationships with aristocrats. Negotiating the intricacies of courtly life took a deft social hand; naturally, Farinelli was “the reigning expert at modulating the rhythms of these movements.” > “In 1732 he got an audience with the emperor and told him, all atremble, that it was the most fortunate moment in his life. After Farinelli sang magnificently, “as god wished”, the emperor exclaimed in Neapolitan, “Voi siete Napoliello” (You’re a Neapolitan), and Farinelli made him laugh with a riposte that echoed the emperor’s facility with dialect by declaring in napoletano, “I am indeed one of those true pasta-eaters.” When they met again and the emperor asked him about a rumor that he’d lost money to a bad creditor, again Farinelli broke up the room by answering that since he had earned the money with his trills, he had reason to hope they would bring him more in the future.” The also aforementioned Caffarelli, perhaps second only to Farinelli in fame, was not quite as willing to play the game it seems. > “A story that reportedly still circulated in Paris a hundred years after Caffarelli had left there in 1753, or was cobbled together by its author Castril-Blaze to describe his Parisian reputation, told how the singer had been sent a gold snuff box from Louis XV, delivered via a distinguished courtier—presumably as a reciprocation for having sung at court or inducement to return the favor by doing so. As legend had it, Caffarelli rebuffed the gesture, showing the courtier his stash of thirty other gold snuff boxes, all fancier than what he had just been offered. And worse, when the courtier protested that his king customarily gave precisely such boxes to no less than foreign ambassadors, Caffarelli reportedly answered, “Then let the ambassadors sing.” How sassy! In Caffarelli, notorious for his unpredictability and displays of temperament, we see the origins of the demanding egomaniac diva stereotype. > On stage, he is reputed to have sung his own preferred versions irrespective of what his colleagues were doing, mimicking them while they sang their solos and sometimes conversing with members of the public in their boxes during the same. Offstage his pugnacity and fierce demeanour led to his willingness to fight duels under little provocation. Such behaviour led to spells of house arrest and imprisonment for assault and for misconduct during performances. Most infamously he completely humiliated a prima donna during a performance of Hasse's Antigono in 1745. On the other hand, with Handel, also a famously fiery character, he seems to have been able to coexist on a peaceable basis, perhaps due to the fantastic sums of money the composer paid him for his work. ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffarelli_(castrato))) Caffarelli didn’t have the necessary constraint and discretion, but those castrati who did were sometimes tapped to perform diplomatic missions on behalf of their royal patrons. > Tosi and Domenico Cecchi (Il Cortona, ca. 1650-55 to 1717-18) carried out delicate assignments for Joseph I; and De Castris (ca. 1650-1724) in the early eighteenth century played the hopeless role of intermediary between Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his estranged son until the whole thing blew up and led to his exile from Florence to Rome, where he continued to carry out diplomatic missions for the Grand Duke. These positions and actions paled by comparison with Farinelli’s, but Melani’s in the previous century were equally flamboyant, if transitory and sometimes shady (he accepted favors from different princes left and right, and in 1667 he claimed chief responsibility for the election of Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi as Pope Clement IX). [pg. 170] As you can see, the castrati were not mere bystanders in the political arena. In fact, some even ended up joining the ranks of the nobility themselves through the granting of knighthood (as mentioned previously, Farinelli was inducted into the exalted ancient military order of Calatrava by the king of Spain) or by purchasing lands that came with a title (Caffarelli, Rivani, and Arnaboldi). --- We’ve covered the rock n’ roll (the music) and there were no drugs as far as I can tell (aside from the opium that was sometimes taken during the castration), so that leaves us at last with the sex of the Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll triumvirate. A first myth to dispel is that castration makes one asexual or at least tempers the romantic passions; as we will see momentarily, this was decidedly not the case. Of course the castration did affect the growth and function of the sexual organs, but at least some castrato were able to maintain normal erections (the age at castration seems to be the main variable here, with boys who were 11-12 at the time of the surgery able to maintain some or nearly all functionality later in life). This doesn’t seem to have affected performance in the bedroom however—if anything, it might have enhanced it. > For Europe’s high society women, the obvious benefit of built-in contraception made castrati ideal targets for discreet affairs. Soon popular songs and pamphlets began suggesting that castration actually enhanced a man’s sexual performance, as the lack of sensation ensured extra endurance; stories spread of the castrati as considerate lovers, whose attention was entirely focused on the woman…When the most handsome castrato of all, Farinelli, visited London in 1734, a poem written by an anonymous female admirer derided local men as “Bragging Boasters” whose enthusiasm “expires too fast, While F—–lli stands it to the last.” > > English women seemed particularly susceptible to Italian eunuchs. Another castrato, Consolino, made clever use of his delicate, feminine features in London. He would arrive at trysts disguised in a dress then conduct a torrid affair right under the husband’s nose. ( “[Why Castrati Made Better Lovers](https://www.thesmartset.com/article0806070116/)”) The role of castrati as sex symbols for both men and women has naturally drawn comparisons to the androgynous appeal embodied by musicians such as Prince or Michael Jackson (“Travelers report how coquettish young castrati in Rome would tie their plump bosoms in alluring brassieres and offer “to serve… equally well as a woman or as a man.”, from the castrati as better lovers article). However, sensational tales of castrati’s sexual prowess obscure a much more depressing story, one of unrequited love and romantic obstruction. With one or two exceptions, nearly all attempts to move beyond discreet dalliances to public relationships and marriage were shot down by the parents of the bride and authorities. > Domenico Cecchi, called Il Cortona, reportedly wanted to marry a Barbara Voglia but his petition was flat-out denied by Pope Innocent with much-repeated but apocryphal-sounding Si Castra Meglion (“be castrated better”). This was a source of great sadness for many castrato. No matter how much applause and adulation (and wealth) they garnered throughout their career, in the end they were still an outsider, a non-man, forbidden from participating in one of life’s central rites. The lack of familial relations meant that life usually didn’t end on a high note for most singing eunuchs (heh); even the Farinelli’s and Caffarelli’s of the world were often quite lonely and depressed in their old age. The same could be said for the end of the age of the castrati. To make a very long story very short: new social attitudes in the late 18th century brought severe criticism and by the mid-19th century both church and state had prohibited the practice (see Rousseau’s commentary in the epigraph for an example of how Castrati were perceived in 1779). The death of Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1923) marked the end of an era spanning over three centuries. Before turning from the past to the present and future, a brief word should be said about the wider history of eunuchs. The Castrati were not unique simply because of their eunuch status; what made them unique was the fact that they formed a special caste of individuals who were systematically produced for purely artistic purposes over a period of three centuries. That some of the castrati came to also serve as trusted members of royal courts was actually par for the course. Since the dawn of civilization, [eunuchs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch) have served rulers from across the world (notably in the Assyrian, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires, and in various Chinese dynasties) in a variety of roles—domestic servants, cuckold-free harem guards, advisors, and spies (there was some historical basis for [Varys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varys), the eunuch spymaster from Game of Thrones). Eunuchs were preferred for these roles for obvious reasons: it was presumed that they could be trusted to a greater degree than non-eunuch males and females as they would be less interested in seizing dynastic power (no offspring to which they could pass on their rule) and less power hungry in general (and their lack of family ties meant it was easier to kill or exile them without retribution). History doesn’t offer a clear verdict on whether or not the presumption of greater trustworthiness was warranted, but examples of eunuchs who were decidedly not trustworthy—because they usurped the rulers who employed them—are not hard to find. This was a particularly [common theme in Chinese history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuchs_in_China) where eunuchs served emperors, and sometimes became emperors themselves ([Liu Jin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Jin) and [Wei Zhongxian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Zhongxian)), for over 2000 years, from the Qin dynasty (200s BC) up until the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912 (Sun Yaoting, the last imperial eunuch, died in 1996). Henri Cartier-Bresson - Eunuch of the Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty, Peking, China, December, 1948 ([source](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/henri-cartier-bresson-eunuch-of-the-imperial-court-of-the-last-dynasty-peking-china-december)). The number of eunuchs in Imperial employ fell to 470 by 1912, when the practice of using them ceased ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch#China)). ### Lessons and Speculations I know this is a very rare thing from historians (professionals or complete amateurs like myself) and you’ll probably be shocked to hear this, but I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the history of the castrati and eunuchs more generally. I’ll try to keep it brief as I know this review has dragged on long enough, but frankly after all this work I feel I’ve earned the right to share a few of my own thoughts and (wild) speculations. > At some point in the near future, the trends of plastic surgery, nootropics, psychedelic legalization, trans hormone therapy, and bodybuilding will collide, with spectacular results. Doing things to reshape your body and mind is an idea as old as dirt, but with recent advances in technology, and breakdowns in cultural taboos, the practice of what could be called “elective chemistry” is going to take off, probably in the next 10 or 20 years. > > — SlimeMoldTimeMold, [Predictions for 2050](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/01/predictions-for-2050/) Barring existential catastrophe (please bar it), it seems likely that sometime this century a new landscape of biological and psychological possibilities will open up before us. Whatever opportunities and challenges may lie ahead in this new age of exploration, I would argue that we should do our best to navigate away from failure modes like “the organized production of a class of transhuman entertainers by means of a dangerous non-consensual procedure that destroys normal biological function and marks these individuals as social outcasts”. The history of the castrati provides a roadmap for how such a phenomenon might arise once more. First, we should ask if we have already started down this path, if there is some modern practice which bears at least a family resemblance to the systematic creation of eunuch singers. Viewed at at a sufficiently high level, we can discern some defining features of the phenomenon: a background of socioeconomic distress, a severe biological modification (with severe health consequences for some) and a lifetime of rigorous training in order to produce prodigious skill for entertainment purposes, a rise to fame and fortune for a chosen few, patronage by the rich and powerful, with often a sad or unfulfilling end to life. Ring any bells? To me, this sounds suspiciously like American football (also boxing/MMA, though perhaps to a slightly smaller extent). Socioeconomic distress? Check—extreme poverty and high rates of local violence are not uncommon in the childhoods of many elite football players. Severe biological modification (with severe health consequences for some) and a lifetime of rigorous training? You betcha. For even the freakiest freaks of nature, making it to the NFL requires near constant exercise and practice. In place of hormone modification through castration, football players modify their hormone levels through nutrition, HGH supplementation, and anabolic steroids. All of this to play an incredibly violent game that causes acute damage—broken bones, ligament tears, concussions, paralysis, and even [death](https://sports.yahoo.com/14-year-old-high-school-football-player-dies-after-sustaining-head-injury-during-game-142114194.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANCS90weVY9XhcN-6FuA6C3kiMw8SBhDAe5lfaC780RqIs03rHZz6NNlQ6smCsv4D6jfRbEWyQTQzFs4o8pb97T_uTEm36eX26HaFGK5dbBb--QEqFGW9zXe74p2BlJOjZVwKDH_ny7r6X_8sGw1Ztiee_uRXryla7nyBImxuHQm)—and lasting damage to one’s body and brain. Rise to fame and fortune for a chosen few? [Out of the approximately one million high school football players](https://twitter.com/GatorsScott/status/640865339320999936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E640865339320999936%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nj.com%2Fhighschoolsports%2Farticle%2Fwhat-are-the-odds-of-a-high-school-football-player-reaching-the-nfl%2F) in the United States, 6.5% earn a college scholarship and about 0.1% make it to the NFL and less than half of those individuals stay in the league beyond year 4. For every millionaire star athlete, there are countless stories of people whose only “earnings” from their playing career are debilitating injuries and chronic pain. Patronage by the rich and powerful? The people who own NFL teams and pay player salaries are some of the [wealthiest people in the world](https://sportsnaut.com/richest-nfl-owner-net-worth-2021/). A sad or unfulfilling end to life? [Retirement from the NFL is notoriously difficult for many athletes](https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/page/hotread150225/depression-suicide-raise-issue-mental-health-former-nfl-players), not least because of the chronic pain (often leading to opiate or alcohol addiction) or cognitive decline and mood disorders from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Will modern American football eventually join the ranks of barbaric forms of entertainment from bygone eras or will it seem a mild prelude compared to what’s to come? The answer to this question may depend to a large extent on economics. With the castrati, the practice was motivated in large part by truly dire starvation-threatening circumstances (at least in the beginning, once castrati became celebrity figures other motivating factors (i.e. greed) started to play a role). It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which the four horsemen—war, plague, famine, death—return large swaths of the global population to a state of such desperation that they are willing to consider offering up themselves or their children for a transformative high-risk/high-reward procedure of some kind. Socioeconomic upheaval of this magnitude could pave the way for the return of aristocracy, likely another key factor for the potential development of a castrati-like practice. In this [neo-feudalist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism) future, we would once again see large numbers of nobles who are, for all intents and purposes, above the law and public reproach. As in the past, these new kings and queens and dukes and duchesses could use their influence and wealth to sponsor transhuman programs that draw “volunteers” from their peasantry. Whether these programs will initially produce transhumans for entertainment (art, sport) or for labor (servants, guards), it seems likely that the line will eventually become blurred—for example, uber-athletes produced for athletic competition also coming to serve as soldiers (or vice versa). The historical and fictional [trope of the court mage](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CourtMage) (e.g. Mentats in Dune, any number of sorcerers/mystics who have served kings such as Merlin, [John Dee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee), or Rasputin) suggests that rulers may seek out (or create) individuals who have undergone some kind of transformation that gives them unique mental abilities. If these cognitively enhanced individuals offer their rulers a decisive strategic advantage in military or politics, arms race dynamics could ensue and demand for “court mages” could soar. A return to feudalism may or may not be necessary for the return of some new castrati-like practice, but either way it likely won’t be sufficient. For the castrati, the Catholic church supplied much of the legal, social, and financial resources that developed and sustained the practice, however it also provided the emotional and conceptual resources (e.g. the Catholic notion of sacrifice) through which families and the castrati themselves understood and justified the practice. What new religion or ideology might come to play the same role in the future? Maybe radical new forms of our current -isms (nationalism, racism, sexism, etc.) will provide the requisite physical and psychological resources, or perhaps it will be an almost entirely new ideology, one that is only dimly hinted at in our own times (or maybe it will be Catholicism that once again supports the production of specialized class of transhumans). Here’s a wild speculation: future ecological collapse will propel the rise of militant eco-cults that use elaborate schemes of genetic modification, plastic surgery, and hormone therapy (and whatever else is needed) to create animal-human hybrids (think [Thundercats](https://www.google.com/search?q=thundercats&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj0sfDkv_D2AhXHCjQIHSYLCcYQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&cshid=1648734844668994&biw=1745&bih=910&dpr=1.1) or [Stalking Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat)) as a part of some master plan to bring about radical environmental restoration (steal this premise). Of course this specific scenario is probably a little far-fetched (or is it?!?), but the general picture—an ideology that currently exists in benign form turning virulent and co-opting powerful biological or psychological modifications for its ends—might not be. When you get to the part of the book review where you discuss animal-human hybrids, that’s probably a sign you should wrap it up. One final thought: though we cannot know how our transhuman future will unfold, we can be certain that the history of the castrati (and of eunuchs more generally) will only grow in relevance as perhaps the best (the only?) example of extended human-transhuman co-existence. In a strange and hopeful twist of fate, the castrati, so often shunned and ridiculed in life, may in death come back to center stage and be honored as the rock star mutants that they were. A Eunuch's Dream by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ (1874) ### Endnotes 1: One of the funnier aspects of the book is how hilariously Italian the names of all the castrati were. A few examples: Loreto Vittori, Atto Melani, Antonio Bernacchi, Francesco Bernardi ("Senesino"), Valentino Urbani, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, Girolamo Crescentini, Giovanni Battista "Giambattista" Velluti, Venanzio Rauzzini. 2: This is a joke by Balatri as the Italian region of Norcia was known for producing traveling surgeons which commonly carried out the castration operation.	Scott Alexander	57854634	Your Book Review: The Castrato	acx
# Classifieds Thread 6/2022 This is the bimonthly (?) classifieds thread. Advertise whatever you want in the comments. We’re going to try keeping it organized again, so please respond to the appropriate top-level comment: Employment, Dating, Read My Blog (also includes podcasts, books, etc), Consume My Product/Service, 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 much less strict about employers, bloggers, etc. And here are some extra dating profiles of people I know of and like: [Lulie](https://www.lulie.co.uk/date-me/) (F / 32 / Oxford + Waterloo) [Kathy](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LkBlL5T4ocCoL4okfJEa6Jqds16ZhfLFtKklbry_DG4/edit) (NB / 28 / Massachusetts) [Nathan](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Stk3XS_cbQpFdjo4LYdcwMqWxbCF4b5pcROBn8JcR9Q/edit#) (M / 28 / London) [Richard](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iR0P1MQ8DdyoUXv_3_K1aWewwf1wRXIxwWHy-GuG3Y/edit) (M / 27 / SF) [Misha](https://drethelin.com/romance/) (M / 34 / Wisconsin + SF)	Scott Alexander	57604539	Classifieds Thread 6/2022	acx
# Birth Order Effects: Nature vs. Nurture ### Introduction Thanks to everyone who waited two years for me to get around to this. In 2018, thanks to the 8,000 of you who filled out the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey, I discovered that higher birth order siblings were much more likely to read this blog than later-borns: Source [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/); thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50). This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren’t really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in [physics Nobelists](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTLTic5nZ2DaBtoCv/birth-order-effect-found-in-nobel-laureates-in-physics) and [great mathematicians](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tj8QP2EFdP8p54z6i/historical-mathematicians-exhibit-a-birth-order-effect-too) (and potentially [Harvard philosophy students](https://bakadesuyo.com/2012/04/are-80-of-harvard-students-first-born-childre/)). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!) [Followup research](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YnXd7zfGGZfMD9QtA/age-gaps-and-birth-order-reanalysis) by Less Wrong user “Bucky” determined that the effect fell off with age gaps; the closer in age you are to your sibling, the stronger an effect birth order has: I continue to be confused by this extremely strong effect which most of what we know about psychology says shouldn’t exist. So in 2020, I asked my readership [some even more complicated questions about their family situations](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScGVSQbvDiqGMoTQbOP4Fyj07rQ3c50i58cuNIy8rpY0QIa8A/formResponse), in the hopes of teasing out why this is happening. I’ll be honest - I think I over-reached here. I’m not very good at statistics, and this is a weird statistical problem: the dependent variable is whether the case ended up in the sample at all! I wasn’t able to figure out a good way to use most of the data you gave me. And the stuff I did use, I mostly made work by slicing and dicing so much that the sample size got pretty low, even when I started from 8,000 survey respondents. I’m publishing this in the hopes that it will inspire someone else will more domain knowledge to do a sophisticated re-analysis. But for now, here’s what I’ve got. ### Confirming Old Results With The 2020 Dataset The 2020 dataset also shows a strong birth order effect in people who read this blog. In 2018, among people with exactly one sibling, respondents were 2.51x more likely to be the older sibling than the younger (72%). In 2020, the number was 2.39x (71%). Change with age gap is shown below: Note truncated y-axis This seems to be broadly similar to the 2018 results. There was an anomaly in 2018 where some categories seemed to drop off surprisingly quickly between 7 and 8 years, which I thought might be meaningful. But [Bucky’s analysis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YnXd7zfGGZfMD9QtA/age-gaps-and-birth-order-reanalysis) showed this was probably a coincidence, and indeed it doesn’t show up in the new data. ### Does Sex Matter For Birth Order Effects? I wondered if there might be a smaller birth order effect for people with opposite-sex siblings. One possible explanation for the birth order effect is children trying to get out of the “shadow” of their older sibling and differentiate themselves in some way. But children are already pretty different from an opposite-sex sibling and might feel less pressure in that situation. But this doesn’t seem to be true. The percent firstborns in sibships of two on the survey was 70% among people with a same-sex sibling, and 71% among people with an opposite-sex sibling; no real difference. ### Do Biological Or Social Factors Produce Birth Order Effects? All previous results are for biological siblings. But it might be worth asking the question separately for biological vs. social siblings. One could imagine either biological or social causes of the birth order effect. For example, some biologists speculate that pregnancy depletes choline, that it takes a long time for choline stores to recover, and that a second child born within that window will have less choline available to build their nervous system, which could be bad. But also: maybe if you have an older sibling, your parents can’t pay as much attention to you when you’re a kid, and you learn less. This was very hard to test for. Again, I wasn’t able to use traditional statistical tests because I’m trying to determine whether someone was in the sample at all, rather than whether two variables are related. It was easy to check normal birth order because I could compare people with exactly one older sibling to people with exactly one younger. It was harder to do with things like adoption in the mix, because that could introduce a bias: are parents more likely to adopt out their first child (because that’s when they’re most unprepared for parenting)? Are adoptive parents more likely to adopt when they already have children of their own (because they’re comfortable with child-rearing) or less likely (because they really want kids and can’t have them biologically)? I had no way of getting controls for these questions and so I couldn’t do a lot of the analyses I wanted. But I did two relatively weak analyses instead: First, I took the entire set of people in weird situations - people who said their number of social siblings was not the same as their number of biological siblings. In this group of 174 people, biological firstborns made up only 61% of respondents with one sibling, notably less than the 71% in the entire sample. That suggests that the unusual social situations are having an effect. You shouldn’t update on the fact that it’s still higher than 50%, because some of the people’s weird social situations don’t affect their status as social firstborns. Second, I tried to compare people who were firstborn under a biological definition but not a social definition, to people in the opposite situation. There were 40 people in the sample who were biological but not social firstborns, and 60 people who were social but not biological firstborns. Again, this suggests that social firstborn-ness is more important as an explanation than biological firstbornness, although it doesn’t rule out the latter having some effect. I additionally tried to compare two different types of social firstbornness - one where no older siblings lived in the house when you were growing up, and one where your parents had never parented another child. There weren’t many people discordant on these two measures (29 vs. 20 respectively), but for what it’s worth, the ratio was in favor of the first type. Since I wasn’t very confident in my analytical abilities here, I asked Bucky, who knows more and who did good work analyzing the last dataset, to look into this (we worked independently and didn’t tell each other our results until we were done). He writes: > It seems to me that the effect is entirely caused by social siblings. > > I filtered for only people with 1+ biological but 0 social siblings. There were 24 oldest biological children in this group vs 21 2nd children (or 25 youngest children with a large overlap between 2nd oldest and youngest groups). This significantly differed from the ~0.7 fraction of older children in the general surveys (p<0.05 or p<0.01 depending on whether I use the 2nd oldest or youngest as the comparison) and is close to a 1:1 ratio. > > I then filtered for only people with 0 biological but 1+ social siblings. There were 51 oldest social children and 23 2nd children (or 26 youngest children again with large overlap). This differs significantly from a 1:1 ratio (p<0.001 or p<0.01) and matches pretty well with the 70% of the Birth order effect. > > I tried doing some filtering by age gap (2-7 years) and the results were compatible with the same result, although the sample sizes got too small to really conclude anything. > > For dealing with answers left blank I treated them as 0 unless it looked like the whole section had been missed out. If I ignored any respondents who left something blank I got similar results (smaller sample size but ratios are even further in favour of the social hypothesis). > > I checked for categorisation errors by looking at respondents’ descriptions of their families and they mainly matched pretty well with the numbers given so I think the data should be considered reliable. I did chuck a couple of results out which seemed unreliable and there was one row which was a repeat so your numbers might not match up exactly (plus you have the non-public data). > > There are a couple of confounders in the analysis such as whether e.g. oldest children are more likely to be adopted or how much you know about your birth family depending on how old one was when the family unit changed etc. I don’t see a realistic way to account for these but I also can’t see any of them being big enough to explain the difference in the results. > > Hopefully this matches up with what you found! I think this suggests birth order effects are social rather than biological. ### So What Causes Birth Order Effects? Based on this analysis, it seems unlikely they are biological. Based on my very weak sub-analysis, and on their tendency to decay with larger age gaps, it seems they have more to do with the social presence of a sibling in the house than with any changes in parenting style (ie your parents learn to parent differently). Two explanations that satisfy both those criteria: 1. Parents are able to devote their full attention to parenting their first child, but only half of their attention to parenting their second. Firstborns get more quality time with their parents during the first few years of childhood. 2. Siblings try to differentiate themselves from each other. So for example, since the older sibling will always be smarter than the younger when they’re both young children, maybe the younger sibling is more interested in excelling in areas other than school (like trying to cultivate a specific talent that the firstborn doesn’t have). You may be able to think of others besides these. One problem with (1) - wouldn’t you expect smaller effects as age gaps get lower? If it’s about having quality time alone with Mom, someone with a sibling one year younger than themselves only got one year of quality time; someone with a sibling five years younger got five years. But it looks like the birth order effect is stronger for someone with a one-year-age-gap sibling than a five-year one. Either the first year is very important, or I’m missing something. A problem with (2) - I would expect the effect to be weaker with different-sex siblings in this case - less direct competition - but it isn’t. If (1) is true, you might expect a strong effect against twins; after all, twins get unusually little of their mother’s attention in the first year. Are twins also under-represented in this dataset? I think yes. 1.9% of respondents are twins. But [in the US as a whole](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db80.htm): The average SSC reader is white and 33 years old, so we should expect a twinning rate of 2.4%. But in fact it should be a bit higher than this, because the two strongest risk factors for twinship are maternal age and maternal propensity to use IVF. Maternal age is highly correlated [with education](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/twins/2011/08/are_twins_taking_over.html) (it often means a mother waited to finish a degree before having children) and our readership is nothing if not [eager to use new birth-related technologies](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies?s=w). So we should expect to have significantly more twins than average. But in fact we have fewer. This isn’t a giant difference, but I think it supports the hypothesis at least a little. Some previous studies suggested that twins just did worse in general, probably because it was too crowded in the womb and they got fewer resources each. More modern studies [fail to find that](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ814952), at least on later life outcomes. But it’s possible that this is another effect which is too subtle to find in generic studies, but shows up in heavily-selected populations. If so, that would mean this section provides no extra evidence for anything. ### Implications If birth order effects are due to parental investment, it would be pretty surprising. The current scientific consensus is that parental investment in the early years of life doesn’t really increase IQ or educational attainment during adulthood. That is, the shared environment has minimal to no effect on later life outcomes (see eg Bryan Caplan’s book [Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids](https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135612560/selfish-reasons-for-parents-to-enjoy-having-kids)). It’s generally agreed that people can put away the Advanced Baby Einstein Educational Toys and just chill. This research challenges those assumptions. If it’s right, the difference in parental attention between an only child and a child with siblings seems to have noticeable effects later in life. How do we reconcile this with twin studies? One potentially trollish answer is that all twin studies are necessarily done on twins, so the one component of the shared environment that they can’t vary is whether their subjects have siblings or not! But this doesn’t really get us out of the problem. Some parents give their children much more parental attention and investment than others, regardless of sibling number, and you would expect this to show up in the twin studies as a positive shared environmental effect on those children. It doesn’t. One possibility is that it doesn’t show up for the same reason birth order effects don’t usually show up: they only matter in heavily selected samples. ### Call For Further Research I wasn’t able to do a very good job on this, partly because of my own limitations, and partly because of the limitations of the dataset. One potential way to improve on this would be to run very large surveys of the population, such that we could capture the kind of person who does read SSC/ACX and the kind of person who doesn’t, and then do more traditional statistical tests on them. Another would be to try to find other features in this survey which correlate with birth order, although this would be conditioning on a collider (their presence in the survey at all). Finally, other people might be able to extract more signal out of this than I was. If you’re interested, you can find the raw data, the original question list, and a description of how to use them [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/). Note that a few people refused permission for me to republish their data, so you will probably get slightly different numbers than I did.	Scott Alexander	56983266	Birth Order Effects: Nature vs. Nurture	acx
# A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame [the conspiracy](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria?s=w). Recently I’ve been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from [these people](https://www.wallpaperforwindows.com/window-film/custom-printed-window-film/). If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty realistic. But what scenes to use? Most of the stained glass images you can find are saints, which isn’t really the mood I’m going for. What I’d really like is a giant twelve-part panel depicting [the Virtues Of Rationality](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues). But the artists I’ve asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn’t allowed to say no. Enter [DALL-E-2](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/), the new art-generating AI. I’m still on the waitlist, but a friend who jumped in sooner than I did let me use their computer for a while and play around with it. This was my first introduction to the exciting world of DALL-E query framing - the surprisingly complicated relationship between what you ask the AI to do, and what it actually does. Seems on topic for this blog. So this is a combination investigation into how DALL-E thinks about queries, but also a practical guide to getting DALL-E to make good stained glass. Let’s get started. ### The Sixth Virtue: Empiricism I’m going to go out of order here so I can demonstrate some principles from simplest to most complicated. Empiricism was the easiest window to generate. I wanted a picture of Charles Darwin studying finches. DALL-E was happy to provide. (On these and most other images, I’ve put the prompt on the top so you can see what it’s doing. All of these “screenshots” are slightly edited. In particular, I’m only showing three rather than the usual ten so that they show up better.) Though even on this easiest of questions, some of the pictures could only be described as “disastrous”. If Darwin had really looked like this, I bet he would have had an easier time convincing people of evolution. Still, let’s move on. ### The Fourth Virtue: Evenness For this one, I wanted a picture of Reverend Thomas Bayes holding a scale: Some of these are okay, but they don’t especially look like Bayes. I figured that maybe DALL-E doesn’t know who Bayes is. Is that true? The only known picture of Bayes is this one: When I ask DALL-E to give me Reverend Thomas Bayes, I get: First things first: yes, DALL-E is very bad at text. Even when it’s good, it’s bad, as you can see in the last picture, “Bay of Tayees”. My guess is that it’s seen so many maps that it has a high prior on anything with the string “Bay” in it being a bay on a map, which is always called “Bay of X”. This kind of failure mode is going to be key to some of our later query engineering, so remember it. But also - it kind of does look like Bayes. Is this because it knows who he is, or because every reverend kind of looks like this? Let’s see! “Thomas Bayes” without the “Reverend” still gives many pictures in the style of the one picture of Thomas Bayes. So I conclude that DALL-E really does know who Thomas Bayes is! Usually the way these systems work is that they have a sort of Platonic ideal of what Bayes looks like, and then they vary it a little randomly (the “temperature”) in order to be able to come up with many different takes on him. It looks like DALL-E is sufficiently un-confident in its knowledge of Bayes that the random variation can change what he looks like quite a lot. Moving back to our stained glass window, more speculatively we’re encountering at larger scale the same problem that gave us “Bay Of Tayees”. DALL-E has seen one picture of Thomas Bayes, and many pictures of reverends in stained glass windows, and it has a Platonic ideal of what a reverend in a stained glass window looks like. Sometimes the stained glass reverend looks different from Bayes, and this is able to overpower its un-confident belief in what Bayes looks like. I think a minimum viable change the Reverend would be having him wear all black. Let’s see what happens: Is it just me, or is that last one Elon Musk? The quality is now much worse! Also, we’ve lost the last vestiges of stained glass as the artistic style, and now Bayes is just standing in front of a stained glass window. Here’s my guess about what’s going on: DALL-E probably has a lot of stock images from stock image sites in its database. Stock image sites describe their images very carefully. If a description gets too close to the kind of description a stock image site would use, then the style shifts to be more like the style stock image sites have, ie clip art. Since the style of clip art is different from the style of a stained glass window, DALL-E assumes the “stained glass window” in the description can’t be talking about the style, and must be a picture element. After some trial and error, I determined that the word “dressed” seems to be a big part of the clip art. Let’s try removing that and just having him be “in black”: This solves the problem, at the cost of the Reverend’s head. I think that by focusing on his dress (even without the taboo word “dressed”), we’re telling the AI to literally focus on his dress in the image, at the cost of his head (a few images, not shown, did include the head - my selection is meant to capture a statistical tendency not to be perfectly representative). Okay, so what if we focus on both his dress and his head, by mentioning he’s in black and has black hair? Now he is a vampire. Whatever. Let’s move on. ### The Tenth Virtue: Precision For the virtue of Precision, I want to show Tycho Brahe, the great 17th century astronomer who measured the position and movement of the stars more precisely than any who came before him. Let’s see what we get: Stunning! Truly excellent! Problem is, nobody’s going to know that’s supposed to be Tycho Brahe. The most salient fact about Tycho Brahe is that he had a pet moose. Sometimes he would let the moose drink beer, and one time it got so drunk that it fell down the stairs and died. Anyway, I think everyone would know who this window was depicting if there was a moose in the background: These are also great, but, I think, differently great. The stained glass has retreated from the style to become a picture element again. The style has become generally more modern. I think what’s going on here is - nobody depicts a moose in stained glass. A man scrying the heavens through a telescope is exactly the sort of dignified thing people make stained glass windows about. A moose isn’t. So DALL-E loses confidence and decides you don’t really mean it should be stained glass style. Also, is it just me, or does Brahe look kind of like Santa here? Is it possible that wise old man + member of the family Cervidae gets into a Santa-shaped attractor region in concept space? I decided to turn the moose into a reindeer to see what happened: Yup! Now Tycho is dressed in red, wearing a red and white cap, the reindeer is flying in the central image, and the whole thing looks kind of Christmas-y (though, to be fair, still also like stained glass). But I really do want a picture of Tycho and his moose. By trial and error, I discovered that it works fine if you substitute Tycho with his fellow astronomer, William Herschel: This isn’t perfect - in particular, the second picture seems unsure whether the picture itself is a window, or the picture includes a window - but they all sort of work. It works even better if you replace “moose” with “deer”: No mortal can truly understand the mind of DALL-E, but I think that either it’s more confident in who Herschel is than who Brahe is, anchoring it to “stained glass depictions of specific historical figures who are known not to be Santa Claus”. Or possibly “Tycho Brahe” sounds kind of fanciful, like the sort of person who might secretly be Santa Claus if you dig a little deeper, but “William Herschel” sounds like a respectable English historical figure who has far too Jewish a name to be Santa. As for deer, they’re a more common subject of classical art than moose are, so they shift the genre out of “classical Renaissance-looking stained glass window” less. ### The Seventh Virtue: Simplicity It’s got to be Occam with his razor, right? So: GILA-WHAMM! Okaaaay. There’s a lot to unpack here. When I Google “medieval razor”, I get things that look like this: …so that second picture is actually historically accurate and DALL-E knows more about the history of razors than I do. The knife-like razor was also used during medieval times, though probably not with the exact expression that Occam has in panel three. I think DALL-E assumes that if you are holding a sharp knife-like object, you are probably trying to kill someone. And if you are trying to kill someone with a knife, you probably have red hair and a red beard (William of Ockham didn’t look like that, but most of the pictures DALL-E generates do). GilaWhamm might be some kind of demented spoonerism of “William Ockham”, though I think it would also be a good name for a shaving brand: > Think BurmaShave’s / a pricy scam? > Save on cash / With GilaWhamm! But also, these stained glass windows are a very different style than some of the earlier ones. Compare Darwin’s finches with Occam’s razor: Darwin is done in the style of the late 1800s; Occam in the style of the Middle Ages. DALL-E knows who both these figures are, and is putting each of them in the context of their period. You can make it even worse by calling him “William of Ockham” - Dall-E knows that “X of Y” names are medieval: But I already chose my Darwin picture, and I want an Occam picture in the same style. What happens if I tell DALL-E that it should be Art Nouveau? I wish I was as sure of anything as DALL-E is as sure that William Ockham had a giant red beard. Or that “William Ockham” is spelled “THAMHHH AR” Meeeediocre. What if I really overload it with stylistic cues? WAIT NO I JUST GOT IT! The reason William of Ockham has the giant beard is because most of the corpus of images with people holding razors is SHAVING ADVERTISEMENTS! (but why red in particular?) ### The Third Virtue: Lightness Oh God, Lightness. This one was such a mess. I wanted it to be a hot air balloon. But: Just as “moose” suggests Christmas, and “William of Ockham” suggests medieval times, “hot air balloon” suggests “amateur stained glass artist who wants to make something colorful and geometric and cute”. The old “add Art Nouveau” trick didn’t help much, but after trying a lot of things, I noticed that all the previous examples had people’s names. Maybe having a historical figure grounds it in the sort of stained glass windows people made during the figure’s time period? …something is happening here, but I’m not sure I like it. The first hot air balloon was launched by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, maybe they can help us: Quite the improvement! What if we get more specific? Yeeeeeeaaah! This is the good stuff! Does it keep getting better as I add more and more French names? Not really, no. But it was worth a try. ### The Eleventh Virtue: Scholarship My plan for this one was Alexandra Elbakyan (the Sci-Hub woman) in a library, with the Sci-Hub mascot (a raven with a key in its mouth). For the record, Alexandra Elbakyan looks like this: …and not like a Goth version of Hermione Granger. I think DALL-E assumes that anybody in the vicinity of a raven must be a Goth, and anybody in a library must be at least sort of Hermione Granger (I bet its corpus included a lot of Harry Potter fan art). More important, we’ve completely lost the stained glass window look, in favor of the library having a window in it. I think the AI feels like if we’re talking about libraries and windows, the window must be in the library, regardless of what the query says. Also, none of these pictures even attempt to have a key in the raven’s mouth. Whatever, I can Photoshop that in later. Let’s try again, switching the potentially window-bearing “library” to the hopefully more neutral “bookshelves”: Why did the quality drop so sharply? I think that “library” suggests a certain style of maybe Harry Potter fan art which keeps up at least some minimal quality standards, and “bookshelves” doesn’t. Maybe Alexandra Elbakyan is part of the problem? Maybe a more proper 19th-century figure would get me a more proper 19th-century stained glass window? Now we’ve doubled down on the Gothicism, and on lace collars in particular. In retrospect, I should have realized that although DALL-E has some idea who Ada Lovelace is, it’s not totally confident that’s her name, and wants to cover its bases in case she’s just someone who loves lace a lot. Let’s try overwhelming it with stylistic cues: Getting closer! Let’s redefine “overwhelm”: Oh nooooo! We’ve gone too far! [We are play gods!](http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/) Abort abort abort! ### Final Thoughts The most interesting thing I learned from this experience is that DALL-E can’t separate styles from subject matters (or birds from humans). If you ask it for a stained glass scene of something that seems stained-glass-y, it will do a good job. If you ask it for a stained glass scene of something that isn’t traditionally depicted in stained glass, it will assume it’s misunderstanding your query and do something else. And if you ask it for a scene where it’s more plausible for the stained glass to be in the scene than the style of the scene, it will put the stained glass in the scene. If you give it a subject that sounds like the kind of thing depicted in medieval stained glass, it will depict it in a medieval way. If you give it a subject that sounds more modern, it will depict it in a more modern way. Some topics, like Santa Claus and Hermione Granger, form vast black-hole-like attractor basins in conceptual space, dragging in anything even remotely related, and turning the scene into Christmas decorations or Harry Potter fan art. Every object in a scene influences everything else in a scene. If you add a moose, the entire scene will look more like the sort of scene where mooses might appear. If you add a razor, all the characters will look a bit more like the characters in shaving ads, even if they are medieval monks. To get a subject depicted in a specific style, you need to balance the attention paid to style and subject. Talk too much about the style, and you’ll get the sort of scene which is typically depicted in that style, regardless of what scene you want. Talk too much about the scene, and you’ll get the sort of style that scene is usually depicted in, regardless of what style you told it. Query engineering is about figuring out ways so that each additional thing you add reinforces DALL-E’s idea of what you want, instead of detracting from it. DALL-E is clearly capable of incredible work. That having been said, I mostly couldn’t access it. Although it can make stunning stained glass of traditional stained-glass subjects, trying to get it to do anything at all unusual degrades the style until you end up picking the best of a bad lot and being grateful for it. You can try to recover the style by adding more and more stylistic cues, but it’s really hit-or-miss, and you can never be sure you’ll get two scenes depicted in the same (or even remotely similar) styles, which kind of sinks my plan for a twelve-part window. I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them, and the ability to have it view other pictures (ie “a picture of X in the style of Y”) would solve the rest. For all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research. But for now, if you want robots to design your stained glass windows for you, it will be a long slog through a bunch of different queries. (thanks to a friend who wishes to remain anonymous for letting me use their computer with DALL-E access to write this)	Scott Alexander	57243633	A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows	acx
# Open Thread 226 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?). In this week’s news: 1: There will be a three-day [Human Aligned AI Summer School program](http://humanaligned.ai/) in Prague in August. It’s a aimed at “researchers interested in learning more about AI alignment topics, PhD students, researchers working in ML/AI outside academia, talented students, [and] inter-disciplinary researchers”. [Apply here](http://humanaligned.ai/) before June 19. 2: Related: the rationalist/EA community has a week-long [program on rationality](https://espr-camp.org/) at Oxford this summer for mathematically talented youth (ages 16 - 20). Past speakers have included Scott Aaronson and Stephen Wolfram, this year’s speakers TBD. This one is free, travel stipends potentially available if needed. If interested, [apply here](https://espr-camp.org/) before June 12. 3: Rob Wiblin says you can get a free copy of various effective altruism related books by signing up for [the 80,000 Hours newsletter](https://80000hours.org/book-giveaway/?utm_source=socials-post&utm_campaign=2022-book-giveaway-socials-push&utm_medium=social-media).	Scott Alexander	57176960	Open Thread 226	acx
# Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism knows that “good intentions aren’t enough.” If you want your charitable giving to mean something, you also need to measure your favorite program’s effects with good statistical data. But we don’t always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren’t enough. You also need to know that you’ve collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on. I first picked up James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of “development economics” that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing. In the interest of space, I’ll focus on the two ideas from the book that have shaped my thinking the most -- recognizing the bundle of assumptions and biases he calls “development discourse”, and Ferguson’s “anti-politics machine” critique of technocratic decision-making. I will end by providing some more subjective takeaways for the Effective Altruist (EA) movement. ### I. Development Discourse “The statistics are wrong, but always wrong in the same way; the conceptions are fanciful, but it is always the same fantasy.” In 1975, the World Bank released a report on Lesotho: a tiny, mountainous country surrounded on all sides by the much larger nation of South Africa. This report, written by and for outside “development experts”, set out to identify problems that were holding the country back which could be solved by simple, technical “interventions”. The report portrayed Lesotho as a country “virtually untouched by modern economic development” after gaining independence, whose “traditional subsistence peasant society” had been disrupted by depleted soil and failed crops, compelling most of its young men to find work in nearby South Africa. To solve this problem, the report made a variety of recommendations, many of which involved boosting agricultural productivity and connecting farmers in Lesotho to better markets to sell their crops and especially their livestock. Was this a fair characterization of the situation? Ferguson, as an anthropologist studying the “development experts”, wants us to ask a slightly different question: how does the development community construct what it considers to be knowledge? When this report passed through committees, what tests did it have to pass to be accepted as accurate? What kinds of errors is the system set up to catch, and how does it catch them? Ferguson’s description of the process is somewhat cynical and some of the errors would have been caught today, particularly in the basic statistics. Since 1990, when the book was published, the rise of randomized experiments has revolutionized development economics. We now have a much firmer grasp on how to test causality, how to quantify effect sizes, and how to make reasonable statistical claims. In other words, the data points our narratives are built around have become much, much more reliable. But the process by which we go from data to narrative is still relatively casual and poorly theorized, and this step was the main source of the World Bank group’s troubles. In the data-gathering process, they noted several facts: 1. Most of the population in rural Lesotho grew crops, but they did not make very much income from them. 2. More than 60% of the area’s young men were working in mines in nearby South Africa and sending back remittances. 3. Many families had large flocks of underfed cattle. Even when money was tight, the team rarely observed cattle sales. Each of these is true, but they need to be set within a larger narrative to inform the work of “development.” Instead of doing the ethnographical and historical work it would take to understand Lesotho’s particular history, political system, and culture, the World Bank’s team of experts substituted their notions of what “less-developed countries” are like, shaped just as much by countries very different from Lesotho and the array of “solutions” the team had to offer as they were by anything to do with the context they’d set out to study. To the economists writing the report, the fact that cattle were not being sold was a clear sign of a market failure -- surely this meant that either the cattle were too low quality to sell, or the population did not have access to markets. Since this story (1) made sense of a data point that was otherwise confusing, (2) fit with economists’ intuitions for why a person might not sell their “product”, and (3) lent itself to being solved with standard tools (programs to improve cattle quality! programs to connect people with markets!), it seemed like a natural and parsimonious explanation of the facts. So natural and parsimonious, in fact, that the authors don’t seem to have thought to check whether it was actually true. The same sort of jumps happened in interpreting the other two facts. The authors assumed that, as a “less-developed country”, Lesotho’s rural economy was driven by agriculture. The fact that income from crops was low was therefore a sign that the population were primarily “subsistence” farmers who could be “developed” with access to better agricultural tools. As further evidence for this theory, the failure of agriculture was a perfect explanation for why young men had recently (it was assumed) been forced to travel across the border for work. While Ferguson focuses on Thaba-Tseka, I think the “development discourse” lens he describes is easiest to understand by imagining how it might function in a very different context. If the same World Bank economists were to study an American suburb, they might learn that: 1. Most households grow fruits or vegetables in their yards, but make little profit by selling them. 2. The majority of household breadwinners have a fairly long commute to work, which they complain endlessly about. 3. People pour money into valuable assets they call “Roth IRAs”, but do not seem to sell them even when they could use the cash. Should the World Bank conclude that suburban America is populated by subsistence farmers whose inability to grow good crops has forced them into long commutes? Are 401(k)s merely a “product” that young Americans hold onto because they’re too hard to sell? Through careful ethnographic work (using the research method of actually talking to people) Ferguson discovers that, while the three facts we noted were true, the report’s interpretation of them was rooted entirely in fantasy. Much like our hypothesized suburbanites, the people of Lesotho’s Thaba-Tseka region grew food, but they did not consider farming their main priority or source of income. Indeed, even in the best of years a typical household would grow less than half of the food they consumed, with most money coming from remittances sent back from the mines, or from services (or beer) sold to those with mining income. The practice of mining in South Africa, far from being a recent response to deteriorating agriculture, had been a central part of the Lesothan economy for more than a century. Villagers’ economic complaints rarely referenced agriculture (since they were not farmers), but rather focused on labor practices and immigration laws they felt allowed the mining companies to exploit their work and keep them in poverty. Similarly, the decision not to sell cattle was part of a complex traditional arrangement Ferguson labels “the bovine mystique”, in which cattle functioned both as a means of paying bridewealth and a way of saving for retirement when one was finally too old or injured to work in the mines. The system itself was relatively controversial among the villagers, but it’s difficult to imagine access to markets was a primary concern when Ferguson’s interviewees knew 1) where the market was, 2) how to get there, and 3) what the going price of cattle was on a near-daily basis. What I find so striking about the World Bank report (and Ferguson’s devastating deconstruction of it) is not that it’s a bad piece of development writing, but that even fifty years later it’s still a thoroughly unremarkable one. Economic development papers and talks tend to have a fairly fixed structure: 1. A quick introduction to “the setting” 2. Carefully gathered numerical data, with a variety of statistical arguments and robustness checks to show that one or two “main results” have been accurately reported. 3. A story that plausibly explains these numbers (either a potential mechanism for an effect, or an explanation of why the effect turned out to be null) If these stories are challenged, it is not because there is no actual evidence for them, but because an economist in the audience has thought of their own preferred theory. If the speaker can find some data point that contradicts the questioner’s idea, this is thought to “confirm” the original story. Since audience members (who often have little specific knowledge of the region) are unlikely to ask questions like “what if this village just has an incredibly complicated set of social conventions around cattle that prevents their sale even without market barriers in place?” or “do the region’s economic challenges have more to do with this very specific regulation in South African immigration law?”, plausible-sounding stories that explain one or two numerical data points tend to gain traction in the literature whether or not they have anything to do with reality. Mark McGovern famously noted this trend in a review of two of Paul Collier’s books, writing: “Much of the intellectual heavy lifting in these books is in fact done at the level of implication or commonsense guessing. And the common sense is surely not that of the inhabitants of the countries being dissected, but that of the highly educated elite located primarily in Western Europe and North America. In those passages where Collier does lay out the thinking behind his explanations, they are always coherent and plausible, but the chain of causal relations makes it evident how fragile these models typically are.” The World Bank report’s fundamental misdiagnosis of the challenges Lesotho faced formed the basis for a series of failed “development initiatives”, most notably the Thaba-Tseka Development Project, a joint venture funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank, the Government of Lesotho, and the UK Overseas Development Ministry. The project focused on providing technical solutions to the “problems” the World Bank report had identified: better agricultural techniques, easier access to markets, and increased government capacity to provide public goods. Each piece faced serious problems in execution, largely because interventions shown to have the sorts of “positive effects” randomized experiments might demonstrate elsewhere in Africa were not necessarily well suited to Lesotho’s unforgiving, mountainous terrain. But even more seriously, the project was so enveloped in “development discourse” that nobody thought to question whether they were working on problems their “recipients” cared about, or merely the ones the “tools of development” were capable of solving. As Ferguson writes, “The promise that crop farming could be revolutionized through the application of a well-known package of technical inputs was so firmly written into the project’s design that it was difficult for those on the scene to challenge it, or even to confront it.” Perhaps the only thing that has changed since Ferguson wrote is that we have tools to better identify these failures: the development literature continues to be littered with failed trials and interventions based on unchecked assumptions. One of the most famous is the British Department for International Development’s 90 million pound Tuungane project, whose Congolese incarnation sought to rebuild village governing institutions that the country’s civil war had destroyed. One of the most convincing explanations of its failure is that it may not have been necessary to begin with: the implementers do not seem to have checked whether the institutions had actually been weakened by violence, and baseline reports indicated that residents were relatively satisfied with village governance before the project even started! More research is needed to clarify the situation -- research which might have been useful to carry out before spending a £90 million on a “fix”. Part of this, perhaps, comes from the usual overconfidence that other social scientists like to accuse economists of. But there are much bigger systemic problems at play. Development work tends to run on short timelines: grad students and postdocs need to publish quickly for their careers to advance, NGO funding runs on 5-ish year cycles, and charities (particularly in “high-risk” areas) face extremely high employee turnover rates. This simultaneously limits the accumulation of institutional knowledge, while incentivizing practitioners away from the time-intensive process of understanding a particular context in favor of “getting results quick.” Similarly, the recent introduction of experimental evidence to the development field is a wondrous thing, but the revolution has to continue: randomized experiments can tell us about the effect an intervention had somewhere, but even the best methods of applying this kind of evidence to a specific context remain somewhat arbitrary and subjective. As EA begins to fund more complex (but potentially more effective) interventions, a key step will be to get a more systematic handle on how to gather evidence about specific places-- countries, states, even villages -- and how to match the tools we have to people who might benefit from them. ### II. The Trouble with Technocrats “But even if the project was in some sense a ‘failure’ as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its ‘side effects’ had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. [...] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region” As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned -- not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”? Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better.” Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things. Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems. A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent: “In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. [...] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.” Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure. This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can [pull talent](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338796/) away from government jobs. Foreign aid can [worsen](https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ad/article/view/57357) ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can [hurt](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/4/1973/2468874) neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” -- surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible! Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project. Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule. This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages [...] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units. When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures. The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects. As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing,” completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted. Have any EA projects had this sort of unexpected political side effect? I think it’s genuinely hard to tell without further research, but the possibility is frightening. (There’s been a little bit of research on the quantitative side --Recent research has found, for instance, that GiveDirectly’s 2014 unconditional cash transfer trial increased community participation but did not change voting patterns, so at least in 2014 the Kenyan government wasn’t using the program to stay in power. Was this the right question to test? I am not sure, especially without a more qualitative survey to see if there are other avenues we should be worried about.) ### III. Takeaways for Effective Altruism So what do we do as effective altruists (hereafter “EAs”)? I see three key takeaways. The first is a clear need for more qualitative research. GiveWell makes [some](https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities/2019/qualitative-assessments) qualitative judgments about charities, but Ferguson’s work illustrates the need for qualitative evaluation of the interventions themselves to see if the underlying studies have captured all of the “right” variables. Randomized experiments are really good at testing hypotheses, but by their very nature they can’t tell you about variables you didn’t decide ahead of time to measure. Are there significant side effects (positive or negative) we’ve missed from massive malaria net distributions? I don’t know, but if so they are not likely to be discovered by a bunch of Americans and Europeans sitting in a room and trying to guess the best things to measure. Rather, they’re probably already known (or suspected) by the people experiencing them, and a first step to finding out is going and asking them. (A second step is finding the right people to ask them -- real expertise in qualitative research is a rare and valuable skill.) Of course, qualitative research is messy and sometimes the people you interview are wrong or have other agendas. So once we have an “on-the-ground” hypothesis or concern, there will often be good reason to use a randomized trial or quasi-experimental method to test it or try to understand how much of a concern it might be! This sort of interdisciplinary approach is starting to gain traction in academia, but it has yet to be seriously applied in the EA sphere. There’s another angle to this: Ferguson’s most incisive insights arise not from studying the people being “served”, but by studying the development practitioners themselves. Other social scientists have continued this trend, from McGovern’s [An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/popular-development-economicsan-anthropologist-among-the-mandarins/F4B61C7199F51FF0F282DD9652635F31) and Robinson’s [How Different Social Scientists Think](https://voices.uchicago.edu/jamesrobinson/2020/06/16/how-different-social-scientists-think/) to Marchais, Bazuzi, and Lameke’s [The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2020.1724806?scroll=top&needAccess=true) and Omar Bah’s webcomic [Mzungus in Development and Governments](https://mdgcomics.com/phdcomic/). Each new paper illuminates the research process in new ways, and provides tools both to do better research and to identify potential weaknesses in the pre-existing literature. I think one of the highest impact investments an Effective Altruist fund could make right now would be to hire a handful of trained anthropologists (or other outside experts in qualitative research / ethnography) to hang out in places like GiveWell or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for a few years and really study how effective altruism works as a system. How are decisions being made, and how is evidence being used to make them? What does “EA discourse” help make visible and which problems and concerns does it hide from our view? How do the positionalities of typical EA researchers affect their views of what’s important or what’s plausible? I have my guesses, and I’m sure you have yours. But I had my guesses about development economics, too, and I missed nearly everything Ferguson (and the authors mentioned two paragraphs up) uncovered. What more are we missing? The second is an emphasis on local context. As funding gaps for “low hanging fruit” like malaria disappear, EA is going to have to focus on more complicated interventions, which are likely to be fairly context-specific -- after all, why should an agriculture program that works in the flattest parts of the Sahel be expected to work the same way in the Maloti Mountains? Ferguson notes about several of the Thaba-Tseka project’s failed arms: “Tanzania may be very different from Lesotho on the ground, but, from the point of view of a development agency’s head office, both may be simply ‘the Africa desk’. In the Thaba-Tseka case, at least, the original project planners knew little about Lesotho’s specific history, politics, and sociology; they were experts on ‘livestock development in Africa,’ and drew largely on experience in East Africa.” For any sort of context-specific intervention to work, an intimate knowledge of the specific history, needs, and geography of individual villages and regions is necessary. The development world has slowly made steps in this direction, but it’s not clear to me that the EA community has a clear way of acquiring, accessing, or working with this information. I don’t think there’s a magic bullet to solve this problem, but in the long run any solution will probably need to involve a) on-the-ground, qualitative research and b) real representation in the EA network from areas EA organizations are interested in working. The development industry has a shameful history of infantilizing and ignoring the opinions of “locals”, and I think the conversations I’m starting to see in EA about diversity and representation of different parts of the Global South need to continue if we’re going to get enough serious knowledge of local contexts to effectively direct funding. The third is a continued need to take politics seriously. This is one of the most challenging issues in charitable giving: when is it okay to work with a government doing terrible things to deliver humanitarian aid? To what extent does an NGO feeding the hungry lend its legitimacy to or cover for an authoritarian regime’s misdeeds? I don’t have anything close to a full answer (and I don’t think anyone does), but Ferguson’s work exposes a possibility I hadn’t thought of before, in which “technical” and “apolitical” projects can expand the power of the state in unforeseen and potentially dangerous ways. After writing The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson largely gave up on the idea of charitable or state-based aid. (Understandably, I think, given that he spent most of a decade watching its most horrific side effects first-hand). It’s ironic, then, that I think his book’s practical value is greatest to those of us who still hold onto hope in its possibilities. May we have ears to hear the voices telling us where our work has fallen short, and eyes to see what it could become. ### Footnotes 1. Ferguson pg. 55 2. World Bank, quoted by Ferguson pg. 25 3. The idea that “less-developed countries” should all be alike seems unlikely, but it fits with the current trend in economics where essentially any question involving non-OECD countries is lumped together into “development.” 4. [Popular Development Economics—An Anthropologist among the Mandarins](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/popular-development-economicsan-anthropologist-among-the-mandarins/F4B61C7199F51FF0F282DD9652635F31) pg. 348 5. Ferguson pg. 234 6. As measured by randomized experiments. See, e.g. [Institutional Change by Imitation: Introducing Western Governance Practice in Congolese Villages](https://raulsanchezdelasierra.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/tuungane.pdf) for details. 7. I learned this story from Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, a researcher involved in the evaluation. 8. Ferguson pg. 252-253 9. T. Sekhamane, quoted on Ferguson pg. 243 10. Ferguson pg. 111 11. Ferguson pg. 243 12. See Orkin and Walker’s [Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya](https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/unconditional-cash-transfers-and-civic-engagement-kenya) 13. Ferguson, pg. 258 14. See “The Data is Gold” or Omar Bah’s comic, above, for some examples.	Scott Alexander	56751267	Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine	acx
# In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement 1: The New York Times has [an article](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/magazine/antipsychotic-medications-mental-health.html) out on the [Hearing Voices Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement) - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has [a pretty passionate response here.](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new?s=r) Other people have differently passionate responses: I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts: 2: Plenty of people hear voices. Some of these people are your typical homeless schizophrenic, but many aren’t. One of my patients was a successful computer programmer who had near-daily auditory hallucinations. He realized they weren’t real, did his best to ignore them, and got on with his successful life - just like he had been doing for the past twenty years. He was seeing me for unrelated depression. This guy kept his condition secret from his friends and co-workers. I don’t blame him for this choice at all. But when everybody who can hide it does, we only hear about the people who can’t keep it hidden, who are usually worst-case scenarios. Also (as a bunch of 1980s gay people can tell you) keeping a basic fact about yourself hidden from everyone you know sucks. I recommended Hearing Voices Movement to this guy. I can’t remember whether he took me up on it or not. But I thought it would be helpful for him to have people he could talk to about his situation who wouldn’t think he was crazy, or try to get him locked up. 3: People hate admitting that some cases are mild, and others are severe. Especially the kind of people who work at the New York Times I talked about this a while back in the context of [the autism rights movement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/). Many autistic people live great lives, enjoy the beneficial parts of their condition, and find it annoying or oppressive when psychiatrists keep trying to medicate them. Many other autistic people can’t live outside of institutions and constantly try to chew off their own body parts. A reasonable conclusion might be “the first group seem mild and should be left alone, the second group seem severe and probably need intensive treatment”, but it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this. Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7. And that’s just the activists! We psychiatrists have the same problem from a different direction: we have seen some crazy @#!$. No matter how mild your case is, we’ve seen some case that looked like that at first glance, then slowly descended into a horror movie premise. Our instinct is naturally to round off the person who uses Xanax once a month to the lifetime drug abuser, the mildly depressed housewife to the gory suicide victim, and the occasional voice-hearer to the guy who needs to be in a straitjacket. Still, some cases are mild and others are severe. People with mild psychosis - like my patient the programmer - probably don’t need to be on really strong medications with severe side effects. They probably just need support. In a perfect world, expert psychiatrists would have a major role in providing that support. In the real world, a lot of these patients expect their psychiatrist to freak out, overmedicate them, and maybe even commit them to a hospital. This being the real world, many of those patients are right. So they look elsewhere. 4: To a first approximation, communities are good for people in need. [Forming communities is hard](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/). A bunch of atheist groups have tried to form Church, But For Atheists. It usually doesn’t work. People need some kind of unifying factor. Atheism alone is too boring, doesn’t cut it. Race can cut it. Cults prove that sufficiently extreme beliefs can cut it. But most of us don’t have a sufficiently diverse racial identity or sufficiently deep insight into the various incarnations of our thetans, and have to grope around for something else. Being mildly psychotic is a decent community rallying flag. Are hallucinations real? Probably not, but neither is God, and study after study has shown you will be happier if you go to church. I expect people who go to Hearing Voices Movement meetings are happier too. One good way to build an community is to unite around persecution. And most chronically mentally ill people have been traumatized by the psychiatric system in some way or another. Sometimes this is specific individuals behaving maliciously or callously. Other times it’s just the normal trauma of being shuffled from institution to institution by a system which isn’t optimizing for preventing you from being stuck on a gurney for twelve hours with nothing to do. If you want to provide psychiatric care to people who mostly loathe all psychiatric-care-providers, you can do one of two things. First, you can force them - court orders, commitments, guilt, etc. Second, you can signal really really hard that you aren’t like those people. A lot of things about the Hearing Voices Movement are cringe. There’s a lot of talk about how your “nonconsensus reality” is okay, how everything is real in some sense, and how if you saw an angel or whatever then that’s so beautiful and you must be a deeply spiritual person. I think these claims are false, but that’s exactly the point: they’re the sorts of things no self-respecting psychiatrist would ever say. Which means they’re good signals that the Movement isn’t just another branch of the psychiatric establishment. Which means that chronically mentally ill people can actually feel safe there and go listen to them. This is a load-bearing part of their treatment model and their community-building model, and GK Chesterton would like to have a word with you before you tear it down. (Alcoholics Anonymous makes an interesting comparison: they’re solving this problem in their own way, by being more conservative and unforgiving than the psychiatric establishment would like. Hearing Voices is more liberal and accepting than the establishment, but the key point is not landing in the exact same place.) 5: Imagine that you go to the top of a Himalayan peak, take some obscure Ecuadorian psychedelic, sink deep into meditation, and have the most profound experience of your life. You see God approaching in the form of an arrow of pure light, which splits open your head and then blossoms like a flower, and this makes you realize that your whole childhood was [and so on in this vein]. You try to explain this to someone, and before you even get three words out, they tell you that you’re crazy and God doesn’t exist and you need to take risperidone 2 mg daily until they tell you to stop. This is probably the right response, and if someone had been willing to do this to the original hippies we might have saved ourselves several decades of weird art and dumb politics. But from the inside, it feels kind of harsh. I’ve occasionally had experiences like this, and although “students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them”, you kind of want someone to at least let you finish your trip report before telling you that you’re bad and invalid and need a neurotransmitter balance that doesn’t suck. I don’t know whether there’s something to be gained from picking over experiences like these, but it’s natural and human to want to do it. Generations of Freudians made good livings by flattering their patients’ preconceptions that their dreams had to mean something. As a psychiatrist, I try not to engage with patients about the meanings of their hallucinations, because my words carry some sort of scientific authority and Science very much does not have an opinion on this. But somebody ought to do it, and “let mildly psychotic people do it for each other” seems like a good solution. 6: Actually, this is an important point. The Hearing Voices Movement makes a specific clinical claim: trying to reason with or even befriend your voices works better than trying to repress them. Is it true? Most of the psychotic people I’ve talked to say no, at least not trivially on first inspection. Most voices can’t be reasoned with. They don’t have agendas, they don’t talk back or bargain. But the psyche tends to behave how people expect it to behave. If all the people you consider friends and authorities in your social group say that voices talk back and negotiate, might voices talk back and negotiate? The entire western occult tradition says yes. I’m only half joking here; the history of hermeticism suggests that if you give borderline-psychotic people a really strong assumption that the techniques they’re using will produce hallucinations with certain results, they’ll get what they signed up for. Or what about Internal Family Systems? This is a kind of woo-y type of therapy where the therapist says “imagine that your anger is talking to you, what does it say?” and then the patient tries to have this imaginary conversation. Sometimes their anger says something insightful like “I am just trying to protect you from being hurt again” and then the patient and their anger reconcile and the patient becomes less angry. I was never able to get the hang of this myself, but some people swear by it. Psychosis seems like a good starting point here - instead of saying “Imagine your anger could talk”, you can start with “You know that voice you hear all the time which keeps telling you to kill everyone? Let’s start by assuming it’s your anger”. I expect that some of the people for whom IFS works will find this works too. So am I saying “voices aren’t really intelligent and agentic, but if you put someone in a weird cultural situation, their voices will start acting that way”? Sort of. But a better framing might be “in the weird cultural situation of 21st century scientific psychiatry, nobody expects voices to be intelligent and agentic, and they aren’t. In some other weird cultural situation, who knows?” Is all of this mealy-mouthed and post-modernist and denying the existence of ground-level truth? Sort of, but “your subjective experience of your psyche is culturally relative” is a weaker and more defensible claim than “reality is culturally relative”, and one with a lot of support - see eg [Julian Jaynes](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/) and [Ethan Watters](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us?s=w) for more. 7: One of Freddie’s big complaints about Hearing Voices - and about a lot of mental health advocacy groups - is that they’re doing the Special Snowflake thing too hard. They think that having a mental illness makes them quirky and substitutes for a personality. In Freddie’s defense, they are definitely doing this. You can think of this in a condescending way, something like: yeah, but you can see why, right? A lot of people with mental illness aren’t very functional. I don’t mean “need to be in an institution” dysfunctional, I mean “barely holding on to their dead-end job and struggling to pay rent” dysfunctional. People need personal mythologies. “I am a guy who works a McJob and is bad at it, and that is all I am” isn’t going to cut it psychologically. “I am a guy who works a McJob by day, but my hallucinations give me a higher level of insight into the problems of the world than all these people who are superficially more successful than I am” is just healthier, as long as it doesn’t get taken to a grandiose extreme. The non-condescending version is that everyone is in this situation. The Hearing Voices people pat themselves on the back because they have interesting hallucinations and are more creative than everyone else. Freddie pats himself on the back because he has an uncompromising commitment to taking his psychiatric problems seriously, warts and all, and not glossing over the negative aspects. I pat myself on the back because I’m balanced and reasonable and empathetic to both sides. It’s really hard not to do the special snowflake thing in some way or other. Prudence consists of doing it in ways that don’t step on other people’s toes, wildly contradict reality, or make society worse off. 8: Since we’re on the topic of Special Snowflakes, a point only tangentially related to mental health. Right now, our society demands you be a Special Snowflake. Women who aren’t quirky enough are “basic bitches”, men who aren’t quirky enough are “yet another straight white dude”. Just today, I read some dating advice saying that single men need to develop unusual hobbies or interests, because (it asked, in all seriousness) why would a woman want to date someone who doesn’t “stand out”? Someone on Twitter complained that boring people go to medical school because if you’re a doctor you don’t need to have a personality. Edward Teach complains that people get into sexual fetishes as a replacement for a personality. I’ve even heard someone complain that boring people take up rock-climbing as a personality substitute: it is (they say) the minimum viable quirky pastime. Nobody wants to be caught admitting that their only hobbies are reading and video games, and maybe rock climbing is enough to avoid being relegated to the great mass of boring people. The complainer was arguing that we shouldn’t let these people get away that easily. They need to be quirkier! A friend read an article once about someone who moved to China for several years to learn to cook rare varieties of tofu. She became insanely jealous; she doesn’t especially like China or tofu, but she felt that if she’d done something like that, she could bank enough quirkiness points that she’d never have to cultivate another hobby again. In this kind of environment, of course mentally ill people will exploit their illness for quirkiness points! We place such unreasonable quirkiness demands on everybody that you have to take any advantage you can get! I’m guilty of this myself. I think I’m an interesting person in certain ways. But those ways tend to be things like “I wrote a blog that was condemned by the New York Times”, and “I’m in a group which many people consider a cult” - not the right type of quirky for job interviews. So when I got the inevitable “tell me about yourself and how you’re different from all our other applicants” question, I talked about how I’d struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which is true. It wasn’t a very interesting struggle, and it didn’t particularly shape my subsequent personality. But I’d never admit that to an admissions officer. And on one level it’s definitely true that mankind will not be free until the last admissions officer is strangled with the entrails of the last New York Times journalist. But in another sense, we do this to ourselves. We demand quirkiness from our friends, our romantic partners, even our family members. I can’t tell you how many times my mother tried to convince me it was bad that I just sat inside and read all day, and that maybe if I took up rock-climbing or whatever I would be more “well-rounded”. We can stop at any time. We can admit that you don’t need a “personality” beyond being responsible and compassionate. That if you’re good at your job and support your friends, you don’t also need to move to China and study rare varieties of tofu. But if you do insist on unusual experiences as the measure of a valid person, then there will always be a pressure to exaggerate how unusual your experience is. Everyone will either rock-climb or cultivate a personality disorder, those are the two options. And lots of people are afraid of heights. 9: I think there’s a difference between psychotic people exploring their psychosis, among themselves, in ways that serve their psychological needs, and the New York Times running an article about it where you’re supposed to conclude that they’re right and good and the stupid square psychiatric establishment who want them to take medication are just dumb and out of touch. I’ve been following the conflict between pro-transgender activists who want to celebrate transgender people and fight stigma against them, vs. anti-transgender activists who want to prevent a bunch of kids from hearing that being trans is cool and so transitioning. This is a really sensitive issue but I am going to do my best to talk about it, and I’m sorry for probably offending both sides. My starting point for any discussion of this, which I feel like it’s really hard for a well-informed and well-intentioned person to disagree with, is that at least some large subset of transgender people aren’t consciously faking it. That is, they genuinely have the experience of feeling like they are the other gender, they’ll be absolutely utterly miserable if forced to live life as their birth gender, and telling them “no, just snap out of it” will not work, at all. I think it’s hard to know transgender people closely without coming to this conclusion, unless you have some kind of really galaxy-brained take beyond my ability to even imagine . So what’s left for the people who believe transgender is a “social contagion” or about “special snowflakeness”? If I had to steelman their position it would be something like: there’s some switch that can be flipped by social pressure and wanting to look cool. Once the switch is flipped, you’re transgender in some pretty real way: you’re not faking it, and you’ll be miserable until you’re allowed to gender transition. Still, being transgender makes people worse off on net, so society should try to avoid flipping that switch. (if you read this blog often, you might notice similarities to my theory of [anorexia](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/05/giudice-on-the-self-starvation-cycle/): yes, lots of people start dieting because they want to be a ballerina or something, but the extreme dieting seems to flip a switch, the switch turns it biological, and you can’t make anorexics go back to healthy eating just by convincing them not to want to be a ballerina anymore) If this were true, a maximally compassionate policy would involve both trying to support people who are already transgender, and trying to prevent the switch from being flipped in people who aren’t transgender yet. I’ve never heard anyone explicitly advocate this policy, probably because it’s really hard to get right - the harder you try to avoid talking about it in front of impressionable young minds, the more you risk stigmatizing existing transgender people, and vice versa. There’s enough bad blood around this issue that I’m sure neither side would trust the other to respect a compromise like this. Probably they would be right not to trust them. Still, when I try to figure out how I personally should behave, I give some weight to considerations like these. This is also how I feel about hearing voices. Is hearing voices socially contagious? My guess is slightly. The DSM says that you can’t diagnose a psychotic disorder if someone’s in a cultural context when they’re expected and encouraged to hear voices - which sure does sound like the experts think cultural context can affect whether you hear voices or not. Born again Christians are constantly having what would normally get classified as psychotic experiences - I have asked a bunch of evangelicals who say “God told me to X” whether they actually heard God in a, you know, hearing God type way, and they usually say yes. Again, [read your Jaynes](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/). It feels prudent not to tell everyone that hearing voices is totally normal and cool. I don’t feel like the Hearing Voices Movement is doing this, exactly. They just sit around being an accepting place for people who already have this experience and problem. I do think New York Times articles about how cool and accepting and normal they are - and how much better they are than boring people who just take their medications - probably don’t do anyone any favors. 10: The article talks about peer mental health counselors - people with a mental illness who try to help others with the same condition. Some peer mental health counselors are among the best and most compassionate people I know. This is difficult and low-paid work, performed by people who may be struggling themselves, and yet they do amazing jobs and probably save a lot of lives in situations I can barely imagine having to operate in. Other peer mental health counselors suck. The arrogance of a doctor who’s read a lot of textbooks and journal articles about a condition can’t hold a candle to the arrogance of a peer who has overcome the condition themselves and thinks that means they know the One True Standardized Way everyone has to do this. Also, “overcome the condition” can be sort of a stretch goal for these people. I still remember a patient who asked me if I could cure his anxiety within a week. I told him absolutely not - medications take a few weeks to even kick in, and managing anxiety can be a lifelong process - and why did he need a cure in a week anyway? He said he was an inspirational speaker on the topic “How I Overcame My Anxiety”, and he had a speech scheduled next week, but was too anxious to work on it. I think about this person often. The worst failure mode is people who handled (or “handled”) their condition without medication, believe everyone else should be able to do this too, and pressure other patients to stay away from meds - make them feel like they’re giving in to the evil psychiatric establishment if they even consider a pill. The New York Times piece reads like it was written by one of these people. 11: I don’t have that much to say about the piece itself, beyond begging you to keep my [Cheat Sheet For Reading Popular Media Articles About Psychiatry](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/183580525141/cheat-sheet-for-reading-popular-media-articles?is_liked_post=1) handy whenever you open a newspaper, but I do think it’s worth talking about the WHO angle. A lot of the article’s anti-doctor anti-med propaganda relies on a WHO report, [Guidance on community mental health services: Promoting person-centred and rights-based approaches](https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1350330/retrieve). It writes: > Last June, the World Health Organization published a 300-page directive on the human rights of mental-health clients — and despite the mammoth bureaucracy from which it emerged, it is a revolutionary manifesto on the subject of severe psychiatric disorders. It challenges biological psychiatry’s authority, its expertise and insight about the psyche. And it calls for an end to all involuntary or coercive treatment and to the dominance of the pharmaceutical approach that is foremost in mental health care across conditions, including psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression and a host of other diagnoses. Psychiatry’s problematic drugs, the W.H.O. maintains, must no longer be an unquestioned mainstay. This guidance is part of a WHO program to get together a lot of patients rights advocates who say drugs suck and psychiatry is bad, they all write a report together saying that drugs suck and psychiatry is bad, and then the WHO marks off on a checklist that they have respectfully listened to the people who think drugs suck and psychiatry is bad. For example, if you look at the report, the first person credited as a “key international expert” whose opinion it relies upon is Celia Brown, whose biography describes her as: > Celia Brown is a psychiatric [abuse] survivor and leader in the movement for human rights in mental health. Celia has served on the Mind Freedom International board for several years, including as MFI president…Celia is shown here speaking at an MFI protest directly in front of the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting The picture on Mind Freedom International’s website. I’m glad people like this exist; they keep the rest of us honest. But if you get together a hundred people like this, they will say the kinds of things that people like this say. And if you make it into a glossy report and stick the WHO logo on it, then there will be a glossy WHO report that says the sorts of things that people like this say. That’s fine and I believe everyone should be allowed to make a PDF if they so desire, but the New York Times seems to be trying to use this to suggest that clinicians or experts or someone whose opinion you should care about is admitting that drugs don’t work and treatment is bad, and this suggestion is false. Please, please just use the cheat sheet. 12: The usual human and humane provisions - food, shelter, counseling, acceptance, support, friendship - make a big difference. Not just in depression. Even in things like psychosis that you’d expect are way too biological to affect through fuzzy things like that. There are a lot of people who are psychotic under stress but do well in an ideal environment. There are a lot of other people who will be psychotic no matter what you do, but depending on environment their psychosis can be benign and compatible with a happy life, vs. violent and uncontrollable. But these things don’t work infinitely well, and sometimes you need the meds. (The meds also don’t work infinitely well, but the interaction between medication and psychosocial support is complicated. There’s usually some dose of medication that will make a patient stop doing dangerous and disruptive things, but this dose might not leave them very happy or able to do anything at all. This forms a difficult and ethically-questionable tradeoff - how do you balance the patient’s own comfort with the comfort of the people around him who don’t want him being disruptive? Part of the role of psychosocial support is to give the patient an environment where people are willing to tolerate the occasional weird or disruptive thing, so that the compromise point on this tradeoff is more compassionate to the patient’s needs.) People like to paint psychiatrists as close-minded monomaniacs who think medication is the only possible solution to everything. This is true of some, but an insult to others; contra what Johann Hari thinks, the biopsychosocial model isn’t exactly a closely-guarded secret. But the opposite of this are the people who think psychosocial interventions and acceptance are the only possible solution for anything and trash talk the meds every chance they get. My guiding star has always been patient choice - except in the rare situations where the legal system officially takes this away to protect other people. That means having opportunities for patients to do things other than take drugs. It also means not trying to scare patients away from the drugs or misinforming people with NYT-quality drivel. I think there’s room for the Hearing Voices movement and things like it in the mental health tent - as long as they don’t try to kick other people out of the tent and say their way is the one-size-fits-all solution for everyone.	Scott Alexander	55407058	In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement	acx
# California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they’re listed on the ballot. Starting with: ## Bradley Zink Bradley Zink is fed up. The terminally-delayed high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco has been a boondoggle. As governor, his first act would be to cancel it, saving $40 billion. What would he do with the money? From [his Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/getBZin2022/posts/327454746070197?__cft__[0]=AZXjYuCPMGHy56Sn0ocD-c1N_QfU7bLwBCT68DAjdieaF0aXq2-uKKtR4URIIoqgXrcEslbs6nYKLk9Jgds0bBd5VTgSWDc_Rwa6V0UF1PNF9fKeDw9VChl0SQ-irBEJMWCiyL5jjaWm0SUhNLm3CUyX&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R): > With the same money, built a 200-mile electric train from San Diego to Yuma [in Arizona], along the border [with Mexico], UNDERGROUND. Place a light rail system above ground. Now, you have cut off any possible illegal drug and human trafficking across the border, both above and below ground. And, you have a basic infrastructure to develop the 200+ miles of undeveloped land, to build new cities and millions of new homes, thus solving the housing crisis! A Double WIN-WIN, a secure border, and room to grow. IT'S THAT SIMPLE! That’s not all. Later, Zink points out that you could also “utilize turbine power created by train windflow” to help generate electricity and fight global climate change. The outpouring of support from ordinary Californians has been overwhelming: ([source](https://www.facebook.com/getBZin2022/videos/528978541939538/?comment_id=422202842613364&__cft__[0]=AZXmf2hM8eefSvP8FgnWJE3lBvcStdbkdcQwOSWeHhF4hybtl_5Y6A5FiZDIBv84W0RgukOwEUvuZktJ1E779Iik2cme6mAR2YNrgKBez6MQoUwCFRpv7Yw5yO9vZNKBs-VhGnD99KoBp207TRupdyjocEerLLoy51FaAcTrScFOzg&__tn__=R]-R)) In his spare time, Zink is the author of books including [Signs: You’re In San Diego](https://amzn.to/3MS4PrD) (a book of photos of San Diego signs), a [book of COVID-19 memes](https://www.amazon.com/COVID-19-Family-financially-assist-Schools/dp/B08B7NLZBZ/), and [educational books for children](https://www.amazon.com/Love-Saves-Bradley-Zink/dp/1512241385/). Bradley Zink (right) with a typical California voter ([source](https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=356516976497307&set=pcb.356519976497007)) ## Jenny Rae Le Roux If you look up “Republican candidate” in the dictionary, you’ll see Jenny Rae Le Roux’s picture. She was born in Tennessee, got a job at Bain, founded a company, bought a ranch, had several beautiful children, and now wants to spread the gospel of pro-business pro-family conservatism to the world. Warning: Jenny Rae Le Roux’s smile can paralyze at a range of fifty feet. If spotted, do not engage. Keep a safe distance and call for support. Jenny Rae has exactly the [positions on the issues](https://www.jennyraeca.com/issues/) that you would expect. She’s pro-business, pro-family, pro-school-choice (“When Newsom closed the doors of public schools, he sent his kids to private school for in-person instruction; in contrast, I invited our school’s teachers to come to our farm to create instructional videos to help students adapt to virtual teaching”), pro-freedom, and pro-innovation. She’s not just pro-life, she’s “pro-life plus” (which means she wants strong social programs to support infants after birth). That escalated quickly ([source](https://www.jennyraeca.com/issues/)). Le Roux is currently third among these 26 candidates in amount of money raised, and has a decent chance of making it to run against Newsom in the general. ## David Lozano [David Lozano](https://lozanoforcalifornia.com/) is an attorney and former sheriff, running on a plan to end homelessness. Every candidate has a plan to end homelessness, but if you read carefully you’ll notice he’s just claiming to be the only one whose plan has that name. His plan: > The plan will build, from the ground up, not one, but *three* major metropolitan/residential cities – one in the Northern part of California; the second Northeast of the Antelope Valley outside of Los Angeles; and the third in the Southern tip of California with each having upper and middle class areas, but also having a moderate class area with the capability of housing over 50,000 homeless each. David Lozano: the only candidate standing up for moderate-class people. Also: You can see an interview with Lozano [here](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/story/2022-05-15/2022-election-q-a-with-david-lozano-california-gubernatorial-candidate). > Vote for me and I can change California. For years people of California have been voting for movie stars, radio disc jockeys and Olympic athletes. Heck, I was at a luncheon last week and a young lady at the table told me her grandmother voted for the last governor because she thought he was cute. The other woman at the table said her mom voted for Newsom because she liked the way he dressed. Come on, California! Please! > > Look at my background — look at what I have accomplished and what my solutions are. I was a past cop working the streets of Los Angeles for years, I’ve worked the jails in Los Angeles. How many past governors have that experience? I’ve been a federal attorney specializing in finance, fighting against the mortgage industry for the past 28 years. I can solve homelessness and crime. I can lower taxes, provide affordable housing to lower and middle class families, and bring industrial arts and trade skills back to our high schools. I can reinstitutionalize mental health facilities all throughout California. I can provide health care and housing for our veterans. I can bring water management to our state. I can do all of this because I have the skill, training, knowledge, ability and determination to make this state great again. > > Now personally I do think my ties are OK, but my wife did say I could get a few more trendy looking suits. ## Ronald Anderson [Ronald Anderson](https://randersongov22.com/) wins my award for “quickest retreat from a spirit of bipartisanship”: > It’s time we all come together whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. It’s time we fix the problem. The system is clearly broken and we the people are losing because of Democrat policies. But that’s not all. He also wins my award for best facial hair: …and for most unintentionally appropriate slogan: Anderson has pretty typical Republican positions on the issues. He’s against illegal immigration, against defunding the police, and against gun control. Also some less typical positions: he wants to place a tax on all Chinese container ships to fund COVID relief. Also - and I find this incredibly endearing - in the middle of all of these standard Republican positions, he has something on how much he hates animal abuse, and how if he’s governor he’s not going to tolerate it. Good luck Ronald! ## Gavin Newsom What is it with these crazy candidates? This guy doesn’t even have a normal name - who ever heard of a Gavin? Also, his [campaign website](https://gavinnewsom.com/) is ridiculous: Gavin loves this state so much that he has constant orgasms whenever he is on Californian soil. Or maybe he’s just imitating that bear’s facial expression. Gavin has typical Democratic policies on most things. Like everyone else, he has a ridiculously-named Plan To End Homelessness, [Project Roomkey](https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2020/12/18/homeless-newsom-says-fema-fund-project-roomkey-amid-covid-pandemic/3970467001/), which will give homeless people hotel vouchers. In his spare time, Gavin is a family man. Although [his first wife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberly_Guilfoyle#Personal_life) left him for Donald Trump Jr. (?!), he is happily remarried and has four children named “Montana”, “Hunter”, “Brooklynn”, and “Dutch”. ## Robert C Newman II [Robert’s biography](https://www.newman4governor.com/about-robert-newman) says he was born to a poor family. At age 4, he contracted polio; no longer suitable for manual labor, his father encouraged him to go to school. He became a small farmer and research psychologist. Then: > In 2001, Robert informed us that God was calling him to “Be the governor.” At that point, life changed dramatically for the Newmans and turned their ordinary life into an extraordinary journey which continues to the present. His policy interests include reducing taxes, protecting the unborn, and water security (five of his thirteen issue pages are about the water system). He looks like this: Robert is [endorsed by](https://www.newman4governor.com/endorsements) California businesses including Valley Livestock Feed Recycling, Eaton Tire Service, and Kriley Exca-Break. ## Brian Dahle [Brian Dahle](https://briandahle.com/) is another more serious candidate. He was the former Republican leader in the California State Assembly, which is probably a lot like being a snowplow driver in Libya. Again, pretty standard Republican positions on issues. He’s against school closures, against crime, against vaccine mandates (he himself has refused the vaccine) and against “Government Waste, Incompetence, And Fraud”. He, too, has a plan to end homelessness - he will: > Streamline state programs for vulnerable populations, deregulate to encourage housing development, and start treating housing as a critical human need and not an impact that needs years of CEQA review before approval. In case you’re still not convinced he’s really Republican, he lives on a ranch and has three children named Chase, Reagan, and Rosslyn. ## Joel Ventresca [Joel Ventresca](https://www.joelventresca.com/) is a self-described Berniecrat running to Newsom’s left. He has an impressive resume, in a sense: His positions include free public transit, non-nuclear 100% renewable energy, challenging "corporate and tech agendas", free health care funded by the rich, and a selection of pro-diversity initiatives. ♬♬ One of these things / is not like the others ♬♬ He is not a big fan of our current governor: …and describes himself as “the only top leading challenger that can defeat Newsom this year.” ## Major Williams [Major Williams](https://bookmajor.my.canva.site/majorforgovernor) (motto: “It’s Time To Think Major”) is handsome and has snazzy promotional material. I cannot quite figure out his job, but his [LinkedIn page](https://www.linkedin.com/in/majorwilliams) says he is “CEO of the Major Williams Brand” and “Founder of The Office Of Major Williams”, both of which he seems, if anything, over-qualified for. He is a philanthropist and runs “Major Kicks For Kids”, apparently a charity of some sort. He has a three-point Plan To End Homelessness, but his website only shows the first point, and there isn’t an obvious way to click through to find the others: Or maybe those are supposed to be three separate points? But then why did he use the word “first”? He is running as a Republican, and knows what he likes and doesn’t like: I am glad he is both anti-socialist and anti-communist. I hate when I elect someone on the grounds that they are anti-socialist, but then they turn out to have been pro-communist. Major and his wife have three children named Kahlo, Lord, and York. ## Ron Jones [Ron Jones](https://www.ronjones2022.org/) has been an army veteran, law enforcement officer, small business owner, and pastor. It’s like he’s a one-person Republican Party. We can’t let him also get a ranch, he’ll become too powerful. On the issues, he wants to: He has three children, but wisely avoids telling us their names. ## Anthony Trimino [Anthony Trimino](https://anthonytrimino.com/) has a really impressive campaign website, which I guess makes sense since he’s the CEO of a digital advertising agency. Anthony is the grandson of Cuban immigrants. He apparently started out poor, then lifted himself up by his bootstraps to found his ad business, “one of the fastest growing privately-held companies in America”. Conventional wisdom is that campaign photos should look ominous and foreboding, so people are scared not to vote for you. He says he stands for “freedom, faith, [and] family” but gives few specifics - although he does say he’s against vaccine passports. His plan for homelessness is to: > …work with community leaders, faith-based organizations and non-profits to scale already existing grassroots efforts across the state to deliver immediate, measurable, and sustainable results for our growing homeless population. Not only does he tell us his children’s names - Christian, Zach, Elijah, Niko, and Cameron - but each of them has made an impeccably-produced campaign video talking about what their father means to them. I am not sure I would vote for Anthony, but I think I would hire him to run my business’s ad campaign, which might have been what he was going for in the first place. Actually, running for governor is an amazing way to advertise your advertising business, which I guess is exactly the sort of idea you should expect the CEO of America’s fastest-growing advertising company to think of. ## Daniel Mercuri [Mr. Mercuri’s](https://www.danielforcalgovernor.com/) campaign website starts off strong: Daniel is part-Italian and part-Mexican. He’s a navy vet, CEO of an “independent production company”, CFO of a private cryptocurrency investment firm, and a mixed martial arts instructor. He tried running for Congress a few years ago, but lost. Daniel actually has a very complete and thoughtful [description](https://www.danielforcalgovernor.com/ca-policies) of his stance on various issues, probably the best of anyone I’ve seen on here so far. He has clearly read various state laws and has opinions on them. He has a six-point kind of vague Plan For Homelessness, but I find the specifics less impressive than his research process: he went around talking to homeless people and asking them what they needed; nobody else seems to have thought of this. For a crypto CEO with a ridiculous offense-focused slogan, I am actually very impressed by his seriousness - though in the end most of his opinions boil down to standard Republican solutions. This is actually really sweet. You are doing a TERRIBLE job of offending me! I can’t do justice to all of his positions, but I can at least repost this summary: I was impressed by Major Williams’ commitment to oppose both socialism and communism. But Mercuri takes it one step further, promising to oppose socialism, communism and Marxism. I know which of them has my vote. In his spare time, Mercuri practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He is married and has two children, Carver and Braedyn. ## Cristian Morales [Cristian](https://cmoralesforcagovernor.com/platform/) is a first-generation Guatemalan immigrant who achieved the American Dream, got a Masters degree, and now supervises various manufacturing plants. He describes his goal as: > Be the Labor Candidate for Governor of California, and the first Latino representing the voices of the working class. He also wants to fight for civil rights, support immigrants and asylum-seekers, and give everyone affordable healthcare. The fun part: Cristian is a Republican, and a lot of his site is devoted to explaining why he thinks his platform and the GOP are a good match for each other. For example: > I am a pro labor Republican. As I indicated above, I believe that the labor movement is now with the Republican party. President Obama famously said certain manufacturing jobs would never come back to the United States. I can say a positive of President Trump’s presidency was his support to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States (which he did). And: > It is well documented that a significant percentage of Latino Americans either have a family member, relative, or otherwise know someone that is undocumented. Worse if this person is a young person and with the vitriol being said in the media and by some fellow Americans I can understand why Latinos would choose to NEVER vote for a Republican. I believe I am in a unique position as someone who is a lifelong Republican, conservative to make the case why at least certain undocumented individuals should be considered some sort of compassion from certain countries that share the same value system as the majority of Americans. A significant percentage of the people from the Northern Triangle countries are ultra conservative devout Evangelical Christians. Some of the fastest growing religions in the Northern Triangle countries include the Church of Latter Day Saints. I ask for compassion in this time of need for the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle which include the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. I like him and I wish him good luck. He’ll need it. I think his best hope is that Donald Trump says that our country needs Christian morals, and people misinterpret it as a Cristian Morales endorsement. ## Michael Shellenberger [Michael Shellenberger](https://www.shellenbergerforgovernor.com/) straddles a weird line between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist. He has lots of famous and popular books named things like The Death Of Environmentalism: Global Warming In A Post-Environmentalist World, The Eco-Modernist Manifesto, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmentalist Alarmism Harms Us All (cf. [bright green environmentalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_green_environmentalism)) I think he holds basically the same ideas I do here: environmental problems are real, but we’re not all going to die immediately, and thoughtful evidence-based plans beat screaming about Green New Deals. He is very pro-nuclear and thinks that a bunch of nuclear plants plus desalinization would solve the state’s energy and water crises. He might be the first of these candidates to have a plan to solve giant statewide crises that would just clearly and unambiguously work. Like many people straddling weird lines between progressive and anti-progressive ideas, he has strong opinions on wokeness. Here’s his inevitable appearance on the the Joe Rogan Experience, where he talks about his inevitable Plan To End Homelessness: The latest step in his intellectual evolution is his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which points out all the rampant crime and drug use and homelessness and garbage in SF and says maybe some of these things are bad (the New York Times wrote a negative review [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/books/review/san-fransicko-michael-shellenberger.html)). I am really split on this guy. He is clearly thinking very hard and developing original opinions on everything. Some of these, like his nuclear/desalinization opinions, are excellent. Occasionally he hits exactly the same notes I would on something, like: > Newsom and many school districts went too far on Covid. It was reasonable to take precautions early in the pandemic to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed. But the continued masking of children and the demand for vaccination against a virus that hurt children the least was unreasonable. But like many people who have original opinions, he also gets some things really wrong. ~~On his mental health-related opinions - the rare field I am qualified to assess - he comes to opposite conclusions from me. I~~ [~~support suboxone treatment~~](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/02/practically-a-book-review-dying-to-be-free/) ~~, he’s against it; I~~ [~~oppose sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill~~](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/)~~, he’s for it~~ [EDIT: Shellenberger has objected to this characterization of his position and says he believes the opposite of what I ascribed to him] . Also, he wants the school day to be longer in order to be more convenient for parents, which is thoughtful and makes sense, but only in the same way that never letting people out of prison would be more convenient for parole boards. Lots of hits, lots of misses. The San Francisco Chronicle accuses him of being “obsessed with stoicism”, and I don’t know whether this is some kind of attack or if he is actually obsessed with the philosophy. He does recommend Victor Frankl books to people on Twitter: I really like this guy, but when I inspect that emotion further I find it has a flavor of “I could fix him”, which I’m told is not a good way to choose one’s relationship partners or governors. ## Frederic Schultz I can’t find Frederic Schultz’ 2022 California gubernatorial campaign page, but I did manage to find a [Frederic Schultz for President 2020 page](http://www.fred4prez.us/home.html). He seems to support many things, especially hashtags: > #NoMoreDrugWar! $10.5TRILLION (REALLY MUCH MORE WHEN ADD IN MY NEW HIGHEST RATE F/ BILLIONAIRES GOING FROM 8% TO 50% OVER $1B!, AS WELL AS WHEN ADD IN #WEALTHTAX STARTING AT 2% OVER $10M (START OF RICHEST 1%!) EVEN F/ "#NONPROFITS"!) #TaxNonProfits! #TaxTheRich! #WealthTax! #HumanRights now! #FREEthePEOPLE! > > #Abolitionist Human Rights Attorney Fred Schultz, J.D. for #President 2020! #ProhibitionKills! #Jobs4All! #Fred2020! #FREEtheSLAVES! #JAILisTORTURE! #FreeShamu too! > > #NoVictimNoCrime! #FreeThe2Million! #PardonThe70Million! #StopKillingUs! #Jail is #torture+ #slavery! #enough! #NeverAgain! #NeverIsNow (brilliant, moral awesome speech, Sasha Baron Cohen! You're right!! WE need them to respect our #PRIVACYRIGHTS / #ENCRYPTION #RIGHTS TOO!!!) > > #Progressive #antiwar #AntiNazi > > #Democratic (socially #Libertarian!) / #LOVEparty! > > #Abolitionist pro-#democracy #candidate for #president! (I've been working last 3 years on filing Supreme Court case , just filed 6/24/19, but have to refile in next few days!, to make #Hillary Clinton president, b/c #SheWon, but LOST case on Oct. 15, 2019, w/ J. Roberts NOT voting b/c I was suing him f/ swearing in trump, originally suing to block him from swearing in trump b/c he lost to Hillary Clinton by 3m votes, so not who we elected f/ president, so should have sworn in Hillary!!!)! He is very against the war on drugs, which he says costs us trillions of dollars a year and causes millions of people to be imprisoned (“modern-day slaves”, which makes him a “modern-day abolitionist”). But he also has other beliefs, for example: > Robots driving cars: also, we should not allow robots to drive cars. We have no other choice if we want to live, and we do. we can barely trust people to drive our cars. Now we’re supposed to let a robot decide if we live or die? And all computers can be, and are, hacked daily! No! …including some which surprised me. He’s pretty angry about the police in a lot of ways, thinks they’re prosecuting victimless crimes and contributing to a culture of mass incarceration - but also, he supports police militarization, because: > I will reverse the recent infuriating presidential order from president Obama which requires police departments nationwide to return most of the combat weapons and armored vehicles that they have received in the last decade back to the federal government. yes, these vehicles were wrongfully given to the police to fight unconstitutional victimless and/or consensual “crimes” like drug use and sales, and yes i will stop that day one i am in office, and yes they have been wrongfully used by police to suppress peaceful protests, which is one of the reasons our nation was founded was to preserve that right. > > But now we need police to be as heavily armed and armored as possible, to defend/guard us (and themselves) against, and god-forbid have to fight, terrorists here at home, and president Obama made a big mistake ordering them to return those weapons by April 2016. i will return those weapons to the police day one I’m in office, and simultaneously issue an order that police are never to pursue criminals for illegal unconstitutional “crimes” again, but only pursue real criminals, or guard us from them, using whatever our best technology can provide. if all those weapons can save the life of even one police-person defending us against terrorists, we must return them, so i will. Day one. Followed by: > Update: Hillary Clinton has hinted she now has changed her mind and supports arming police with military weapons, but only to fight terrorists. So, all her experience led her to the wrong conclusion on this issue until police proved they needed to use combat weapons and armor in the recent murders of police in Dallas Texas, which we all still mourn. so, i don't want to hear how my "lack of experience" should prevent me from holding office, when i am right consistently on issues that save lives, and Hillary (and trump certainly!) are wrong on issues that would kill so many here and abroad Schultz is a practicing lawyer. You can learn more about him at this video: ## Woodrow Sanders III [Woodrow Sanders III](https://woodrowsandersiii.com/) has one of the WASPiest names I’ve ever heard, yet is black. He spent seventeen years working at various state bureaucracies (including as a UNIX administrator) but “after realizing that he would never be able to effect lasting change from within under the bad leadership of the governor’s office, he decided the only way to break the cycle” was to run for Governor himself. He says that what separates him from other candidates is that he has practical opinions on how specific things about the bureaucracy could be run better, eg: He’s less about having a Plan To End Homelessness than some of the other candidates, which I find thought-provoking - do you want to elect someone who has a Grand Vision themselves, or someone who purports to be able to get the bureaucracy running more smoothly? A lot of candidates’ Grand Visions boil down to things like “figure out what works and then do it”, and probably the reason the last guy didn’t try that had something to do with the bureaucracy. So I’m not sure. He also has a channel [GovUnleashed](https://www.govunleashed.com/) where he talks about his ideas. ## Reinette Senum [Reinette Senum](https://www.electreinette.com/) was [the first woman to successfully cross Alaska alone in the winter](https://www.theunion.com/entertainment/activities-and-events/woman-looks-for-answers-finds-a-dog-named-diamond/). She said that “I could handle the 55-below cold, but I could not handle the loneliness”. Partway through her journey, she found a sled dog named Diamond, whom she rescued from death and befriended. She had to leave Diamond behind at the end of her journey, which bothered her so much that she decided to go back and get him. She sold the footage of her trek to National Geographic, who turned it into a special called Alaska Revisited, and with the money she flew back to Alaska and rescued her dog friend a second time. They moved to Nevada City, California, where unfortunately Diamond was killed by a car. If you don’t vote for her after hearing this story, you have no soul. She stayed in Nevada City (population: 3,000) for twenty years, got elected to City Council, and eventually became Mayor. Now she wants to do a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington style move to the big city. Her [Contract With California](https://www.electreinette.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/RS-for-Gov-_-Contract-With-Californians.pdf) is thoughtful, albeit rural-focused. Her platform has more words about pollinators than homelessness, and the Plan For Homelessness it does have is kind of pollinator-y: > The Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project provides job training, transitional employment and support services to individuals experiencing homelessness. This dynamic employment-training program is focused on stewardship, conservation and regenerative agricultural principles; it teaches skills that truly transform the lives of those who participate and want to achieve a stable place in society. Programs like this can be incredibly effective. In 2019, 100% of the graduates of the Santa Cruz program obtained employment, and 78% obtained housing […] > > By implementing our statewide regenerative farming, pollinator gardens, soiling building, and forest management systems, and thriving community centers, we will provide jobs that never before existed, and a grassroots economic groundswell. Reinette is another person who doesn’t clearly fall into a partisan mold - she’s very environmentalist (and has won environmental awards), but also boasts of launching a video interview series which was banned from YouTube for “providing little-known information regarding COVID”. Realistically I think by almost anyone’s standards she is a conservative. Still, I like her and wish her well. ## Lonnie Sortor Here my commitment to find something interesting and unique about all 26 candidates for Governor of California starts to flag. I’m not sure there are any cute facts about Lonnie Sortor. He is a Republican. He owns a construction company. He lives in Truckee (population 13,000). His campaign motto is “It’s Time To Stand”. He looks like this: One does not necessarily have to be a unique person with specific qualities to get elected Governor of California. Gavin Newsom has been governor for three years now, and he has never had a specific quality in his life. Still, this sort of pathway mostly works for you if you’re rich, well-connected, and willing to go through the list of offices in the correct order: friend of Getty family → SF supervisor → SF mayor → lieutenant governor → governor. If you’re an ordinary humble working person with no political experience, and you want to be elected governor - especially as a Republican in a lapis-lazuli-blue state, competing against twelve other Republicans in a 26-person field, I feel like it behooves you to have a plan deeper than saying “It’s Time To Stand”. Yet Sortor hits exactly the same Republican beats as every other Republican, often in the same order. He does not like mask mandates. He is angry that, despite our state’s many blessings, the economy is so mismanaged that businesses are leaving California. He has what one could generously call a [Plan To End Homelessness](https://www.sortorforgovernor.com/solutions): > California leads the nation in homelessness. It accounts for one-fifth of the homeless population of the United States. Homelessness is a result of poor planning, regulations, and lack of leadership. This is a symptom of failed policies. > > As governor, I will work collaboratively with community leaders, faith-based organizations, and non-profits to implement practical solutions that build on existing efforts. These solutions will bring sustainable programs across the state. I’m making fun of him, but it would not surprise me if Lonnie Sortor would be an excellent governor, at least by his own values. Year after year, ordinary people see Gavin Newsom, a person with no memorable qualities except for having excellent hair, win elections. They think “I, too, have hair. But also, I care deeply about the people of this state. Maybe if I do the same thing Gavin Newsom did - start a website, go on some campaign tours, mouth inane mottoes - I can accomplish what he accomplished. But instead of being a checked-out boring elitist, I could turn California around.” Then they lose horribly, because they don’t have a giant political machine behind them, plus the vote is getting split twenty ways. Still, there’s something good about these people existing. I used to think that nobody could possibly be optimistic about an ordinary person succeeding in our political system. You would have to be living in a cave. People like Lonnie Sortor prove that isn’t true. You just have to be living in Truckee, California. Which, incidentally, is full of caves. ## Mando Perez-Serrato [Mando’s website](https://mandocaliforniagovernor.godaddysites.com/) starts out ominously: …but further scrolling reveals that Mando has a mouth, neck, nice-looking suit, and some policy positions. Also, he’s another one of this year’s bumper crop of proud diverse minority conservatives: > PROUD TO BE AMERICAN, LOVE CALIFORNIA & I STAND FOR THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. > > Instead of following fraudulent Black Lives Matter Organization that is Anti-American. They committed FRAUD and purchased a 6 Million Dollar Mansion with the Non-Profit Donations it received instead of supporting the Black Community. As Governor, I will make an immediate 30 Million Dollar Investment in the Black Community in Education, Small Business & Jobs in Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood & Oakland. > > PROUD OF MY MEXICAN ANCESTRY FROM MICHOACAN/ GUANAJUATO > > Spanish: Orgulloso de mi ascendencia Mexicana y mis padres inmigrantes. Necesitamos a "MANDO" para deveras ayudar a nuestra comunidad Latina. Mis abuelos piscaban fresas y naranjas cuando llegaron a California, ahora por su esfuerzo y la ayuda de Dios soy un Candidato Catolico pidiendo su voto. > > Tierra, Trabajo, Libertad Y Educacion, SI SE PUEDE RAZA! Like every other proud diverse minority conservative, he has a business: Perez Combat Inc, makers of the Pro Action Rod: I started out thinking you struck your enemies with the Action Rod directly, but now I believe it probably attaches to a gun and makes the gun more powerful somehow. Further research is needed. He also has a message for Joe Biden: > "Here's the deal"... LoL :), due to your "Extreme" old age, memory loss, degenerative brain disorder, Cognitive Impairment from Alzheimer's, Dementia, Parkinson's or all the above, your approval rating Crashing like the 1929 stock market, inflation at 10% and rising fast turning into hyperinflation that has triggered a massive recession do to your bad "Monetary Policy" you really need to step down, check in to a retirement home & leave the Presidency to me - MANDO. He also . . . has some kind of interest in Mandalorians? A reasonable interpretation would be he thinks it’s funny that his name is Mando, and has made a brand out of it. You can come up with the less reasonable reading yourself: ## James G. Hanink [James Hanink](https://jameshanink.com/home/) is the only metaphysician running for Governor of California. Maybe for anything anywhere. Hanink got a PhD in Philosophy from Michigan State; his dissertation, “Persons, Rights, and the Problem of Abortion” set the tone for much of the rest of his life. He moved to California, where he taught at Loyola Marymount (a Catholic university) for almost forty years. Now, at age 75, he wants to be Governor. His main issue, as you might expect, is abortion, which he is against. But he’s also running on various help-the-poor policies, on environmentalism, and on COVID (he’s unhappy that churches got closed). Although other candidates have committed to running against socialism, communism, and Marxism, Dr. Hanink is the only candidate as far as I know to be against both socialism and capitalism: (it looks like he’s a [distributist](https://jameshanink.com/2021/07/13/qa-with-california-catholic-daily/), an exotic economic philosophy mostly endorsed by Catholics) His candidacy statement sure does sound like the kind of thing a Catholic philosophy professor would say: > My political philosophy centers on the primacy of the common good. To advance the common good, I look to the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and economic democracy. The common good includes the good of all. In this respect it is unlike the utilitarian aggregate of personal preferences. Human beings have an inviolable dignity. For this reason, I am committed to a consistent ethics of life. He also has [a blog](https://www.newoxfordreview.org/more-frank-dialogue/#), where he inevitably gushes about Alasdair MacIntyre and complains about Steven Pinker. ## Shawn Collins Yet another black Republican. If you went by the gubernatorial ballot, you’d think we were still in the bad old days of Senator Byrd and half of Democrats being KKK members. [Shawn](https://shawncollinsforca.com) grew up poor in inner-city Dallas, joined the Navy, served in Afghanistan, and became an attorney. He coaches baseball and basketball, and has completed eight triathlons for a total of twenty-four athlons in all. His stance on the issues is thoughtful and well-explained but basically standard Republican. His [Plan To End Homelessness](https://shawncollinsforca.com/solution/homelessness/) is: > California must distinguish between the people who have fallen into homelessness due to a lost job or other catastrophic event (the “have nots”), those who are homeless due to addiction or mental illness (the “can nots”), and those who are resistant to any help when it is judiciously provided to them (the “will nots”). Much of our chronically homeless population (roughly 60%) are the “can nots” and the “will nots”, who are suffering from addiction and mental health issues, and for far too long, California has tried to help addicts and the mentally ill with a housing first policy that simply puts them in a motel without addressing their mental health or drug addictions. > > It’s time to fix the mental health laws that cleared out our mental hospitals fifty years ago and put tens of thousands of people on the streets, effectively transforming our jails into mental health centers. I would demand that the legislature put forward serious reform of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS Act) and require any county that receives mental health funds for housing to adopt Laura’s Law, so that treatment is an option before involuntary commitment is required. > > I support the removal of any restrictions that throttle the ability of shelters, non-profits and churches to house individuals and families using strict guidelines, requirements and programs that have a proven track record. …like I said, thoughtful and well-explained but basically standard Republican. ## Heather Collins Gavin Newsom won the governorship primarily by having extremely slick, well-styled hair. But what if you cut out the middleman and just elected hairstylists directly? Enter Heather Collins: 🦋 Is this feminism? 🦋 Heather is a hair salon owner and single mother from Los Angeles who is running as a Green Party candidate. She supports the environment, increased immigration (she herself is an Irish immigrant), and, of course, her Plan To End Homelessness: > For our homeless living on the street, I call for municipalities to approve or develop 8 -10 story parking lots or parking-like structures in downtown or industrialized areas. (With most office workers working from home, there should be parking structures that are underused now) > > The structures would shelter them from the sun and rain and still have airflow. Each person would be given an assigned safe, hygienic, and spacious spot where they can move with their pets, belongings, and the communities they have formed on the street. (Just like us, they have started communities that they are comfortable with, so, unlike Roomkey, they are not isolated from their community). Indeed, and unfortunately, some homeless can still illegally acquire harmful drugs and drink, however they will not be allowed to manufacture and sell drugs in these proposed homeless shelters. They also cannot have bicycle chop-shops like the ones, that have amassed on the streets, that often consist of stolen bicycle parts. > > Also, there would be restrooms, showers, and laundry available for them. They would have an address they could use (this is a HUGE need), access to banking, so they don’t have to carry all the money they have with them, and if needed, help with medications, mental health, get a GED, get an ID, accessing programs that they may be entitled to, job training and regular meals. > > There would be security for the structures’ residents and the surrounding areas. There could be a floor just for women because I found out that when women first experience homelessness, various sources have stated that 99% of homeless women are sexually molested, emotionally harassed, and victimized. > > There are a number of logistical challenges and costly duplication with the programs currently helping our homelessness. Helping them to safely relocate into one location would cut down on that and make the funding possible for homeless services more productive… > > The homeless would not be forced to live in these structures or parking areas, but they would NOT be allowed to live on the streets or park wherever they want. There are still shelters they can access. This is more creative and thoughtful than most homelessness policies. I give her top marks. ## Tony Fanara [Tony](https://tonyfanara4californiagovernor.com/) is a first-generation Italian immigrant and owns an Italian restaurant. He also has a classically Italian solution to the water crisis: Don’t laugh - why don’t we have something like this? [This article](https://www.abc10.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/why-guy-question/why-cant-california-engineer-a-pipeline-for-water-why-guy/103-f168df0d-13a3-4f3e-ab3b-aea324e49044) suggests it would work but be too expensive - $10 - $30 billion. But California had a [$97 billion budget surplus this year](https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/05/spending-california-100-billion-surplus/). If spending some of that on an aqueduct would save me from people preaching that I should take shorter showers, then hail Caesar! His Plan To End Homelessness: Some context for this: rumor has it that other states give their homeless people free tickets to California. The homeless like it, because California has better weather, and the other states like it, because they stop having homelessness problems. Anyway, this solution is extremely unconstitutional, but I like the way he thinks. Otherwise he seems like a pretty standard Democrat, albeit more fashionable: ## Serge Fiankan [Serge](https://www.sergefiankan2022.com/aboutserge) is just your typical half-Belgian / half-Ivory-Coastian immigrant working in the entertainment / eco-tourism / pharmaceutical / real-estate industry. He lives in Pleasanton, California / Luanda, Angola; in his spare time, [he](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10138907/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm) breeds horses / writes screenplays. He wants to End Homelessness by "creat[ing] housing solutions that work using tiny home villages where meals, basic medical needs, professional training, and job solutions are provided [and] incentiviz[ing] corporations to hire in these communities." His other policy positions are practical, thoughtful, and middle-of-the-aisle. He has a remarkably good video: Despite probably knowing 700 languages, his favorite method of communication is [retweeting terrible political cartoons](https://twitter.com/sergefiankan): ## Luis Rodriguez [Luis](https://www.luisjrodriguez.com/help_luis_j_rodriguez_become_california_governo) describes himself as > …a novelist / memoirist / short story writer / children's book writer / essayist as well as a community & urban peace activist, mentor, healer, youth & arts advocate, husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Unlike many people who describe themselves this way, other people agree: he was the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014-2016. He self-identifies as [Xicanx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xicanx), which I think is what happens if you see “Latinx” and think it’s a good start but needs more X’s. He writes plays about the Xicanx experience, and also goes by the Aztec name “Mixcoatl Itztlacuiloh”. Needless to say, he is running for the Green Party and wants “no more capitalist private property relations, exploitation, war, or inequities”. His motto is “"In essential things, unity; in nonessential things, liberty”, and one suspects he thinks very many things are essential. The important question is: are his poems good? A typical example is [To The Police Officer Who Refused To Sit In The Same Room As My Son Because He’s A ‘Gang Banger](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151343/to-the-police-officer-who-refused-to-sit-in-the-same-room-as-my-son-because-he39s-a-gang-banger): > How dare you! > How dare you pull this mantle from your sloven > sleeve and think it worthy enough to cover my boy. > How dare you judge when you also wallow in this mud. > Society has turned its power over to you, > relinquishing its rule, turned it over > to the man in the mask, whose face never changes, > always distorts, who does not live where I live, > but commands the corners, who does not have to await > the nightmares, the street chants, the bullets, > the early-morning calls, but looks over at us > and demeans, calls us animals, not worthy > of his presence, and I have to say: How dare you! > My son deserves a future and a job. He deserves > contemplation. I can't turn away as you. > Yet you govern us? Hear my son's talk. > Hear his plea within his pronouncement, > his cry between the breach of his hard words. > My son speaks in two voices, one of a boy, > the other of a man. One is breaking through, > the other just hangs. Listen, you who can turn away, > who can make such a choice; you who have sons > of your own, but do not hear them! > My son has a face too dark, features too foreign, > a tongue to tangled, yet he reveals, he truths, > he sings your demented rage, but he sings > You have nothing to rage because it is outside of you. > He is inside of me. His horror is mine. I see what > he sees. And if my son dreams, if he plays, if he smirks > in the mist of moon-glow, there I will be, smiling > through the blackened, cluttered and snarling pathway > toward your wilted heart. You may judge this for yourself, but he certainly has had an interesting life, which you can read about [here](https://www.luisjrodriguez.com/history). Luis lives in Los Angeles and has four children - Ramiro, Ruben, Luis, and Andrea - and a Chihuahua/Terrier mix named “Chula”. ## Leo S. Zacky Finally, we reach the end of our journey. Twenty-six gubernatorial candidates; twenty-six more-or-less neatly-packaged collections of hopes and dreams and promises, twenty-six Plans To End Homelessness - and we come at last to Leo S. Zacky. Mr. Zacky is the heir to a legendary poultry dynasty, a series of words I didn’t think I would be using in that order today. He knows what font he likes and he’s sticking to it. He tells the inspiring (?) story of how he grew up toiling in the chicken mines, “work[ing] alongside the workers, doing the dirty jobs, asking them questions on how to improve production and what the company could provide to motivate them. At Zacky Farms, the workers were viewed like family.” Now he’s ready for bigger and better things: > This 2022 election is all about stopping what is happening all around us. We sense an underlying, destructive anti-American presence that is causing California to be a less desirable place to live and do business. Obama’s prediction years ago that America must be “fundamentally transformed” is coming true before our eyes. Our news media has been compromised and we must dig deeper to be truly informed and understand how to fix this broken system. There is so many issues before us, each one rooted in bad ideologies and policies. Each of us have a personal responsibility to do our part to keep freedom alive. As Governor of California, I will fight for freedom, integrity, law and order, and a common-sense approach based on the US Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I am strongly against mandatory vaccinations, lockdowns, and mask mandates. I support science and freedom of individual choice. I am a capitalist who believes in free markets, not socialism. I am fed up with business as usual. You will not be surprised to hear he has more or less the same positions on issues as every other Republican. His Plan To End Homelessness is: > I have solutions to benefit the unfortunate people living on our streets and to restore cleanliness and safety to our communities. My solutions include medical treatment, education, work programs and more. He does have a wacky perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic: > We are now finding out that the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a global plan being orchestrated by the World Economic Forum, headed by Klaus Schwab. Read his book, published in August 2020, “COVID-19: The Great Reset.” And a tacky video: ## Closing Thoughts In case it’s not clear yet, I love all of these people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them are immigrants. Immigrants believe in the American Dream. Maybe they’re the only people who still do. Back in Mexico or India or wherever, they heard that America was a magical place where ordinary people governed themselves and anyone could get ahead. Then they came to America and it met their expectations in some ways, and didn’t quite measure up in others. And they thought “Wait a second, I’m in a democracy now, it’s my job to fix this!” And so they bought their flag pin and their red-white-and-blue striped tie, subscribed to web hosting for $3.99/month, painted “[NAME] for Governor” on their beat-up old truck, and went off to the crusade. A few years ago, I asked: [what happened to the Puritans](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/)? Those old-timey almost superhuman Americans who had five incompatible jobs, invented stuff in their spare time, and fought like hell for every single weird utopian cause they believed in? The answer seems to be: they live on small farms and only come out once every four years, for gubernatorial elections. Most of these people have no cultural or genetic link to the Puritans of old, but the spirit is unmistakable. People complain about increasing polarization, but there is no polarization among vanity California gubernatorial candidates. Decided your two top priorities are fighting climate change and fighting vaccine mandates? You can run for governor. Equally angry about gun control laws and animal abuse? Run for governor! These people see homeless encampments all around them and think “Wait, what if we just built a bunch of new cities for the homeless people to go to?” Or “how much would it cost to get all of them those $10,000 tiny houses you sometimes see advertised on Facebook?” Or “What if we built eight-story parking structures they could live in?” Probably there are good reasons we don’t do any of those things. But even thinking of them demonstrates a spirit of looking at the world, realizing it doesn’t make sense, and groping for solutions. Probably none of these particular ideas will end homelessness. But they sure beat the usual attitude of “eh, if there were some solution, some important person would have thought of it already, I’ll assume it’s either been taken care of or never will be, avert my eyes, and go about my life.” These are people who the system hasn’t beaten down. They think for themselves, they stand up for what they believe in, they take risks. Most of the time their thoughts are insane, and the things they believe in are ridiculous. Still, whatever their negative qualities, they seem, in some important sense, to be free. They seem human. They are not NPCs. In the old days, people devoured success stories - Horatio Alger and all that. Nowadays you don’t hear them as often; something about celebrating success feels problematic. Except during gubernatorial elections. Then everyone’s an immigrant from a poor background who made something of themselves. Or an immigrant from a poor background who hasn’t made anything of themselves yet but plans to, any day now. Or a rich person from a rich background who made full use of their advantages, lived a happy and fulfilling life, had seven beautiful children, and bought a ranch. Everyone has trekked across Alaska solo, or founded businesses in fifteen different industries, or been a veteran/firefighter/pastor. I did not know there were so many Army veteran small business owner ranchers in the entire world. Realistically, none of these people besides Gavin Newsom will become governor. Gavin Newsom will continue to run California for four more years, then run for President and very possibly win. When he leaves for DC, the political machine that created him will find some other excellently-hairstyled person, he or she will succeed Newsom as Governor, and none of these candidates will be consulted in any way. California will continue to have homelessness, fires, water shortages, worst-in-the-nation business climate, near-worst-in-the-nation schools, muddled and inconsistent COVID-19 policies, and all the other things these people are complaining about. Still, I think of these candidates [the same way Ross Douthat thinks about cults](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-cult-deficit.html). They themselves may be crazy and of questionable value. But they’re the extreme version of a healthy tendency. They’re a live canary singing happily in the coal mine, demonstrating that something good still exists in American culture. Some people are still hopeful, entrepreneurial, free-thinking, and invested in democracy. These people are our Strategic Optimism Reserve, and I am glad to have them.	Scott Alexander	56015946	California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z	acx
# Willpower, Human and Machine Two paragraphs from the [mesa-optimizers post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers?s=w), which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post: > Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light” or “if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it”. As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn’t mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese. And: > Mesa-optimizers would have an objective which is closely correlated with their base optimizer, but it might not be perfectly correlated. The classic example, again, is evolution. Evolution “wants” us to reproduce and pass on our genes. But my sex drive is just that: a sex drive. In the ancestral environment, where there was no porn or contraceptives, sex was a reliable proxy for reproduction; there was no reason for evolution to make me mesa-optimize for anything other than “have sex”. Now in the modern world, evolution’s proxy seems myopic - sex is a poor proxy for reproduction. I know this and I am pretty smart and that doesn’t matter. That is, just because I’m smart enough to know that evolution gave me a sex drive so I would reproduce - and not so I would have protected sex with somebody on the Pill - doesn’t mean I immediately change to wanting to reproduce instead. Evolution got one chance to set my value function when it created me, and if it screwed up that one chance, it’s screwed. I’m out of its control, doing my own thing. > > [But] I feel compelled to admit that I do want to have kids. How awkward is that for this argument? I think not very - I don’t want to, eg, donate to hundreds of sperm banks to ensure that my genes are as heavily-represented in the next generation as possible. I just want kids because I like kids and feel some vague moral obligations around them. These might be different proxy objective evolution gave me, maybe a little more robust, but not fundamentally different from the sex one. These posts both focus on the difference between two ways that a higher-level optimizer (evolution, gradient descent) can train an intelligence: instincts vs. planning. Probably the distinction is messier in real life, and there are lots of different sub-levels. But both posts share this idea of drives getting implemented at different levels of consequentialism. How does this relate to willpower? It sure feels like one could tell a story where “I” “am” “the planning module” of my mind. I come up with kind-of-consequentialist, long-term plans for achieving goals represented at a high level of abstraction. Then I fight against various instincts represented at lower levels of abstraction. The winner depends on a combination of hard-coded rules, and on which of us (the planning module vs. the lower-level instincts) have been better at getting reinforced in the past. I don’t know how true this story is. “I am the planning module” seems not exactly the same as “[I am the global workspace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory)” or “[I am a sampling from a probability distribution coherent enough to create working memory out of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and?s=w)” (though it doesn’t really contradict those, either). Maybe the “I” of willpower/agency isn’t exactly the same as the “I” of conscious access? After all, the I of conscious access can clearly feel the desire to enact instinctual drives (eg binge on Doritos), even if the I of agency is trying to exert willpower to avoid doing it. But this generally fits [my current best guess at how willpower works](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower?s=w). One corollary of this model is that future AIs may suffer weakness of will, the same as humans. Suppose an AI is trained on some task through gradient descent. It first learns the equivalent of “intuitive”/”instinctual” hacks and “reflexes” for doing the task. Later (if the [mesa-optimizer](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers?s=w) literature is right), some of these combine/evolve into a genuine “consequentialist” “agent” or planning module, which is “superimposed upon” the original instincts. But the planning module will start out less effective than the original instincts at most things, and the overall mind design will have to come up with a policy for when to use the instincts vs. the planning module. At the beginning, this will be heavily weighted in favor of the instincts. Later, as the planning module gets better, with enough training it should learn to favor the planning module more. But lots of things happen with “enough” training, and real AIs could potentially still have situations where their agentic parts defer to their instinctual parts. Many stories of AI risk focus on how single-minded AIs are: how they can focus literally every action on the exact right course to achieve some predetermined goal. Such single-minded AIs are theoretically possible, and we’ll probably get them eventually. But before that, we might get AIs that have weakness of will, just like we do.	Scott Alexander	54933434	Willpower, Human and Machine	acx
# Open Thread 225 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?). In this week’s news: 1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral. These were selected more or less by popular vote. I’m still reading some entries and might give them Honorable Mention status (or maybe promote them to finalist?) if I find more I like. I’ll probably do this at least for Exhaustion: A History and maybe others. But for now, if you’re not an official finalist, you should feel free to post your review on your own blog or do whatever else you want with it. If I end up liking yours later, I won’t disqualify it just because you did something else. Also, there were many incredibly amazing reviews this year, please don’t feel bad if you didn’t win. I’ll say more about this later. 2: Thanks to everyone who donated to or otherwise supported Carrick Flynn. Unfortunately he didn’t win. Some discussion [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/us4gm2/carrick_flynn_has_lost_the_or06_primary/). I’m not sorry for urging people to support him; I think it was a good bet in expectation. I might be sorry for saying I thought he was more likely to win than the prediction markets said; I was going off rumors of positive polls, and I still need to figure out what happened there.	Scott Alexander	56161617	Open Thread 225	acx
# Your Book Review: Making Nature [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science. For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see [this paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201516), which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family. Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won [a fancy prize for services to humanity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_of_Asturias_Awards#Prince_or_Princess_of_Asturias_Award_for_Communication_and_Humanities) in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige. But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped[Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo20298849.html), a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity. I grew curious about this when I realized that most researchers treat journal prestige as a given. Everyone knows that Nature and Science matter enormously, yet few would be able to say why exactly. But this is important! Prestigious institutions, from universities to media companies to major sports competitions, have a huge impact on the world. It’s useful to understand how they came to be, beyond “being famous for being famous.” One reason this is more difficult than it sounds is that we often settle for superficial answers. Selectivity, for instance, is a common explanation: prestige simply comes from obtaining what is hard to obtain, such as a Harvard degree, an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize. Nature is indeed highly selective, accepting less than 10% of submitted articles (and the vast majority of papers are not even deemed worthy of a submission to Nature by their authors). Yet harsh selectivity alone cannot explain prestige, or it would be trivial to launch a prestigious journal or university just by setting an artificially low acceptance rate. Another facile explanation is longevity. It’s true that prestigious institutions are often old, and indeed Nature has been around for more than 150 years since its birth in 1869. Science is only slightly younger, having been founded in 1880. But there are many older scientific journals: the oldest one, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was created two hundred years before Nature, in 1665. Then there are more recent publications that are prestigious: Cell, for instance, was founded in 1974. The correlation between prestige and longevity is real, but imperfect. It also says nothing of causation: does longevity cause prestige, or does prestige cause longevity? What matters is not the span of time per se, but the specific events that happened — in other words, the history. Making Nature, while not specifically about prestige, gives us exactly that. We’ll first examine the origins of Nature and how it disrupted the publishing landscape of its time (Part I). Then we’ll study the factors that allowed it to build a reputation during its first century of existence (Part II). We’ll end with a focus on the 1970s, when selectivity and prestige suddenly became important to Nature and scientific publishing in general (Part III). ## I. On the Origins of *Nature* The story begins with Nature’s founder and first editor, Norman Lockyer. Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: > FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; > > And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote [more than 15,000 letters](https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/search?sort=date&keyword=darwin&f1-document-type=letter) in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the[Athenaeum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athenaeum_(British_magazine)) magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin [took many years](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171#:~:text=Considering%20that%20Darwin%20became%20an,into%20action%20only%20by%20circumstances.) to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 ## II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. ### Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): > What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) > > Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) > > Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) > > A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) > > Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) > > Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made *Nature* and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) > > [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis [revealed](https://www.nature.com/articles/530148a) that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself [reports](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal-impact), for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. ### Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like [ResearchHub](https://www.researchhub.com/). In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: * Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s. * Debates in the 1920son whether the word scientist was acceptable to describe the people doing science as opposed to man of science or scientific worker. * The development of plate tectonics theory in the 1950s and 60s (in this case, Nature and Science were on approximately equal footing). * High-profile controversies about homeopathy and cold nuclear fusion in the 1980s. How did Nature become the main scientific forum in the UK and, later, the world? As we saw, the weekly publication schedule was one of the key factors, since discussion requires people to be able to reply to each other in a timely fashion. But speed alone wasn’t sufficient. There were many scientific weekly periodicals in Victorian Britain, and Nature wasn’t even the most popular: in the 1870s, “other weeklies—such as Chemical News, Knowledge, and English Mechanic—all boasted more subscribers than Nature’s estimated 5,000.” Why didn’t one of these magazines become the best venue to discuss science? One answer seems to be that Norman Lockyer personally relished controversy and encouraged “spirited disagreement” within his journal, making it ideal for whoever was itching to pick a fight over scientific ideas. If Lockyer had chosen to dampen the tone of some Letters to the Editor he received, or even reject them for publication, then the debates would have moved elsewhere. Easy enough to make a parallel with the social media that thrive today on what we’ll also politely call “spirited disagreement.” Another answer is that Nature managed to occupy the sweet spot on the tradeoff curve between generalist and specialist publications. Since it covered all fields of science, Nature was a better fit than a magazine like Chemical News to discuss interdisciplinary questions as well as questions on how science should be done. At the same time, it was a specialized journal in terms of its audience and contributors: they were almost all professional scientists. Add the fact that it was read by most scientists in Britain, as well as a significant proportion of non-British scientists, and you get a publication that was widely considered the best means “to get to the right people” as the editor of Chemical News himself admitted in 1895. Establishing this network of “the right people” was an explicit goal of Lockyer from the beginning. One of the first things he did after founding the journal was to ask “men of science—some whom he knew personally, others whom he knew by reputation” (i.e. he cold emailed them) to publish their names as supporters and future contributors. The most important of those names was the aforementioned Thomas Huxley, who was not only a prominent biologist but also a popular essayist in the literary periodicals as well as the leader of an influential group of scientists called the X Club. Huxley was a strong supporter of Lockyer’s project, and he frequently wrote for Nature in the early years, which helped it cement its reputation. Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing [a network of other famous Huxleys](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families?s=w), such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 [report](https://www.nature.com/articles/129312a0) on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 [letter](https://www.nature.com/articles/143239a0#:~:text=Disintegration%20of%20Uranium%20by%20Neutrons%3A%20a%20New%20Type%20of%20Nuclear%20Reaction,-Lise%20Meitner%20%26&text=ON%20bombarding%20uranium%20with%20neutrons,larger%20than%2092%20were%20ascribed.) proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 [work](https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0) on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. [La Nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Nature)) and German (e.g. [Naturwissenschaften](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Nature)) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. ### Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called [The Reader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reader_(weekly)), which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company [still exists](https://macmillan.com/) and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. ([Springer Nature](https://www.springernature.com/gp), a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The [original mission statement](https://media.nature.com/full/nature-cms/uploads/ckeditor/attachments/7568/mission.pdf) was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The [current version](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal-information#:~:text=Nature's%20mission%20statement,news%20and%20issues%20concerning%20science.) is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: > First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. > > Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. ## III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from [a multitude of charts](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/), various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. ### Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the [Wikipedia page of the journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)). Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: * 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international * 1973 (Davies): 33% British and 67% international * 1980 (Maddox again): 20% British and 80% international. “International,” of course, mostly means the United States. The 1960s and 70s are the golden period when the US overtook all other countries in most domains, including science. Nature could not ignore this, and opened a satellite office in Washington D.C. in 1970. Interestingly, however, the journal’s Britishness seems to have helped it be seen as more international than its rival Science, which researchers in France, Germany, Japan, and other countries may have considered too American. A few decades earlier, Nature’s international growth had slowed down its speed of publication. But this time, Maddox and Davies were committed to a fast tempo. Something else had to be sacrificed. The result was a sharp decline in acceptance rate: “In 1974, Nature printed approximately 35% of submitted papers; by the end of the 1980s, the acceptance rate would be down to 1 in 8 papers, or 12.5%” As Baldwin notes, this meant that publication in Nature “became increasingly prized as a sign of scientific success” — the only mention of prestige in the entire chapter. The 1970s were also the time when certain practices we now take for granted became widespread. Peer review, now considered an essential part of scientific publishing, hadn’t been systematic at Nature until then. Previously, the editors reserved the right to accept or reject any submission, and asked for feedback from other researchers only when they felt they didn’t have the necessary knowledge. Another new development was journal performance metrics — by which I mean, mostly, the impact factor. The impact factor is a proxy for a journal’s importance. It is calculated from the number of times the journal’s articles from the last two years were cited across all scientific publications, the idea being that more commonly cited works are more impactful. The first comprehensive list of impact factors was published in 1975: that year, Nature was ranked 109th out of all journals in the list. But within five years, in the 1980 rankings, Nature had risen to the 49th position. Today it usually ranks first on [most measures of impact](https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?order=h&ord=desc). The impact factor and related metrics are widely seen as problematic for many reasons, but they certainly do show that Nature’s reputation rose in the 1970s. It also seems obvious that their very invention contributed to the shift towards the prestige economy we see today: before sending work to a journal, a researcher can now look up the rankings and pick the most “impactful” journal that is likely to accept the submission. But Making Nature doesn’t discuss this. Nor does it describe what happened in the rest of academic publishing at the time, such as the rise of another prestigious journal: Cell. ### A Tale of Two Disruptions Remember when, in the introduction, I suggested that the journal Cell might be less deserving of its inclusion in the CNS acronym than Nature and Science? Well, I may have to take it back. Making Nature does not mention Cell, except a few times to identify it as a rival to the other two. But as I was pondering the shift to the prestige economy in science, I remembered reading [an in-depth 2017 article from](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) that did talk about Cell in the wider context of scientific publishing. Here’s the relevant part (emphasis mine): > “At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with *Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. . . . [Cell] was edited by a young biologist named Ben Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published. > > What he created was a venue for scientific blockbusters, and scientists began shaping their work on his terms. “Lewin was clever. He realised scientists are very vain, and wanted to be part of this selective members club; Cell* was ‘it’, and you had to get your paper in there,” Schekman said. Notice the timing: Cell was founded in 1974, almost at the same time as metrics like impact factors became widespread, and right before Nature’s acceptance rate started to plummet. This suggests that the primacy of prestige in science publishing was not a vague trend over the course of the 20th century. It was tied to a specific event of the mid-1970s: the invention of a new style of journal. “Suddenly,” the Guardian piece continues, “where you published became immensely important. . . . Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world.” Cell and other journals by its parent company, Cell Press, tend to have amazingly aesthetic covers. That seems consistent with positioning as a luxury brand. [added in case you were curious - SA] Other publications, old and new, tried to replicate Cell’s success. The Guardian article focuses on British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who took advantage of the shift to expand Pergamon Press, a media empire built out of scientific journals. But by triangulating between that article and Melinda Baldwin’s book, we can conclude that no publications were better positioned than a couple of well-known, fast-paced, generalist, English-language journals: Nature and Science. “Suddenly,” “almost overnight,” there was a prestige game — and they won it. And whether the timing is a coincidence or not, the invention of impact factors around then probably accelerated the trend. Games need clear winners and losers, and journal impact rankings provide exactly that. Why doesn’t Making Nature talk about this? One possibility is that the Guardian article is mistaken or exaggerated. Surprisingly, this was difficult to fact-check: I googled around and didn’t really find any other references to Cell having had such a transformative effect on scientific publishing. It could mean that the real effect wasn’t that dramatic — or it could mean that Cell’s impact has been overlooked. I’m tempted to believe the latter, since I otherwise don’t know of a good explanation for Cell’s considerable prestige. If the Guardian piece is correct, then it sounds like there’s a blind spot in most people’s understanding of the history of scientific prestige, even Melinda Baldwin’s. That may be because it’s easier to assume journal prestige was an inevitable trend. A narrative like this one seems superficially plausible: as science became truly global and performed by an ever growing number of researchers, journals had to become more selective, and increasingly provided a useful (and scalable) signal to distinguish the best scientists from the rest. This hypothesis is probably true to some extent, but the problem is that there’s no strong reason that journals — and even more so, specific journals — have to provide this signal. Scientific prestige managed to exist just fine for centuries without being tied to the periodical your work was published in. So it would be a mistake to suppose that Nature’s success was the necessary consequence of a general theory of prestige. The specific details matter. And in this story, the details include the invention of not one but two disruptive styles of journal: one in 1869, with a focus on speed, and one in 1974, with a focus on selectivity. Making Nature’s biggest weakness, then, would be in not recognizing the existence of this second disruption. It isn’t a unique failing: Nature itself, in the [history of the journal](https://www.nature.com/nature/history-of-nature) published on its website, says nothing about prestige or reputation in the 1970s. Perhaps it would have been gauche to do so. Yet it seems clear that the story of Nature (and, I assume, Science) is incomplete without an understanding of whatever the f\\\* happened in the 1970s. ## Conclusion Let’s summarize Nature’s rise to fame. It began 153 years ago as an experiment in science popularization. The experiment failed at its primary aim, but it lucked into a useful niche: fast communication between men of science across disciplines. This allowed it to build a network of elite scientists and a venue for scientific debate. All of this was possible thanks to the editorial commitment of Norman Lockyer and the financial commitment of Macmillan and Company. Fast forward a hundred years, and suddenly (perhaps because of Cell) scientists start caring very much about where their papers are published. Nature, alongside its twin Science, is propelled to the top of the new prestige hierarchy. The story told in Making Nature doesn’t stop there. There is a chapter on the 1980s that shows how deft the journal was at managing controversies over homeopathy and cold fusion, two events that reinforced its status as a guardian of “proper” science. Then, in the conclusion, Melinda Baldwin gets into the recent history of Nature, which involves a third important disruption of scientific publishing: the advent of the web. There’s no question that the web has profoundly changed the way scientists interact with scientific results. But interestingly, the instantaneousness of online publication — whether on blogs, in the comments below an article, in social media, or on a preprint server like [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/) and [bioRxiv](https://www.biorxiv.org/) — hasn’t affected Nature very much. We might have naïvely expected that it would have tried to keep up with the new platforms, since speed was its comparative advantage. But it didn’t. And that hasn’t made it obsolete, either. This is the strength of prestige. Once it’s established, it becomes a self-sustaining loop. Any useful attributes that helped jump-start the loop, like speed of publication, end up mattering much less. And then, when the prestige loop is running at full throttle, you get something like the current state of academic publishing: a system that many researchers feel is broken in multiple ways, but which feels impossible to change because of the powerful incentives in place. Yet there is a glimmer of hope. Studying Nature’s history made me realize that the institutions of science are not static or eternal. The prestige associated with Nature and Science matters a lot now, but that has been true for only fifty years — not such a long time in the grand scheme of things. So there’s no reason that we can’t reform the angelic hierarchy of scientific publishing, if we want to. We just have to know what we’re up against. With satisfying depth and crisp writing, Making Nature provides the account we needed of one of the top institutions of science. This is crucial stuff for anyone who wants to understand how they work, or who would set to the task of creating new ones.	Scott Alexander	55847444	Your Book Review: Making Nature	acx
# Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety 1: What is silexan? There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the patience to sift through or care about. But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had [an interview with](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6761759/Leading-expert-claims-doctors-dish-LAVENDER-OIL-line-treatment-anxiety.html?ITO=applenews) psychiatry professor Hans-Peter Volz, who said that silexan should be first-line for anxiety, replacing things like SSRIs and Xanax. And a very reputable professional publication within psychiatry, The Carlat Report, published [an article](https://www.thecarlatreport.com/the-carlat-psychiatry-report/silexan-a-novel-anxiolytic/) and [a podcast](https://www.thecarlatreport.com/blog/what-works-for-treatment-resistant-anxiety/) touting silexan: > Not many treatments in psychiatry have a large effect size. There’s stimulants for ADHD, ketamine for depression . . . and now Silexan for generalized anxiety disorder. And: > Most [alternative medicine] therapies do not have robust effects, but Silexan is an exception. Consider it in adults with generalized anxiety disorder. What’s going on? Silexan is a branded extract of lavender oil created by Wilmar Schwabe GmbH, a German pharma company. Nobody is sure about the mechanism of action, but it probably involves serotonin 1A receptors, the same receptors blocked by mediocre anti-anxiety medication buspirone and some of the newer antidepressants. Studies claim it to be highly effective against anxiety conditions. Carlat Report offers us the following data (table layout is mine): Before silexan, the anxiety landscape was: * SSRIs, which work fine, but only about half of people respond to them and some people have intolerable side effects. * Benzodiazepines, which work great, but are really addictive. * Quetiapine, which makes people so sleepy that they forget to be anxious, plus has various bad long-term side effects. …plus some other things with even worse cost/benefit ratio that people rarely used. Now people are saying that silexan works even better than benzodiazepines, doesn’t cause addiction, and has no major side effects! If true, this would change the world. SSRIs changed the world, and they’re nowhere near as impressive as silexan claims to be. 2: Is there evidence that it works? Silexan has four meta-analyses, all of which show strong effects. But here’s a Venn diagram of the studies included in each analysis: These four meta-analyses only have six studies among all of them, and five of them are by the same guy! Also, Kasper is a co-author of two of the four meta-analyses. Additionally, all six studies - the five Kaspers and Woelk - have conflicts of interest, in the sense of either directly being funded by Wilmar Schwabe (the pharma company producing silexan) or the researchers having gotten money from Schwabe. So do at least two of the four meta-analyses. You might think I’m trying to write a hit job on silexan, but not really. The fact is, this is par for the course in the supplement world, and only a little unusual for any mental health treatment. Studies are expensive, and the natural funder (until big government agencies get involved) is the company marketing the drug. Usually there will only be one academic institution or team that’s really committed, and if it has a prestigious leader, his name will be on all of the papers. [Professor Kasper](https://cluster.meduniwien.ac.at/mnc/general-information/members/people/persons-details/?pers_id=346) seems like as legitimate and respectable a researcher as you can get for these kinds of things: head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, chair of the World Psychiatric Association’s pharmacology branch, editor of three good journals, various important and influential papers. Sure, he’s gotten “grants/research support, consulting fees and/or honoraria” from Schwabe. But he’s also gotten money from “Angelini, AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals AG, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Janssen, KRKA-Pharma, Lundbeck, Neuraxpharm, Pfizer, Pierre Fabre . . . and Servier”, and you don’t see him writing nearly as many glowing papers about their drugs. High-level academic psychiatrists academics are usually working with a bunch of drug companies and getting paid for that work, and this isn’t usually considered disqualifying to their credibility. So fine, let’s look at the studies. A typical example is Kaspar (2014), [Lavender oil preparation Silexan is effective in generalized anxiety disorder](https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/17/6/859/691858?fbclid=IwAR08DB04KH6lPPIv5xDagKBU4ZhZ22wwlgtAvGKBxoaxP1xKicZH4LvHDek). It has 539 people, which is really quite impressive - usually these kinds of supplement trials would have more like 10% of that. The study is double-blind (patients don’t know if they’re getting silexan or placebo, and doctors don’t know which one they’re giving) and they made sure the placebo capsules smelled like lavender (a nice touch!) The groups were randomized carefully, but there were some statistically significant random differences between them; none of them seemed too worrying to me but your opinion might differ. There was a clear, obvious, and dose-dependent effect of silexan vs. placebo (p < 0.001) on seven of eight outcomes measured; the eighth was “physical health” and it’s fine if an anxiety drug doesn’t help with this (although you could always hope it would relieve some ailments by making people less stressed). It did significantly better than paroxetine, which only reached statistically significant effect size on about half of the outcomes (par for the course in these kinds of studies, SSRIs are kind of weak). Effect size was 0.37 for the 80 mg dose, and 0.5 for the 160 mg dose. (Where did Carlat Report’s 0.86 effect size come from? Supposedly from the [Generoso meta-analysis](https://sci-hub.st/10.1097/JCP.0000000000000615)’s sub-analysis of only GAD patients, but I can’t for the life of me retrace how they got that number.) This is a pretty good study. Large sample size, professionally done, strong consistent results. [Yap (2019)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-54529-9), one of the two independent meta-analyses, basically agrees, finding no red flags except “other bias”, ie it was funded by the drug company: So aside from the really obvious problem, there are no gaping problems here. (and other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) 3: What about circumstantial evidence? Along with the big official studies, there are a few other reasons we might expect silexan to work. First, it works well in [animal studies](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10354-012-0164-2). Sure, everything works well in animal studies, and sure, these animal studies were also sponsored by Wilmar Schwabe, but whatever, I already said it was only circumstantial evidence. Second, the anecdotal evidence seems really good. In the Carlat article, editor Dr. Chris Aiken writes: > I started recommending Silexan in 2016 and have treated 505 patients with it, most with GAD or a mood disorder with anxious distress. My experience has been in line with the research, with the best results in pure [generalized anxiety disorder]. Most patients were taking long-term benzos, and many spontaneously reduced their benzo dose on their own after starting it. Patients often forget to reorder Silexan, and when they come off it, it usually takes a few months for the anxiety to return. The change is so gradual that many don’t notice it. This is where careful tracking with rating scales (which can be as simple as having patients rate their anxiety from 1–10) and trials on and off Silexan come in handy. I’ve tried it on about six patients, without keeping careful records. Two of them found it very effective, another found it somewhat effective, and three others didn’t find it helped much. I also tried it myself - I didn’t notice much effect, but I’m not that anxious at baseline, so whatever. This seems about average for supplements, maybe a little better. The nootropics community seems pretty excited about it. See eg [Lavender/Silexan Has Been Astounding](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3ps40c/calmaid_lavendersilexan_has_been_astounding/) and [Highly Recommend Silexan Lavender For Anxiety](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/7mi1ex/highly_recommend_silexan_lavender_for_anxiety/) on r/nootropics. But the nootropics community is always getting pretty excited about things. As far as I know nobody’s included it in any formal community surveys, including me. Finally, there are lots of studies on lavender aromatherapy. Aromatherapy sounds a bit silly, but the key idea is that the active ingredient in silexan is volatile and either acts at olfactory neurons (what? is this a real thing?) or can be absorbed intranasally (definitely a real thing, although I don’t know what to think about this supposed delivery mechanism). [A meta-analysis of 37 RCTs of lavender](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31655395/), mostly aromatherapy-based, found strong effects but admitted most trials were low-quality. There seems to be a bit of a fight going on between people who think lavender has some sort of olfactory-specific mechanism and people who think it’s just a normal drug which can sometimes be intranasally absorbed. For example, [here’s a](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/lavender-scent-anxiety.html) [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/lavender-scent-anxiety.html) [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/lavender-scent-anxiety.html) highlighting Japanese research showing that lavender makes mice less anxious, unless you genetically engineer them to have no sense of smell, in which case it doesn’t work. Some of these people even think the reason silexan works is because you swallow the capsule, the lavender smell seeps out as you digest it, and then you inhale it from your own throat. On the other hand, [here’s a contrary study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024320513001926) showing that mice genetically engineered to lack smell still respond to lavender normally. My bias is towards skepticism of the smell-based stuff; I’m guessing it’s just ordinary absorption. 4: If you were going to take it, what would you do? When my patients are interested in trying silexan, I refer them to [this brand](https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Way-non-drowsy-clinically-gluten-free/dp/B007TYY2JA/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?crid=30UT1E6WXDWX4&keywords=silexan&qid=1651648408&sprefix=silexan%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-2-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEzM0tNSU1OR0I5SUlYJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMjU2NzY2TEtUUU1VQlk5VEZTJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTEwNDQxNjczSjBGUFhGNk9MV1QyJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==), which is the same as the one in the Kasper studies. The studies suggest that 160 mg (two pills) once a day work better than 80 mg (one pill) once a day. Reports conflict on whether it works immediately, or “builds up” over a few weeks. Many of the anecdotal reports say they feel better within the first hour, and the aromatherapy studies are also done on the assumption that the substance works immediately. But Aiken says only that patients start to feel improved after a week, and some of the studies don’t show separation from placebo until after a month. I have no priors on this one: benzodiazepines work immediately, SSRIs take a month, and silexan has been compared to both. I’d recommend trying it for a few weeks just to be sure you’re not missing anything. The most common side effects are upset stomach, nausea, and burps that taste like lavender. I was able to avoid the last one by putting the silexan softgel in a capsule, but I don’t know if this is okay: it might ruin the absorption - and remember that according to the aromatherapy people, the weird lavender-smelling burps are part of the mechanism of action! Silexan might cause miscarriage during pregnancy, and pregnant people should avoid it until this has been investigated better. Studies have established pretty conclusively that there is no addiction risk - [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7968617/) actually went so far as to give it to known drug addicts to see if they felt like abusing it; they did not. If it works for you, there’s no known reason not to take it forever, although this kind of statement has a habit of crashing and burning later. 5: Conclusions? Everything looks amazing about silexan, except the part where all the good studies are by one guy taking money from the drug company. I go back and forth on how much to worry about this, in the context of other anecdotal evidence for efficacy. I think a really obvious conclusion is that someone else needs to study silexan, independently. This is within the abilities of an ambitious medical student or resident. Do a poster presentation on it or something. Otherwise, should you take silexan if you’re anxious? I default to yes. It’s $12 for a two-week trial, which should make it pretty clear whether it works for you or not (might it be placebo? I’m not sure how to even think about the difference between a placebo anxiety cure and a real anxiety cure). Risk is low, and if it saves you from a course of SSRIs or benzos it’s probably worth it. In case that sounds like a total cop-out, here’s an even bigger one: 50% chance personal prediction that, when independent studies are done, silexan will have an effect size equal to or greater than SSRIs for anxiety (ie 0.3)	Scott Alexander	53352199	Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety	acx
# Link: Troof On Nootropics Should have signal-boosted this earlier, forgot, sorry. The author of the blog [Troof](https://troof.blog/) sort of [replicated](https://troof.blog/posts/nootropics/) my [2020 nootropics survey](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results?s=w). But instead of another survey, they made a [recommendation engine](https://www.nootroflix.com/). You rated all the nootropics you’d taken, and it compared you to other people and predicted what else you would like. The end result was the same: lots of people providing data on which nootropics they liked. Troof got 1981 subjects - more than twice as many as I did - and here were their results: This is hard to compare to my survey - it has some different chemicals, and includes a few things that aren’t chemicals at all like meditation and exercise. But the things that both surveys share are in a pretty similar order. I think we have mostly gotten what we can get out of this methodology, without many big surprises. Why do I say this in such a resigned-sounding tone, as opposed to a more triumphant “the results have replicated, so we’re now sure they’re true”? The surveys show that: * Addictive or illegal things do better than safer ones * Difficult but popular lifestyle interventions do better than chemicals * Fancy high-tech chemicals do better than well-known normal ones We should sort of expect all of these things to be true. People wouldn’t keep doing difficult lifestyle interventions unless they worked; the truly useless ones have probably fallen into obscurity. People wouldn’t risk addictive or illegal things unless they had impressive effects. But it also seems kind of suspicious for placebo effects. People go through a lot of trouble to do something and then figure it must work. If something’s too cheap or easy or boring, they forget about it. I’m especially concerned by psilocybin microdosing, which ranked 8th of almost 150 interventions. Several double-blind studies have now shown this doesn’t work ([eg](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02698811211050556)). Worse, in unblinded studies, [it seems to](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6364961/) “work” best for the people who most strongly believe it will work, and seems to have whatever effect these people believe it will have. This is most likely a very exciting-sounding intervention that doesn’t work at all, and it was one of the very highest-rated on this survey. Meanwhile, SAMe, which has been shown to work well in RCT after RCT, is one of the lowest-rated. To put this another way: if you made a model combining some measure of “how hard is this chemical to obtain / how hard is this lifestyle intervention to practice?” and “how novel and high-tech does it feel?”, plus one or two other things like “is this a stimulant?”, it feels like this would predic the results almost perfectly. Does anything stand out as doing substantially worse than the simple model would predict? It really doesn’t. Maybe theanine, a little? I’m grasping at straws. Finally, in my survey, I got impressive results for Zembrin, a certain extract of the kanna plant. This survey fails to replicate that - Zembrin lands exactly where the “how hard is it to get? how fancy is it?” model would predict, which is not very high. I’m not sure why my survey got such strong results. I know I was personally excited about Zembrin, so there’s room for experimenter bias, but I can’t think of how I would have added in the experimenter bias when I was just collecting your ratings. Maybe I bungled the statistics somehow? In any case, it’s a completely average anxiolytic in every way. Thanks to Troof for doing this! They draw some different conclusions from me, which you can read at the end of [their post](https://troof.blog/posts/nootropics/).	Scott Alexander	54984521	Link: Troof On Nootropics	acx
# Contra Dynomight On Sexy In-Laws I. From the Dynomight blog: [You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry](https://dynomight.net/hotness/). They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner. Evolutionary psychology has pat explanations for both sides here. People want attractive partners because attraction correlates with health, fertility, and status (eg the debutante’s wide hips and large breasts mean she’ll be able to give birth and nurse effectively; the stranger’s height means he must be strong and healthy). But people also want wealthy partners from good families, because they’ll be able to give more resources to the children. Dynomight’s question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants. Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn’t differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources? (yes, most people care a little about both - there are gold-digging suitors and parents who are proud of their son/daughter-in-laws’ good looks - but the trend for parents to care relatively more about wealth and good breeding seems clear, and Dynomight [cites](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.09.039) [research](https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491000800405) [showing](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470490800600207) this is true) Dynomight mentions a kind of boring theory: parents are older and wiser than suitors, and so less hormonally obsessed with attractiveness. I don’t think this really works: we’re asking this question on the evolutionary level, so this just passes the buck: why did evolution give older people a less attractiveness-seeking hormone profile? But they also mention a much more clever theory, dating back to [Robert Trivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers): > Your parents share an equal number of genes with all their grandchildren. But you share twice as many genes with your kids as with your nieces and nephews. If you marry a doctor, maybe they’ll help your niece with tuition or convince her to major in pre-med instead of comparative Sanskrit opera studies. But if you marry someone with amazing genes, your niece will get none of them. So maybe your parents care more about the social status of who you marry because that has benefits for all their grandchildren. You care more about attractiveness because you give twice as much weight to your own kids. They do some math and it doesn’t quite work out, but they have some good arguments for why maybe this is true on the margin and then the math does work. I find neither of these theories convincing. One objection to the latter (h/t AM): what if you’re an only child? Then your parents don’t have to consider the impact of your mate on your siblings and their children, and your interests should be aligned. But only children seem to have the same disagreements with their parents about mate choice as everyone else. Maybe evolutionary imperatives aren’t fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way if they have only one child, and another way if they have many children? That seems like a hard sell if you’re first claiming they are fine-grained enough to tell parents to act one way, and children another. You would have to land within a pretty narrow range of how fine-grained evolutionary imperatives can be. If you’re going to question how fine-grained evolutionary imperatives can get, why not go a little further and get rid of the entire problem? II. There’s an old rationalist saying: [individuals are best thought of as adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers). The idea is the same one that I was trying to get across in [the mesa-optimizers post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers?s=w), when I wrote: > Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light” or “if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it”. As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn’t mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese. Urges like “mate with anything that has a red dot on it” are adaptations. Animals can execute them as simple programs. The opposite of that would be just giving the animal an urge towards maximizing its inclusive genetic fitness, and a big enough brain to figure out what that means. Imagine eg a human with a driving goal to have as many children as possible, who’s capable of thinking of things like donating lots of sperm to sperm banks. This is honestly the winning move in the evolutionary game, but humans haven’t been smart enough for long enough for evolution to instill something like this in us. Instead we get somewhere between half-hearted approximations of this kind of thing, and blind adaptation-execution programs. A simple example of this is [Ondine’s Curse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_hypoventilation_syndrome), a rare disease (usually caused by a tumor) where the breathing-related parts of someone’s brain stop working. A patient may notice that they no longer have any desire to breathe. They may think “Well, that’s weird, but seems like I probably still need oxygen to live, I’m going to breathe anyway.” Lacking any natural sense of when to inhale/exhale/stop, they hopefully calculate out what the right amount of breathing to do is for each breath manually. Unfortunately, these people usually die when they fall asleep and can no longer reason themselves into breathing. But their sacrifice serves as a useful example of adaptation-executors vs. fitness-maximizers. A healthy person, breathing because their body instinctively demands oxygen, is executing an adaptation. A Curse patient, breathing because they have a goal of continuing to be alive, and they understand rationally that obtaining oxygen is a subgoal, is maximizing fitness. You can have as many layers as you want. A very adaptation-execute-y hunger drive might be “see shiny red berry, mmmm, looks so good, grab and eat”. Somewhere in the middle might be “feel stomach pangs, go to fridge, get a snack”. More towards the fitness-maximizer end might be “realize that nutrition is important for avoiding deadly heart attacks, read recommendations, eat a balanced diet.” III. Here’s [a paper on mate choice in nonhuman primates](https://watermark.silverchair.com/32-1-62.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAArowggK2BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKnMIICowIBADCCApwGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMbC49myl4kcLnsAKqAgEQgIICbXuFIeN0P7ViEHyXfr7AKqGZsCYX7pbilsHi4K5qk8d9KojcdRIZrF4E1IW4j2bPJkT6WkA1BEdmgcfgk1LbyfgrQtyGgDVG8yvQyoM_3WY0_2ZaLC1xvMB3nwoinCdsDRDomHPvGsq1x3vxsHzFsIVpO3MnR9nD5GFwXZjiastheaseBlK1aKWsADcAEUFSu2h4rWhNYr5KKgPXbFDl2Rrr8hyC-uAOgBkrsOMYgYeXUJ_Yu_emQR6NFVCZqHUe-EsUNnsT0lXtkO63HRqxqXXdnnbOW66c8oMNSkvicbnCiG12w86i16OjtnoClNrxJogTtL6tZslZ25qIf1H4XeHhlxXwpKgF6KYPTteAIXFJBookMQdBa9AHpTePbbOgfkK34ULwMBsL4Vfzeq5xOxzOPxMA16UBXcq8pKi8q2cXUsq7S2sm9SBOf1SD7Igb9hDFl0eWvrtVLT-17J8r2vA-3H0pfHRLrkWEg8P976rperyguCe7Pob9f9pofk2jH69e3p69rgTpshTdcdVk8dlABm74u2YeSw-oz-a5tXvJ80FdLE4Ch2KGxQsRbVZfg4akNeLn11Y7XSy8GOXtRJTG_as-aCdNTgj5RYU_B93IbyDew9a5WQQwAbZHb58Q1apr2a_PSizkHySSEWNjTb50FoOUuM2f38e8__bvymURzwIGe-JSjOZQUgGr0_ryuabVZm7lalc3a0YgzHIvFFztVfcmmOJfbM0aktxSMaFbc6L7YTgHr-R9tCMBHY50fAbhQuy1ms4N32fedYAfaR7fZQOz9xDDUtt2yaquCTe3O4nZ9Me3n-kooV_ezA). Suitors place surprisingly little emphasis on mates’ appearance, but there is some evidence that they do consider body size. They also consider a potential mate’s position in the dominance hierarchy. So even here, we have our two categories of positive traits: attractiveness and status. On the other hand, there’s no evidence at all that these animals’ parents play much of a role. So: suitors’ mate choice depends on innate, evolutionarily well-established software. Parents’ mate choice depends on - well, it’s not clear. I tend to think that a few million years between primates without parental mate choice and the current day might not be enough time to give people really good innate parental mate-choice instincts. So suitors’ mate-choice instincts are probably very finely-honed, specific drives and instincts. There’s some deep animal if-then statement saying that if someone has a youthful-looking face, they’re probably healthy and fertile and you should be more willing to mate with them. Parents are probably going off of something like a vague desire that their children and grandchildren do well, without any supporting software. That means they have to use their reason to figure out how this cashes out in the real world. Which is better: built-in micro-managing instincts, or human reason? Depends on the situation. Our built-in nutrition instincts are amazing in lots of ways: people with hyponatremia will feel a craving for salt, even if they have no idea what hyponatremia is or why salt should solve it; in order to replicate that with human reason you’d need an MD and lots of expensive laboratory equipment. On the other hand, our built-in nutrition instincts are also what tells us to take a fifth donut after we’ve already eaten four, which even a moron can use their reason to figure out isn’t a good idea. So it can go either way. Somebody using their built-in mate-choice instincts can figure out lots of things that would otherwise take a bunch of obstetricians and geneticists to tell them. But also, they’re kind of at risk of running off with some floozy who will turn out to be addicted to drugs and not a very good parent for their children. Someone using human reason to figure out mate choice is going to be biased towards the human-comprehensible concepts that they use all the time - things like status hierarchies and money. An average Indian mother isn’t going to know about which physical features predict healthy pregnancies or which very minor skin imperfections signal poor immune function, but she is going to know that potential son-in-law X makes $20,000 a year more than potential son-in-law Y. I think this is why suitors and parents have systematically different preferences about who to marry. It’s the same reason why I might be tempted to overeat at the ice cream shop, but my parents can easily tell me “you should watch your weight” (while facing their own temptations themselves). It’s the same reason why heroin addicts have trouble coming clean, but their parents have no trouble lecturing them about it. It’s the same reason why porn sites have lots of material about people copulating with high-quality mates, but none about people finding high-quality mates for their children. “POV: WATCH YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY RICH DOCTOR”. Evolutionarily it makes sense, but the urge isn’t implemented on that level. IV. In the mesa-optimizers post, I wrote: > Mesa-optimizers would have an objective which is closely correlated with their base optimizer, but it might not be perfectly correlated. The classic example, again, is evolution. Evolution “wants” us to reproduce and pass on our genes. But my sex drive is just that: a sex drive. In the ancestral environment, where there was no porn or contraceptives, sex was a reliable proxy for reproduction; there was no reason for evolution to make me mesa-optimize for anything other than “have sex”. Now in the modern world, evolution’s proxy seems myopic - sex is a poor proxy for reproduction. I know this and I am pretty smart and that doesn’t matter. That is, just because I’m smart enough to know that evolution gave me a sex drive so I would reproduce - and not so I would have protected sex with somebody on the Pill - doesn’t mean I immediately change to wanting to reproduce instead. Evolution got one chance to set my value function when it created me, and if it screwed up that one chance, it’s screwed. I’m out of its control, doing my own thing. > > [But] I feel compelled to admit that I do want to have kids. How awkward is that for this argument? I think not very - I don’t want to, eg, donate to hundreds of sperm banks to ensure that my genes are as heavily-represented in the next generation as possible. I just want kids because I like kids and feel some vague moral obligations around them. These might be different proxy objective evolution gave me, maybe a little more robust, but not fundamentally different from the sex one. Since then, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Is it correct to model myself as having (let’s call it) a reptile-level instinct of “genital friction feels good”, plus a separate mammal-level goal of “kids are cute”, while missing a human-level goal of “maximize inclusive genetic fitness, eg by donating to sperm banks”? Where by “reptile-level” I mean “evolution implemented this on reptile-level cognitive machinery” and by “mammal-level” I mean “and then once mammals evolved with more complex cognitive machinery, evolution went back and implemented the same goal at a different level”? (I don’t want to make actual claims that reptile vs. mammal cognition is the exact distinction here, just trying to vaguely gesture at the idea of different evolutionary levels of representing the same idea) Or what would be the alternative? Maybe the genital friction one is the “real” evolutionary incentive to reproduce, and “kids are cute” is a byproduct of some other drive, like the drive to protect children once you have them, but as a spandrel this also makes you want to have children? And we’re sure lucky it does, because otherwise we would have gone extinct as soon as we invented condoms?" Or is the desire to have children (separate from the desire to have sex) cultural? We notice other people having children (maybe because they were born before the era of birth control) and saying nice things about the process, and this makes us feel like we should have children too? Certainly some people say they only have children because they feel social pressure to do so. Maybe that’s the whole game. What would it mean to have separate reptile, mammal, and human drives? If some man has a fetish for, let’s say, tall Asian women wearing red bikinis, this can’t be because evolution encoded a preference for this particular type in his genes. And it’s probably not because, using his human reason, he decided that tall Asian women wearing red bikinis were the best way to achieve his goals. It has to be the signature of a drive compressed enough to make sense in reptilian logic trying to unfold itself until it makes sense on the human level. Is there just one drive, which leaves different traces of itself on various levels as it tries to come into existence? I find the suitors vs. parents conflict interesting as a test case. It certainly looks like the suitors are working off one level of drive, and the parents another, in a way suggesting they’re genuinely separate.	Scott Alexander	53770706	Contra Dynomight On Sexy In-Laws	acx
# Open Thread 224 1: There’s a great new article out on effective altruism and the Carrick Flynn campaign: [The Esoteric Social Movement Behind This Cycle’s Most Expensive House Race](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/12/carrick-flynn-save-world-congress-00031959). “Flynn . . . remains confident that even a small number of lawmakers, armed with the ideas of effective altruism, can bend the hinge away from destruction and back toward flourishing.” And my friend Miranda interviewed him [here](https://www.vox.com/23066877/carrick-flynn-effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-congress-house-election-2022), along with Dylan Matthews from Vox. Although the articles mention his generous PAC support, Flynn can’t use that money himself, and he still needs a last infusion of direct funding for his real campaign before the election on Tuesday. If interested, [please donate here](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/flynn-web), up to a maximum of $2900 for the primary and general. I think this is important enough that I’ve donated and moved the Open Thread a day early to get this announcement out when it can still do some good. 2: DeepMind’s AI alignment team is [hiring researchers and software engineers](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BA7kPQsoqSuScK6rz/deepmind-is-hiring-for-the-scalable-alignment-and-alignment).	Scott Alexander	54926027	Open Thread 224	acx
# Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain [This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. 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 - SA] Imagine that there was a generally acknowledged test for artificial intelligence, to find out whether a computer program is truly intelligent. And imagine that a computer program passed this test for the first time. How would you feel about it? The most likely answer is: disappointed. We know this because it happened several times. The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot who could fool some people to believe that they talk with a real human. Before ELIZA, people assumed that only an intelligent machine could do that, but it just turned out that it is really easy to fool others. Other tests for intelligence were playing chess, playing [a whole variety of games](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark), or recognizing cat images. Machines can do all this by now, and this is awesome. And yet, every success sparked new disappointment, because we didn't find any magic ingredient, some quality that would make a difference between intelligent and non-intelligent. When the groundbreaking [GPT-3](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/) and [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) suddenly could write news articles or poetry, or could dream up [snails made of harp](https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/snail_made_of_harp.jpg)... the main improvement was that they used more raw computation power than the previous versions. If you find this disappointing, then you will also be disappointed by "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. The book is the condensed wisdom of three decades of cognitive research, and it tells you what consciousness is, how it operates, and why we have it. The book actually answers these questions. But if you were hoping that the book would Resolve Philosophy, tell you What Makes Humankind Unique, or whether Free Will exists, it doesn't do that. It only tells you what consciousness is. ### Consciousness: What is it Not? In order to study consciousness, we first need to recognize it. Dehaene's approach to this is simple and bold: a perception or a thought is conscious if you can report on it. If a test subject sees the word "range" on a screen, and you ask her to report what word she has seen, then the answer might be 1) "I have seen the word range", or 2) "What word? There was no word!?" In the first case, she has seen the word consciously, in the second not. This approach is more radical than it seems. Researchers are very cautious to take introspection at face value. And rightfully so, since our introspection is often wrong. The beauty of Dehaene's approach is that he only extracts a single bit of information (yes or no). It turns out that there are experiments which differ only in a minimal aspect (e.g., a slightly longer or shorter time delay), and which trigger either 1) or 2) reliably across many trials and many test subjects. I'll describe a few such setups later, but the point is that you can trust the reports because different people consistently give the same answer in the same situation. It is important to understand that Dehaene's book is only about this definition of consciousness. It is not about cognition (in the sense of abstract reasoning) or meta-cognition (the ability to reflect about your own thoughts). It is not about self-consciousness (being aware of oneself). And of course, there are other definitions of consciousness. The [most compelling alternative](https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/consc.BRAIN.8.pdf) calls Dehaene's concept conscious access and distinguishes it from conscious perception. But for this review, I will stick with Dehaene's definition. Another different, though related concept is attention. For Dehaene, attention is the gating mechanism that decides which information is allowed to enter consciousness. But this process itself is unconscious: we are not aware of all the options that were considered and discarded, only of the winner. This notion of attention is broadly [in line with the mainstream of the field](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness), though the exact definition varies. ### Controlling Consciousness To understand consciousness, the first step is to understand how unconscious processing works. Some glimpses come from [blindsight patients](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight), who lose the ability to see consciously due to brain damage. This can affect their whole field of vision, or just one hemisphere, or even just specific forms like lines. But they remain able to unconsciously process what they see. They will automatically walk around objects in their way, even though they swear that they don't see them. The effect can also be artificially produced in monkeys. Fortunately, there are also ways to make perception unconscious in ordinary people: - You don't always perceive images consciously if they are presented with a low contrast, or for a short time. - Binocular rivalry occurs if your two eyes are presented with different images. In this case, most of the time you don't see a weird overlay of the two images, but instead your conscious perception flips between seeing either one or the other. It's a bit like staring at [ambiguous images](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image), but more consistent. So at any point in time, you perceive one of the images consciously and the other unconsciously. - Attentional blinking describes the effect that after a conscious perception, you are consciously blind for anything that you see in the next 200-300ms. Let's say you watch a fast stream of digits, each only visible for 100ms, and occasionally the stream contains a letter instead of a number. You are supposed to detect the letters. When you see an "M", this enters your consciousness, and you detect it. But if 300ms (three images later), there is another letter "S", you will not see it consciously. Actually, you will be sure that there was no "S" in the stream. - With Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) we can stimulate specific brain regions. By stimulating sensory areas, we can induce hallucinations, and we can either make them conscious or unconscious by regulating the strength of TMS. By interfering with the right region at the right time, we can also prevent real perceptions from entering consciousness. All these setups are useful, but they are not 100% reliable, more like 80% at best. For example, binocular rivalry is different [in autistic people](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2017.112). But there is one setup which works always, for everyone, and that is masking. In masking you see some shapes (the "mask"), then very briefly an image, and then the shapes again. If the image is shown for 30ms, then people do not consciously see it, while for 60ms they do. This works with almost 100% accuracy, and has become the main workhorse for consciousness studies. You can even mask only a part of the screen if you want. While subjects are presented with masked words, numbers, and images, the researchers can measure the brain activity with EEG, MEG, fMRI, or even implanted electrodes (for epileptic patients who have the electrodes for unrelated medical reasons). They measure how the skin starts to sweat and the body tenses up from the unconscious perception. And mostly easily, they measure how it affects the performance in a subsequent, conscious task. For example, seeing the word "bank" unconsciously will make you react faster to a related word like "money", an effect known as priming. ### Should I Believe This? Wait a moment, priming? Aren't those the wrong conclusions that were wiped out by the big [replication crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) in psychology? Should I really believe these things? I think yes. It is hard to convey in a review how painstakingly pedantic the field apparently is. There are a lot of different opinions on consciousness, and the experiments are scrupulously examined for any possible flaw or alternative interpretation, both from insiders and outsiders of the field. Just to give one example, in the priming study with "bank" and "money", the conclusion was that the words are processed \semantically\, not just as a bunch of characters. Dehaene mentions not one paper getting this result, but four. Then he describes how critics were not satisfied, and gives five more papers which addressed the critics. But for reasons going deep into the precise setups, it was still not settled whether this actually proves the claim that the meaning is processed. Which made the original authors re-examine their results and publish a follow-up paper proving that indeed, the critics were right, and their setup was no proof. Which triggered an avalanche of follow-up work until it was waterproof beyond doubt. Dehaene cites 44 papers just on this debate. And there was never any doubt on whether the raw results were reproducible, the debate was about whether the experiments left room for alternative interpretations. I wish my own fields of research would be just half as rigorous as what I read in this book. I have read one other scientific book which breathes the same positive pedantry, and that is [Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-are-we-smart-enough) by Frans de Waal. I think there is a pattern. It helps that both fields treat a topic on which everyone has their own opinion, so they get a lot of know-alls from outside the field interfering with the discussion. But more importantly, they are based on methods which used to be tabooed inside their scientific community. De Waal treated his animals as personalities and even bonded with them instead of keeping neutral distance, and he took wildlife observations seriously. All of this was considered totally unscientific, so he was forced to be extra scrupulous in his experiments. For Dehaene and his colleagues, it was the paradigm that “subjective reports can and should be believed” -- as a source of raw data, without making the mistake of conflating the subjective belief with reality. When patients tell you after surgery that they had the impression to leave their body and float at the ceiling, then you should not believe that they actually floated. You should believe that "floating" was their true feeling, and that probably there is a neuroscientific cause for this feeling. Taking it seriously eventually enabled researchers to induce the feeling of leaving your body in any person, by using the right neural stimulation. But until the 90s, it was scientifically taboo to take subjective feelings into account, so experiments with low standards would have been torn apart. I find these examples encouraging, because they show that even strong taboos can be overcome if your science is just good enough. Not surprisingly, the replication crisis hit cognitive psychology much less hard than other fields like social sciences. Of nine key findings of cognitive psychology, [all nine could be reproduced](https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/06/05/these-nine-cognitive-psychology-findings-all-passed-a-stringent-test-of-their-replicability/), including three that are core to the book. Yes, a lot of priming experiments were not replicable, and only a hard core survived. But this book is about the hard core. Of course, some of the ~1300 papers cited by Dehaene will be wrong, but I have a lot of trust in the general picture. ### What We Can Do Without Consciousness Ok, let us believe that the results on unconscious processes are real. What can the brain do with unconscious information? A lot. The experiments fill a big chunk of the book, and I can't go into detail. I have already mentioned that your unconscious brain does not just process the letters of a word, it also deciphers the meaning. For example, a masked "four" primes you not just for recognizing "four", but also for "4", "FOUR", a spoken "four", and even for "three". In fact, it primes you better for "three" than for "two": the priming is stronger the closer the numbers are. Unconscious perceptions can induce negative emotions, and you can unconsciously distinguish faces and abstract categories like "object" and "animal". You can unconsciously estimate averages. Unconscious perceptions can control your attention. An unconscious "stop signal" will activate your executive control center in the brain. Sometimes this prevents you from pressing a button that you were supposed to press, which seems like a mysterious mistake to you. You can also unconsciously detect errors: when you make a mistake in an eye-tracking task, your error control system will flash even if the signal never reaches your consciousness (in which case you don't notice that you have made a mistake). You can even learn new things unconsciously. If you get a reward after each unconscious presentation, and you get more reward after image A than after image B, then you learn that A is worth more -- even if you never consciously see any images at all! For you, it seems like you look at a screen where nothing interesting happens, and you get completely random rewards. ### What We Can NOT Do Without Consciousness So if we can do so many things unconsciously, what do we even need consciousness for? What is the effect of a conscious perception? Traces of unconscious perceptions are spurious. They are almost completely gone after a second. This means that tasks which require working memory can not be performed unconsciously. For example, in order to compute 12x13 we need to perform several subsequent steps, and use the intermediate result of one step as an input for the next one. This task can not be performed unconsciously. It seems that the unconscious traces are too weak to be used as an input for a second step. Dehaene tries to pinpoint the exact point of complexity that can be performed unconsciously, and it seems to be very low. After seeing a number n unconsciously, test persons are well above chance for the tasks of naming n ("But I haven't seen anything!" "Don't worry, just take a random guess."), naming n+2, or deciding whether n<5. But deciding whether n+2 is smaller than 5 is already at chance level. Dehaene suspects that complex language (conversation with others) also falls into this category of processes that require working memory. It is not mentioned in the book, but the same probably holds for trains of thought, including cognition. Consciousness has a coordination effect. Imagine you see some line moving in a diagonal direction over the screen. We know very well what happens in the low-level visual areas. The neurons there cannot "see" the whole picture, they have only a limited perceptive field. For them, the image is ambiguous: it is impossible to decide from their local information whether the line moves upwards, or to the right, or diagonally. Some neurons will decide for "upwards", and encode that. Others will decide for "right" or for "diagonally". If the image remains unconscious, then these mismatches are never resolved. However, if the image enters consciousness, then after 120-140 ms all neurons in the lower layers suddenly start to encode "diagonally". Now they agree on the same interpretation of the world. Dehaene phrases this in a way that ACX readers will love. For him, the unconscious (or pre-conscious) neural activity encodes a probability distribution over the possible states of the world. If we see the word "bank", then the meaning "credit institute" and "sitting bench" are both represented by some neurons, so they both occur in this probability distribution. When the word reaches consciousness, then the brain \*samples\* from this distribution. So it decides for one of the possible options, and all neurons are overwritten with this meaning. For example, in binocular rivalry (when your two eyes see incompatible images) you will sometimes see option A, sometimes option B, but usually not both. Once you have drawn a sample, this is not a final decision. In binocular rivalry, your perception switches every few seconds between A and B. Some researchers even claim that the brain [gets the Bayesian math right](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/07/1101430108): if you present an image that is ambiguous in a very clever way, such that there is an objective underlying probability of 70% for A and 30% for B, then you will see A for 70% of the time and B for 30% of the time. Others claim that you can play ["Wisdom of the Crowd" in single-player modus](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02136.x). Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses. Such sampling has obvious benefits. If I have to walk around a tree, then choosing either "left" or "right" is fine, but my whole brain and body should stick to this decision. So conscious sampling is very important for decision-making. But it goes beyond that. The way how we perceive the world in a conscious moment is already a selection, as the [rotating mask illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKa0eaKsdA0) nicely illustrates. There is another interesting effect of consciousness that Dehaene only mentions casually a few times: it enables us to gauge our confidence. So test subjects can say "I am certain" or "this was just a guess". We can test these self-assessments with [betting systems](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness#Post-decision_wagering). And we are good at this, but only if the task was based on conscious perception. If it is based on unconscious perception, then we may still be good at the task itself, but our self-assessment is inaccurate. Often we underestimate our performance. By the way, simple betting systems (consisting essentially of the options "Yes", "No" and "Not Sure") also show that [mice](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1861845/), [monkeys](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15105996/) and [dolphins](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8530911/) know how confident they are. We'll have to wait a bit for results on how consciousness affects self-assessment in animals, but researchers have [speculated that the results should be similar](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-20745-072), suggesting that a [prediction market](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/) of unconscious mice may work poorly. ### Consciousness and Learning In this section, I will go a bit beyond the book, so this might be a bit less reliable than the rest. I have worked on research of neural plasticity and learning, so the ideas do not come entirely out of thin air. To understand the effect of consciousness on learning, you should first know that there are two different types of long-term memory, procedural and episodic memory. Procedural memory allows us to walk, ride a bike, or play the piano. For this review, I will pool it together with semantic memory: the knowledge that birds can fly, or things that you have learned by heart, like a song or the multiplication table. We can use procedural memory in automatic mode, and we can acquire and access it unconsciously. Acquiring procedural memory often requires a lot of practice and repetition. This type of learning is usually slow and decentral in the brain: only the regions which are directly relevant to the task are involved in this type of learning. It shares many similarities with modern machine learning systems. On the other hand, episodic memory refers to specific moments of your life, for example remembering what you had for breakfast or what your conversation partner said five minutes ago. This memory is one-shot, so the memory is instantaneously formed and does not require any repetition. Aspects of episodic memory can be transferred into procedural memory: when you learn the name of your new colleague, then this stays an episodic memory for a while, but it becomes procedural/semantic memory after a few repetitions. Sometimes we don't even need repetition, for example when we recognize a face after a single meeting, or when a child acquires new words. But this relies on complicated interaction between the two types of memory that I won't get into here. Usually, we can make a clear distinction. It seems that episodic memory without consciousness is plainly impossible, and I will come back to that. But consciousness also helps for procedural memory, even though it can be formed from purely unconscious perceptions. First, think of consciousness as giving a boost to the learning rate. I have mentioned before that episodic memory (which requires consciousness) can be transferred into procedural memory during sleep, and this is stronger than the effect of the direct experience alone. You will still not be able to learn the piano in a week, but consciousness probably makes learning faster. Second, as Dehaene explains in his book, you only connect unconscious events with each other if they are simultaneous. This makes sense because unconscious neural activity fades away so quickly. Dehaene describes some classical conditioning experiments similar to Pawlow's dog, where the sound of a bell is associated with receiving food. But if (to stay in the picture) the bell is perceived unconsciously, then the connection is only made if the bell rings while the reward comes (plus/minus at most one second), not if the bell rings a few seconds earlier. For episodic memory, I think that it is even more closely entangled with consciousness. I believe that the coherent activity of consciousness is exactly the form of neural patterns that can be stored in episodic memory. Thus a conscious perception creates a memory item that can be stored and retrieved later. Let me explain why. A crucial property of memory is pattern completion: that you can retrieve the whole memory pattern from activation of a small part. So the word "croissant" may trigger the image of a croissant, the smell of it, the taste, the texture, and so on. But the same works vice versa. The smell of a croissant also triggers the rest. There is no core of the concept "croissant" that needs to be present in order to trigger the whole concept. For procedural memory, this is not a big deal. Since this memory is formed slowly, there is enough time to nicely embed it into existing structures. But episodic memory is one-shot learning, it needs to be formed in a second. (There is some long-term consolidation later during sleep, but this only shifts the problem: the brain still needs to maintain traces of the pattern for 16 hours.) And it's really hard to embed a complex concept so deep into an existing network that you still have pattern completion. Mind that every change in the brain needs to be cautious, because you have a lot of systems that should still be working after the change. In machine learning, in case of doubt you set your learning rates really low, and that is for the same reason: you don't want to overwrite all the existing functions of your network. And the task is more difficult for more complex patterns. If each neuron represented its own interpretation of reality, then it would be pretty hopeless to encode all this into a retrievable pattern in just one second. But it gets a lot easier if the activity of all neurons throughout your whole brain are highly consistent with each other, and that is precisely what consciousness seems to achieve. This is why I believe that consciousness might create the items that we can store in our episodic memory. ### Properties of Consciousness For an unconscious perception, the main brain activity is in perceptual regions (visual regions for images, auditory regions for sounds, and so on). The signal can travel further into the brain, but only reaches a few regions, and gets weaker and weaker. A conscious perception does not get weaker, it gets stronger as it travels. Dehaene compares unconscious perception with a wave that runs out at the shore, while a conscious perception is like an avalanche that gains momentum. After 400ms, the conscious avalanche has activated large parts of the brain, which Dehaene calls global ignition. Moreover, all the brain parts synchronize, and information flows from all parts into each other. This is not a metaphor, "flow of information" is a well-defined quantity, measured by so-called [Granger causality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granger_causality#In_neuroscience). Granger causality is a useful concept with a terrible name, since it is about a complex form of correlation, and not about causality. Whatever it is, it suggests strongly (without being a proof) that all parts of the brain talk intensively with each other. Dehaene goes into a lot of details on the exact form of these signals and exchange, but I will cut it short. It all fits very well with the assumption that in a conscious moment, the brain creates a coherent worldview, which we may call "sampling", "coordination", or "creating a memory item". Dehaene compares it with a memo that the CIA prepares for the president: it does not contain all the details of hundreds of subreports, but is a highly condensed summary of the worldview of the CIA. This metaphor expresses nicely how the information is compressed, but mind that it leaves out two aspects. In a conscious moment, information also flows downwards to the low-level areas, and they change their activation patterns to make them compatible. So it is as if all CIA members would read the presidential memo, and start to rewrite their own local reports to match this worldview. (I hope that the CIA doesn't work this way.) Second, in the brain there is no single president to make decisions. There are regions that we call "executive control regions", but they are notoriously hard to pinpoint, and there is no region which is always involved in decisions. It might be more accurate to think of a committee meeting of all brain regions, who discuss and decide on a topic. Consciousness has a severe disadvantage: it is really slow. A conscious perception takes about half a second, 500ms. This is ages compared to neural transmission speed. If you are shown two images, and you are supposed to pick out the one with the animal, then your eyes start moving to the correct image after 70-100ms. Not with 100% accuracy, but far above chance. In a 100m sprint, you really don't want to wait for 500ms before you start running. Or imagine playing computer games with 2 frames per second, which is NOT FUNNY. So a lot of our everyday life runs on autopilot. This is also the reason why predictions are so important for the brain. Some cool experiments show that when we are shown a surprising image, the time we believe the image to appear is 300ms after it actually appears. But if we can predict the image, there is no such delay, and we perceive the timing correctly. Consciousness is also exclusive. While a conscious perception is processed (which may consist of several components, like an image and a compatible sound), the activity blocks off other perceptions. They are either missed completely, or can only be processed after the 500ms are over. There is something like a buffer in which a perception can be stored until consciousness is ready again, but it will not be processed before that. (Again, there are cool time perception experiments which show that quite convincingly.) So our consciousness runs at most at 2 perceptions per second, and other than unconscious operations, it can not be parallelized. ### Insights Into the Inside Now that we understand consciousness, we have quite a lot of tests to tell apart conscious from unconscious processing. Indirect clues come from abilities. It seems that working memory requires consciousness, and Dehaene has developed some very detailed tests to decide whether someone is conscious. Not just for fun; he works with patients in long-time coma (more precisely, in vegetative state). Some of them are fully conscious locked-in patients, but this is quite hard to detect. Dehaene has developed tools for detecting traces of consciousness in such patients, and they can predict (to some extent) whether the patients will eventually recover. They are also useful for developing communication devices for locked-in patients. But we can also apply the tests to healthy individuals and see what we get. We are not conscious during anesthesia (what a surprise), but sleeping is already more complicated. Most sleep phases are unconscious. In dream phases (REM sleep), external stimulation usually does not spark consciousness. However, the brain does react like a conscious brain if the stimulus is directly implanted into the brain via magnetic stimulation (TMS). So perhaps we are conscious in dreams, and we are only cut off from outside perception. But it is too early to be certain. Also, although the book does not discuss this point, I wonder whether we are conscious all of our daytime. Probably we don't use the full bandwidth of two conscious perceptions per second the whole day. How conscious are we when we enter the "flow" during a marathon? Can meditation suppress consciousness? I don't know. A part that really made me think is Dehaene's theory of schizophrenia. I have heard a lot of explanations for schizophrenia, and most of them sound superficially compelling, but collapse pretty quickly when you dig into them. This one... has not collapsed yet, at least not for me. Deahene believes that schizophrenia is what you get if you (partially) lose conscious perceptions. This sounds ridiculous at first, but as always, Dehaene makes it really hard to shrug this off as obvious nonsense. He claims that in order to reach consciousness, a masked signal needs to last "much longer" for schizophrenic patients. I expected that "much longer" means "whatever passes your p-value test", but I looked into the study. It was 90ms versus 59ms. That’s a lot. The maximum of the control group (n=28) was roughly the same as the average of schizophrenic patients (n=28)! And of course, it doesn't stop there. Also for other effects of consciousness, [schizophrenics really stick out](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/100/23/13722/F2.large.jpg). (The link is worth clicking!) Dehaene describes how the other neural signatures of consciousness are disturbed or even plainly missing. He describes how schizophrenia can be caused by certain neuro-anatomic damage (in terms of regions and neuron types), which happen to be exactly the type of damage that would impair consciousness. He tells compelling stories on how consciousness would explain the [positive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Positive_symptoms) and the [negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Negative_symptoms) symptoms of schizophrenia. He mentions some [weird autoimmune disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-NMDA_receptor_encephalitis) which gives you super-strong schizophrenic effects (from hallucinations to paranoia) until you spontaneously lose your consciousness after three weeks and possibly never regain it. I am still cautious about the story, simply because I have a really low prior that we ever find a theory of schizophrenia. But if you hope for such a theory, you should know this candidate. ### Conclusion So consciousness has upsides and downsides. It is really slow, it is exclusive, and it simplifies the world into a highly compressed sample. This can be useful in its own right, for example to make a decision. A lot of information is lost in this process, but apparently the resulting pattern is so simple that it can be processed further. Since all parts of the brain participate in a conscious event, it is also universally available in the brain. Dehaene calls this function the \Global Neuronal Workspace\. Propagating something to consciousness is similar to loading something into a register of a computer, so that it can be processed further. I believe that consciousness is even more, it creates the item in the first place. The item can then be stored and retrieved, and it can be used as input for mental algorithms. Of course, a conscious thought does not need to be triggered from the outside. It can also be the next step of a mental algorithm, like the next thought in a train of thoughts, and it can come (fully or partially) from episodic memory or mental associations. Dehaene adds that due to its simplicity, these memory items can often be expressed in language, and thus they can be transmitted to others. Thus consciousness is probably a necessary factor for the complex language and culture of humans. Necessary, but not sufficient: many animals around us are conscious, too. Humans are special in many ways, but being conscious is not among them. After reading this long review, does it still make sense to read the book? Yes, absolutely! It describes tons of really fascinating experiments that I had to skip, and it is really pleasant to read. As are other books by Dehaene, especially "Reading in the Brain" and "The Number Sense", which discuss how the brain processes texts and numbers. Appendix A: The Hard Problem of Consciousness Do you feel disappointed by the book? At least some people did. When the program ELIZA passed the Turing test, a common reaction was “This is not what we had meant”. Some reactions to this book were similar. Dehaene’s concept of consciousness is much more mundane than the lofty associations that we commonly attach to the word consciousness. But if we actually want to nail it down and get a more substantial definition than “whatever elevates me above mere animal”, then “the thing that happens during conscious perceptions and does not happen during unconscious perceptions” sounds pretty convincing to me. But other people think differently. Dehaene was accused of dodging the [hard problem of consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness). This is "the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences. That is to say, it is the problem of why we have personal, first-person experiences, often described as experiences that feel "like something"" (wikipedia link above). Dehaene has been criticized for "[dismissing the hard problem in barely over a page of text](https://web.archive.org/web/20140717224102/http://www.funjournal.org/images/stories/downloads/2014_Volume_12_Issue_2/june-12-r5.pdf)". For Dehaene, as for other renowned researchers, the problem does not exist, and I share their opinion. But there are equally renowned researchers [who accept the problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness). Even though the book hardly discusses the topic, I believe that it has implications for the question, and I will explain my point of view below. If you believe in the hard problem of consciousness, then my perspective will probably not convince you otherwise, but it may help to pinpoint further where exactly we disagree. A sensory input like the color "red" leads to some neural activity. While the neural activity is active, there is some perception of it. There are at least two different ways of phrasing what happens. - Classically, we would say that "I" or "the brain" experiences the color red. This is also called a quale, plural qualia. The hard problem of consciousness assumes that this experience is something that goes beyond neural activity. So even if an outsider perfectly knows the neural activity, then this does not give experience. A crucial point of this perspective is that there is an observer, which is usually called "I", and sometimes "my mind" or "my brain". - In the book [Consciousness Explained](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained), Daniel Dennett argues that a more appropriate description is the multiple drafts model (also called Cartesian theater): the brain is a collection of many different regions, all of which follow their natural task of observing the surrounding neural activity. Each region acts like a little agent with its own perception. The experience is then just the collection of these local experiences. Critics like [John Searle find](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/) that the multiple drafts model can't explain why experiences are first-person, i.e., where the "I" comes from. And I think this is precisely the point that Dehaenes's book helps us to understand. My claim is: Given what we know about consciousness, if we assume the multiple drafts model, then we should naturally expect the subjective perception of a first-person observer. To explain the claim as clearly as possible, let me take a small detour. The brain is very good at decomposing the world into units that make sense. For example, when I look out of the window, I automatically decompose the image into several houses, a few people, a dog, and so on. The units can be nested, like a window that is part of a house, and can even overlap. In general, the brain tries to find neat and clean units if possible. An example is our own body. We have a very clear body schema, i.e., we consider our own body as a unit (with various sub-units, of course). My hand is part of my body, the cup of tea in my hand is not. And that makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, qualitatively the difference is not so fundamental. Both the hand and the cup are objects outside of your brain. We can control the hand by sending signals to our joints, and we can control the cup by grasping it, which is also achieved by sending signals to our joints. So it is the same sort of control on a fundamental level. But on any practical level, the difference is huge. Even an alien observer would agree that the decomposition into "your body" versus "not your body" is sensible. However, simple tricks like the [rubber hand illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion) show that this body schema can be re-learned. So the body schema is a construct that is shared by almost all people ([some get it wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia)), because it makes so much sense, both to us and to alien observers. What would an alien observer say about the neural activity in our brain? There are a lot of different brain areas with different functional rules. Sometimes a few areas interact with each other, and our visual system may activate our motor control system without much other brain areas involved. A lot of neurons plainly contradict each other. Perhaps the alien would conclude that the subunits have a lot more descriptive power than just the coarse category "brain". So it might decide to describe it as Cartesian theater. But now imagine that the alien is only allowed to observe the brain \*in conscious moments\. As we have learned, in these moments all regions of the brain have agreed on the same interpretation of the world. In the theater picture, the alien would only observe the actors at times when they all speak in a perfect chorus. In this case, it might conclude that the sub-units are not so important, and that the chorus is much more important than its part. I think this is precisely where our concept of "my mind" comes from. Remember that our episodic memory might be exclusively formed from conscious moments, and also implicit learning gets a strong boost from consciousness. So when "we" (our brain, or the actors in the Cartesian theater) learn a "mind schema", then this is based on the conscious moments, not on the activities in between. On this basis, it makes sense to merge all our neural activity into a single unit, which we call "I" or "my mind". Just as we form the concept of "my body", but even stronger, since we never "observe" different parts of our mind to be incoherent or even independent. Once the concept of "I" is formed, any conscious perception is connected with the "I" unit, so a conscious perception of the color red is translated into "The neural activity of the myself-unit represents the color red", which in common terms is "I experience the color red". Appendix B: Are Robots Conscious?* Are babies, animals, or robots conscious? For babies, yes, they are conscious. Their consciousness is 3 times slower than that of adults, which probably has purely physical reasons. The cables in the baby brain are not isolated. The isolation just doesn't fit into the baby skull. Unisolated fibers have lower transmission speed. The isolation is added later in several surges, the last and most drastic of which happens during puberty. Be patient with your babies and kids, and yes, even with your teens. A lot of animals are conscious, too. For mammals, it looks like a universal Yes. We have pretty clear evidence of consciousness from apes, monkeys, dolphins, rats and mice, some of which came after Dehaene's book. The question becomes trickier as animals become more different from humans, since the brains become more different, and we are more and more forced to rely on indirect clues. For an octopus, where most of its neural power is dispersed over its arms, the behavior suggests that the answer is still yes, but neural signatures can no longer be taken as confirmation, and a lot of tests don't work anymore. And for robots, neural signatures don't help at all. Dehaene has no doubt that we can eventually build robots which are conscious in exactly the same way as humans are, but even if true, that doesn't tell us whether my laptop, GPT-3, or R2-D2 are conscious. But do we have to rely on neural signatures? Can't we generalize and define it by the all-parts-talk-to-each-other-and-there-is-great-coherence-and-Granger-causality-thingy? So if a robot satisfies this criteria, is it/s/he conscious? The book only touches this question lightly, but I'll add a few of my own thoughts. Since the question about robots can become confusing, let me instead discuss the obvious alternative question if and when the Swiss canton of Glarus is conscious. Switzerland is a successful little country in Europe, and it may have [the weirdest political system](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i) that you have ever heard of. After each election, the government is formed from all parties in the parliament, more or less proportional to the number of seats. (It has only seven members, so small parties are left out.) Currently, the government consists of two members from the social democrats, two from the liberal party, one from the moderate rights, and two from the far right party. Switzerland is an egalitarian society. It doesn't have a capital city because the Swiss didn't want to single out a city. Bern is the seat of government, close enough. Switzerland also doesn't have a head of state like the Queen, which is slightly awkward since the country can't make official state visits. (But the Swiss prefer anyway not to interact too much with other countries. They pondered 50 years before [joining the UNO](https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/news/dossiers/alle-dossiers/15-jahre-uno-mitgliedschaft-der-schweiz/haeufige-fragen--die-schweiz-und-die-uno.html) in 2002.) Switzerland also doesn't have a head of government. The closest thing is the mostly empty title "Bundespräsident", which rotates annually among the members of government. The title always goes to the member who hasn't held it for the longest time. (There are tie-breaking rules in case several members of the government never had it.) But the Bundespräsident doesn't really have additional power. For such an egalitarian country, it is not surprising that Switzerland is federal, it consists of 26 cantons (similar to US states, just smaller). Of course, every canton can make its own laws, and most cantons have parliaments for that. But the canton Glarus, with a tiny population of 12,000, does not have a parliament. Instead, they have a [Landsgemeinde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsgemeinde): once a year, the citizens of Glarus assemble at a big open space, and decide jointly on new laws, the tax rates for the next year, and important offices like judges. Every citizen can rise to speak on any of the discussed items, and can propose changes (which even go through sometimes). I hope you see the analogy to consciousness. Once a year, the Landsgemeinde creates a coherent state among its citizens. Communication is open from everyone to everyone, until a common ground is found, and a decision is made which is compulsory for everyone. You could even say that the Landsgemeinde creates a permanent and consistent "memory" since its decisions become codified law. So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. [In a great rebuttal](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799), Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness." So we have little hope to capture consciousness in a nice mathematical theory. But why would we even want this? One motivation comes from the idea that conscious beings are qualitatively different from others, and deserve human rights, or robot rights. But consciousness is a terrible indicator for that. There is no magic ingredient, no godly spark in consciousness. It’s nothing special. Or at least it is much more widespread among species than generally assumed, and it means a lot less than philosophers often make out of it. (To be fair, they might be talking about a different concept than “having conscious perceptions”. But I think Dehaene has the better claim on the term consciousness.) At least for me, this approach to ethics seems to be a dead end, and the question of consciousness of robots has become a lot more boring after reading this book. Robots won't be conscious in the exact same way as we are. They might be “conscious” in a fascinating different way, but that seems to become a matter of definition and taste, not a matter of insight. So we should not base our treatment of robots on the question whether they are conscious. I would guess that the same problems will arise with other concepts like meta-cognition or self-consciousness, once we properly understand them. I don't have an alternative solution, but just a prediction: in the end, these discussions will not matter, because whether robots will be granted robot rights (assuming they don't just seize it) depends on whether and how people will subjectively perceive them as intelligent personalities. I doubt that any theory on this issue can win a political fight against the feelings of people.	Scott Alexander	54821121	Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain	acx
# Book Review: The Gervais Principle I. The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book. It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction: > By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of. And: > There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before. Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions…So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject. > > This power can have very unpredictable effects. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn’t. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic hazard: dangerous knowledge that may harm you. A case of “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” […] > > But I believe, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, that almost everyone is capable of “handling the truth”. Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance. Big talk for a book on management. Rao himself doesn’t claim this, but several people said I should read this book to understand Jacques Lacan (I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”). So I went into Gervais with a suspicion that the “business book” claim was, at the very least, incomplete. II. In 1969, Laurence Peter proposed the [Peter Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle): “everyone gets promoted to the level of their incompetence”. That is, if you’re great at your job, you keep getting promoted, until you reach a level where you’re bad at it, then stay there. This also got oddly philosophical for a business book. In 1995, Scott Adams countered with the even more cynical [Dilbert Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle): “companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow”. In 2009, Rao wrote The Gervais Principle, continuing the increasing-cynicism trend. The Principle, named after The Office writer Ricky Gervais, goes: > Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing [Clueless people] into middle-management, groom [under-performers] into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort Losers to fend for themselves. Rao quickly introduces “Clueless”, “Losers”, and “Sociopaths” as terms of art. He confesses to lifting them from a comic by Hugh MacLeod, and accordingly admits that their connotations don’t quite match the real categories he’s pointing at. Better terms might be Manipulators, Believers, and Drones, or maybe Ubermenschen, Bureaucrats, and Normies. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil (although they often are, and Rao himself - a self-confessed sociopath - did write another book called [Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook For Sociopaths](https://www.amazon.com/Be-Slightly-Evil-Sociopaths-Ribbonfarm-ebook/dp/B00F8JTYH8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1DTS622QUDOP6&keywords=be+slightly+evil&qid=1651556951&sprefix=be+slightly+evil%2Caps%2C374&sr=8-1)). They are ambitious people who would rather succeed than be liked. Gandhi (as per Rao) was a Sociopath, in that he was able to separate himself from conventional morality and pursue a goal effectively. Examples from The Office include David Wallace and Charles Miner. Clueless people aren’t necessarily stupid. They may be brain surgeons or rocket scientists. But they are fundamentally incapable of grasping the shifting, illegible nature of social reality. They retreat to objective reality - over-performing at their object-level job - and taking the official legible rules really seriously. They can be found carefully studying the Mission Statement, trying to figure out how best to embody its values. Or putting up inspirational posters in the hallways. Or trying to win the hokey competition for Best Office Morale so they can get the first prize pizza party or whatever. Office examples are Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute. Losers aren’t necessarily bad, unhappy, or low-status. They’re the great mass of ordinary people, who don’t qualify for either of the above types. They like friendship, positive emotions, belonging to groups, and having social status - not in the sense of “becoming God-Emperor”, but in the sense of “being well-liked”. They sort of understand social reality, but have instinctively chosen a quiet life over the will to power. Office examples include Stanley Hudson and Phyllis Vance. In Rao’s statement of the Gervais Principle: * Sociopaths run the company. * They identify overperforming entry-level workers as Clueless (why would you overperform? unless you have some clear route to leverage your success into extra money or power, you’re just giving the company free labor for no reason). They promote them to middle-management, where they can serve as useful toadies and pawns who will never predict the inevitable backstab. * They identify underperforming entry-level workers as potential new Sociopaths. Sociopaths realize that entry-level work is “a bad bargain” and immediately start scheming to get promoted. These schemes are usually very clever but don’t involve doing a great job at their object-level position. Leadership puts these people on a track to upper management. * They identify people who perform at exactly the expected level as Losers, who understand their side of a bargain (perform at the expected level in exchange for a paycheck) and accept it. Leadership keeps these people somewhere around entry-level forever, and the Losers are fine with this. If this doesn’t make sense, compare to (as Rao does) the famous quote by Prussian general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equort: > I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid . . . Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for . . . staff appointments. [But] the man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. III. This is where the book starts showing its true colors. After stating the Gervais Principle, it switches from a business book to a work of psychoanalysis. (before I follow, a word of warning: in exactly one sentence, buried in the middle of the book, Rao admits that everyone has a little bit of each of Loser, Clueless, and Sociopath in them, and each comes out at different times. He then never returns to this theme again, and treats them as totally separate types. I’m going to follow his lead and make this acknowledgment, but also treat them mostly separately.) Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you, whose approval you desperately crave. You would do anything for the voice to like you. Ghosts, mental models, and personified abstract concepts fight each other for a turn at the mike and the right to implicitly control your actions. Who wins? If you answer something like “a vague abstracted shadow of my parents” or “the sum of all my schoolteachers” or “the rules” or “authority”, you’re Clueless. If you answer something like “Mrs. Grundy” or “the Joneses, whom I must keep up with” or “right-thinking Society”, you are, in Rao’s world, a Loser. If you answer “I strangled all of those concepts with my bare hands, then smashed the microphone with a hammer”, you’re a Sociopath. The Gervais Principle goes heavy on dev psych: > Here is the non-trivial stuff, compressed into three handy laws: > > 1. Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses. > 2. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction > 3. The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented > > An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that [defense mechanisms](http://trailmeme.com/trails/Defense_Mechanisms) emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it vanishes. Defense mechanisms though, are more useful as a partial catalog of phenomenology than as a foundational idea. > > These then are the developmental psychology roots of the Gervais Principle. Recall that Cluelessness goes with overperformance. That overperformance is caused by arrested development around a strength, which has been hooked by an addictive environment of social rewards. Mediocrity is your best defense against addiction, and guarantor of further open-ended psychological development. > > And yes, for the alert among you who have spotted a connection, arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology. A strength in one situation is merely an entrenched piece of arrested development in another. > > In our model, the three development stages – Clueless, Losers and Sociopaths – correspond to different patterns of arrested development and different strength-addictions. That is, development involves progressing from one stage (eg school) to another stage (eg the real world). But if you’re too good at an early stage, you become accustomed to the reward you get from success. Suppose you loved school and did great at it. Then you get invited to participate in the real world, a noticeably non-school-like environment. You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own. But if you can’t real-world actually go back to school, instead you might remain permanently stuck at a psychological stage where everything feels like school, where you try to distort your perceptions until your world-model looks vaguely school-like, and where you use your school-based skills and coping mechanisms for everything. The particular example I just gave, about school, is Rao’s explanation for Dwight Schrute: > Dwight, with his stern German upbringing, lacked the normal encouragement of early-childhood creative-performance instincts (we see several glimpses of this, including his attempt to read horrifying medieval cautionary tales to the kids during bring-your-child-to-work day, and his own description of his childhood, which left his brother actually developmentally disabled). He has therefore developed none of the addiction to childhood applause-seeking performance behaviors that have trapped Michael. > > Instead, Dwight found relief in the graded, performance-oriented worlds of school and varied medieval-guild-like worlds, such as farming, animal husbandry and karate. His attempts to understand the world of management, which is decidedly not a world of grades or guilds, are based entirely on peripheral guild-like elements. He is the only one excited about the Survivor-style successor-selection event Michael arranges (in the bus on the way over, he asks, “Will there be business parables?”). When he attempts manipulation, his mind naturally turns to hidden microphones, doctored documents and other elements of tradecraft learned from spy novels, and only rarely to psychology. He banks the occasional tactical victory, but cannot play or win the mind games required to beat the Sociopaths. > > In Dwight’s world, everything worth learning is teachable, and medals, certificates and formal membership in meritocratic institutions is evidence of success. Even where play behaviors are concerned, the Dwights of the world can more easily get lost in points-and-rules worlds. It is significant that Dwight has never seen/read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which is about creative-performance play), but is obsessed with gaming worlds and sci-fi/fantasy universes. > > Perhaps the clearest example of Dwight’s need for formal affiliation is his lame attempt at the insider stand-up comedy routine, [The Aristocrats](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29). To Dwight, everything is a formal contest, and there are always authority figures who provide legitimacy and rankings. He has no sense of humor (thanks to skipping early childhood), and has no idea how to actually evoke laughter, so he tries to ace the only formal membership test he can see, the ability to tell the Aristocrats joke. Michael, by contrast, can at least tell juvenile jokes, and Andy can manage some bad frat-boy humor. Rao argues that Michael Scott, the “boss” in the show, is stuck at an even lower level: > Little children in normal environments win their first victories through creative performance: reciting nursery rhymes, drawing pictures, and demonstrating creative play behaviors. If they succeed too much, they get addicted to the typical adult reaction: Wow, aren’t you cute/clever?and, to a lesser extent, to admiration from younger siblings. In learning to thrive in this particular reward/penalty environment, little children rely mostly on responding to the emotional content of what they hear and see, since they do not understand much. > > With a few evolved defense mechanisms thrown in, to protect against adult realities that don’t conform to childhood environments, that’s exactly what it feels like to be Michael. When he hears somebody talking, all he hears is “blah blah blah good job, blah blah blah, how could you do this Michael?” in conjunction with facial expressions and body language. > > Michael’s head is a massive library of childlike mappings between situations, canned phrases and reactions. He is not completely responsible for his actions and utterances because he genuinely does not understand them. There is coherence in what Michael says though; he does not sound completely nonsensical because he reacts meaningfully to body language, facial expressions and emotional cues. “You talkin’ to me?” (borrowed from De Niro) is a belligerent line, and by pulling out that line when he feels threatened, and then displacing the tension with laughter, Michael is able to derail the conversation. His trademark joke, “That’s what she said!” is an extreme example. It makes no sense in most contexts where he trots it out; its only purpose is to dissolve tension and displace threats. Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. The only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode, like Cesar Milan with his dogs … Around Packer, his boorish friend, insulting and objectifying ways of talking about women gain approval, so he trots out borrowed, misogynistic man-talk. Withering under the collective glare of his politically correct employees, phrases like “respect women” gain smiles and halt frowns, so that’s what he offers. > > […] > > Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael’s database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don’t require much present-reality data to retrieve. When kids quote adults or movies, they seem precocious, and gain approval. In an era where more kids are raised by TV than by parents, parroting movie lines comes more naturally than repeating bromides learned from parental figures or at churches and temples. > > Recall that social calendars force you through later stages whether or not you master previous ones. So what about later stages? Michael is not quite as enamored of medals and certificates as Dwight because (as a lousy student) he never got very good at earning them, and could therefore not get seriously addicted to them. > > Finally, Michael has poorly developed peer-affiliation drives. He wants to be the center of attention, not one among many equals in a huddle of peers. When Michael appears to be operating under a peer-affiliation drive (the sort that animates Andy), he is really casting child behaviors into a teen mould. He believes that specific people, rather than formal or informal groups,are cool or admirable (proxy parental figures, older siblings). If they are not cool or admirable, they must be made to view him as cool and admirable (younger siblings). I was struck by a line in an appendix, saying this is the same level that Nazi bureaucrats were at. Just for fun, let’s compare the rest of Rao’s profile of Michael with Arendt’s profile of Adolf Eichmann (all quotes taken from my [Eichmann In Jerusalem](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/) review): > Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? And: > The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk” – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. And finally (this time in my voice): > If [Arendt] has any thesis at all, it’s that Eichmann believed in something larger than himself. We usually encourage this sort of thing, but I think the prosocial version involves having a specific larger-than-yourself thing in mind. Eichmann (says Arendt) just liked larger-than-himself things in general, and the Nazi vision of eternal struggle for racial supremacy was the biggest thing he could find in the vicinity. We’ll later see that he had a strange respect for Zionists, and this was because they too believed in something larger than themselves. Eichmann’s infamous cliches were the cliches of pomp and circumstance and glory and high words, the ones which made him feel like he was engaged in a great enterprise whether or not there was anything behind them. The reason he admitted neither to “just following orders”, nor to a deep personal belief in anti-Semitism, was that his loyalty to Hitler came from neither. When Hitler said to kill all the Jews, he gladly complied; if Hitler had said to kill all the Christians, he would have done that too. Not because he was a drone following orders to save his skin, but because he believed. Not in any of the specifics of Nazi ideology. Not even in Hitler’s personal judgment. Just in whatever was going on at the time. IV. When he gets to the next section, on Losers, Rao mostly forgets the developmental psych. Now this is a book on status economics. Rao’s poetic description: > Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live. > > In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being. > > You and I know them as Losers. Being a Loser means clinging to the delusion of being special, while also being fully accepted by your social group (indeed, your specialness only matters instrumentally and insofar as other people appreciate you for it). But these two imperatives are Scylla and Charybdis: insist too hard on actually being special and you’re a narcissist who everyone hates; try too cravenly to seek acceptance, and you’re acknowledging other people are better than you. Rao views Loserdom as a series of conspiracies to manage this paradox. The end solution looks something like "everyone is special in their own way”. > Loser dynamics arelargely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity. But unlike the delusions of the Clueless (false confidence of the Dunning-Kruger variety which we saw last time), which are maintained through the furious efforts and desperate denials on the part of the deluded individuals themselves, Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we’ll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures. > > Loser above-averageness is generally not based on an outright falsehood. Unlike Michael’s pretensions to comic genius, which are strictly not true, Pam really is the best artist in the group. The delusion lies not in a false assessment of her artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate her on the basis of art in the first place. > > In other words, Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other […] > > At the life-script level, the game-playing social contract creates complete nominal illegibility. Each individual in a group is judged according to a custom life script that makes it impossible to compare two lives within the group. Pam’s life has a redemptive script based on the fact that she is the cutest one in the office, can paint well, and forms the “It” couple with Jim. Kevin’s is based on the fact that he is in a band. Creed’s uniqueness lies in his weirdness…Remember, you are unique, just like everybody else. A second, corollary paradox: Groucho Marx joked that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But then why do people ever associate in clubs? Suppose you joined a club that was clearly not good enough for you - maybe you’re a famous billionaire and they’re a bunch of losers who watch crappy TV in a basement once a week. Why would you be in this club? But suppose you tried to join a club that was clearly too good for you - you’re a poor person with no social skills, and you apply to the rich billionaires’ country club. Why would they ever accept you? This suggests that people won’t join clubs that are too much higher or lower status than they are. But why would they join clubs that are even slightly higher or lower status? Wouldn’t you expect nobody ever joins anything except in the vanishingly rare case where their status and the club’s status are exactly the same? Rao is trying to make the point that all associations require some level of status illegibility. If you knew status perfectly - if you went around with “Status: 6.8/10” tattooed on your forehead - then you could see a club all of whose members had statuses 6.2 - 6.5, and know that you could do better. So instead, the same social conspiracy that keeps people convinced they have useful talents, also keeps status illegible. This takes the form of everyone teasing each other, creating a constant churn of minor status increases and decrements which is too complicated for anyone to track properly. (Rao says that the single-highest and single-lowest status people in any group can sometimes be legible - creating an observable range for what status people in the group can be, ie “we’re for people between 6/10 and 7/10” - but the middle always has to be illegible, to allow the majority of people to preserve their polite fiction that they’re among the higher-status members of their group.) This section on status economics ends with a digression on jokes. Not as in knock-knock jokes. Jokes where one person makes fun of another, gaining status at their expense. These kinds of jokes are status economics transactions. According to Rao, the minimum viable Loser joke is three people: the joker, the victim, and an audience. The joker makes a joke. The victim has a chance to retort (eg “takes one to know one!”) and the audience decides how to mentally update everyone’s status. Rao uses examples from The Office, but I haven’t seen it, so I was thinking about [an episode](https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/The_Comeback) of Seinfeld: > When George was stuffing himself with shrimp at a meeting, Reilly remarked, "Hey, George, the ocean called. They're running out of shrimp." Slow-witted George could not think of a comeback until later, while driving to the tennis club to meet Jerry. His comeback was: "Oh, yeah, Reilly? Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you." > > Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer did not think 'jerk store' was a good comeback mainly because "there are no jerk stores." Elaine suggests, "Your cranium called. It's got some space to rent." Jerry suggests, "The zoo called. You're due back by six." Kramer finally thinks George should just tell Reilly that he slept with his wife. > > After discovering that Reilly was let go from the Yankees and now works for Firestone, George flies to Akron, Ohio just to try the jerkstore line. When he says it, however, Reilly responds, "What's the difference? You're their all-time best seller." George, unprepared for this, ends up using Kramer's line. He's then told that Reilly's wife is in a coma. Rao asks: in what sense did Reilly successfully “score” on George? Suppose George had been a very stupid person, and hadn’t understood that Reilly’s comment was supposed to be teasing/hurtful; he would have been unaffected. Or suppose he had something totally outlandish (“Yes, but there are canyons on Mars”), then insisted that it was a brilliant comeback and let Reilly exhaust/embarrass himself trying to prove it wasn’t? In contrast, if there had been a third person there (let’s say a love interest who both George and Reilly were pursuing), this pointless narcissistic zero-stakes game would become relevant: the love interest gets to evaluate the two against each other, and award status to the victor. This isn’t always the wittier of the two. You can also imagine a world where George says “Excuse me, I have an eating disorder, I think it’s incredibly stigmatizing for you to bully me like this.” Then the third person gets to decide whether to treat this as Reilly making a hilarious joke and George being too thin-skinned to take it, or as Reilly saying something offensive and George bravely calling him out. Crucially, if she wants, she can let her decision hinge on whether she liked Reilly or George better to begin with, or whether one or the other would be a better ally in the future - so this is part status-transaction and part status-test. But in the actual Seinfield episode, there is no love interest. George and Reilly are trying to score points on each other, totally unaware that this is meaningless. For Rao, this is a sure sign of Cluelessness - anyone with social skills would realize no status could be gained or lost and the whole game is pointless. So Loser jokes are 3+ people, and Clueless jokes are 2 people. Continuing the pattern, a Sociopath joke must be for one person - the joker amusing himself, totally unconcerned whether anyone else appreciates it. V. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil. They’re just . . . unbeholden to anyone else. They might still follow the rules because it advantages them to do it, or because they have personally chosen to follow some moral code they happen to like. But they don’t crave approval from anyone, not even abstract concepts. If the Clueless come from arrested development, and Losers from normal development and its attendant status economics, Sociopaths are formed by a sort of dark enlightenment. They have a moment when they realize nothing is true and everything is permissible. Rao’s poetic side writes: > Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there areno social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something specialabout the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe. > > There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking. > > Maskis an appropriate term for any social reality created through subtraction, because an appearance of human-like agency for non-human realities is what the inhabitants require. By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special. > > All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally notbe a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy. > > […] > > When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued. To create medals and ranking schemes for the benefit of the Clueless is to see them as mere baubles yourself. To turn status-seeking into a control mechanism is to devalue status. > > To devalue something is to judge any meaning it carries as inconsequential. In terms of our metaphor of masks of gods, the moment you rip off a mask and wear it yourself, whatever that mask represents becomes worth much less. So the Sociopath’s journey is fundamentally a nihilistic one. > > The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious. > > Suddenly, it becomes apparent that allsocial realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans. > > The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulatingsocial realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors. > > Losing thisillusion is a total-perspective-vortex moment for the Sociopath: he comes face-to-face with the oldest and most fearsome god of all: the absentGod. In that moment, the Sociopath viscerally experiences the vast inner emptiness that results from the sudden dissolution of all social realities. There’s just a pile of masks with no face beneath. Just quarks and stuff. Both Losers and Clueless are trying to manipulate other people’s impressions of them. Sociopaths are trying to manipulate reality. Reality includes other people’s impressions - if your goal is to become President, in some sense you care what the electorate thinks of you. But it’s an instrumental goal. Sociopaths crave the Presidency (or whatever) and use other people’s good opinions as stepping-stones. Losers and Clueless crave the good opinions directly. Once you stop craving other people’s good opinions, you lose some mental blocks that would normally prevent you from coming up with manipulative strategies. Rao says the most basic Sociopath manuever is “heads I win, tails you lose” - coming up with some way of arranging systems so that they get the credit for good results while avoiding the blame for bad ones. A simple strategy is to come up with a plan and appoint a Clueless pawn as Director Of The Plan. If the plan goes well, it was always your idea and you hand-picked and mentored the person who carried it out. If the plan goes poorly, it was always the director’s idea, you maybe thought it had some promise but he clearly bungled the execution. But this is a weak 101-level version of the maneuver; [the real thing](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-v-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose/) involves a bunch of bureaucracies, committees, and total deniability. Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit. Is everyone else against this? Do they view it as duplicity and oppression? Rao says no. Sociopaths aren’t just CEOs. They’re priest-kings, creating meaning for everyone else. The Clueless demand a world of legible rules, legible rewards and punishment, and a legible Authority tracking everyone’s balance. Sociopaths, who create companies, religions, governments, and every other form of authority, help Clueless people live in the legible gamified rank-able worlds their minds crave. I’m less able to follow Rao’s explanation of “Loser spirituality” and how Sociopaths control it. My guess is something like: Losers “worship” positive emotions, belongingness, and “good vibes”, within carefully obfuscated conspiracies of mutual status-blindness. These aren’t really capable of dealing with the real world: a typical fiction is that “we’re all really talented and gave our all on this project”, but in fact the project might be failing. Sociopaths are outside those conspiracies and outside local status competitions, ie your CEO isn’t going to share banter over a glass of beer with you. So they are allowed to (carefully, emotionlessly) communicate/represent/convey reality to the status-maintenance conspiracies in a way where no particular member loses status by admitting reality first. Although in some vague sense the Sociopaths are oppressing and manipulating everyone else, this isn’t how it feels from the inside: both Clueless and Losers are grateful to the Sociopaths for taking the burden of confronting reality off their shoulders. If the Sociopath fails at this, and a Clueless or Loser has to confront reality unmediated, they’ll either have a very bad time but eventually bounce back, or become a Sociopath themselves. VI. So that’s The Gervais Principle. Is any of it true? I don’t find myself or the people I know best falling clearly into any of these archetypes. They’re useful to have around. I can see pieces of all of them. But none are a great match. I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone. I’ve occasionally suggested that all politics should be replaced with some kind of system for calculating how much utility every option has, then doing whichever one is best (bonus points if it’s on the blockchain). But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer. Sociopaths are supposed to fiercely distrust collectivism and come up with their own, usually utilitarian-inspired morality, which I identify with. But I can’t manipulate my way out of a paper bag. Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y. I have a group of friends, and within that group of friends I’m acutely aware of the things I’m unusually good at vs. bad at, and I worry a lot about whether my strengths qualify me to be a member in good standing. My status within that group is illegible and I prefer that to the alternative. Does [that make me a Loser](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/19/nerds-can-be-bees-too/)? Who controls the microphone in my head? Whose approval do I crave? When I was younger, I remember pretty vividly that it would be whoever I had a crush on at the time. When I started blogging, it became my blog audience. But sometimes it gets hijacked by random store clerks. And I particularly remember being invited to an event with some big name tech people, fretting about whether they would like me, exerting some willpower to remind myself that I was valid with or without their approval, and then realizing afterwards that what I had actually done was fantasize about how if I wasn’t obviously craving their approval, they would be impressed by my independence and put-togetherness and respect me even more. So fine, I (and the few other people I know well enough to use as examples) don’t naturally fall into any of these categories. Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system? If I invent three random types of people: * Green: introverted, long hair, likes the cold, complains too much * Red: cheerful, gets mad at little things, loves pets and children * Blue: financially savvy, bad at romance, natural leader, enjoys biking …then most people will find that they have some traits of each, but that’s just a natural result of the system being made up and useless. Maybe the problem is I’m using this as a psychological type system, but it’s actually supposed to be a business book after all? The namesake principle claims that overperforming Clueless get promoted to middle management, and underperforming Sociopaths get promoted to the top. This ought to be testable. Suppose we looked at a sales firm, or an investment bank, and correlated first-year sales/profits with promotions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that overperformers get promoted to the next level up - after all, the naive ordinary model says you get promoted for good work. Surely most people who underperform their first year won’t get promoted, but the Gervais partisan could say that yes, only a few very special underperformers are real Sociopaths. So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. I would naively predict the top echelons would be made of former normal-to-over-performers, so if someone found they were in fact underperformers that would be a big update for me in favor of all of this Gervais stuff. I can’t find a dataset that would tell me this, but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say. Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here. Finally, it just seems totally wrong to me that the highest-status and lowest-status members of groups/clubs/societies are legible, and everyone in the middle isn’t. I am thinking of some non-formal groups I belong to, and the highest- and lowest- status people are often as confusing as everyone else. The exceptions are formal organizations with presidents or whatever, but even there I couldn’t tell you who the lowest-status person is. VII. That last section might feel harsh, so I want to stress that I liked a lot of things about Gervais Principle. Gervais Principle feels like what psychoanalysis would be like if it weren’t so devoted to making itself incomprehensible. It explained its theories clearly and gave good examples of each. Even though it stuck to really traditional psychoanalytic ideas (the theory of people getting stuck at developmental stages is classic Freud - see eg [anal-retentivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentiveness), [oral fixation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_stage), etc) it vastly exceeded the source material in clarity, plausibility, and ability to avoid naming all of its concepts after barely-related bodily orifices. In particular, I feel like I better understand some of the ideas from[Sadly, Porn](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?s=w). People’s desire to subject themselves to an order created by sociopaths. Everyone keeping a ledger of status transactions. Terror of acting openly, and how it breeds bureaucracy and excessive layers of management. It’s all in here. Lacan claimed there were three different personality structures: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert. Suggestive, but I can’t squeeze these into matching Rao’s triad. For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least. Likewise, Lacan says psychotics are incapable of using language normally, instead retreating to stock phrases - a suspiciously good match for Rao’s Clueless description. But Lacanian psychotics are most able to act and least dependent on other people’s approval, which is totally the opposite of Rao’s system. [Clinical Introduction](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction?s=w) hints at a rare personality type who has passed beyond neurosis, and is able to have normal healthy self-motivated desires that are not just the desires of others. It doesn’t dwell on this type, because they rarely see psychoanalysts, but it sounds like a good match for Rao’s Sociopaths. That would mean we have to map all three main Lacanian types into Rao’s Clueless and Losers - but I have no idea how to do this faithfully. So I am less impressed by the typology itself than in the book’s ability to ask questions - or, more precisely, to make the reader ask questions. This is its “organizational literacy” - when confronting people or groups, you can ask things like: * What narrative script is a person relying on in order to maintain their sense of specialness? * Which idea/ghost/model controls the microphone that produces the voice in some person’s brain at any given time? * How has the bureaucracy of this organization been designed to redirect credit and blame in ways that serve its leaders? * What sources of reward is this person addicted to, and how has that changed the lens through which they see the world? Most people have a special place in their heart for the book that first made them understand the idea of status economics. Gervais Principle does a good enough job with this that I’m sure it had a profound effect on some people. For me, that role was already taken by an unusually good college psych textbook, plus Robin Hanson’s blogging as remedial lessons, so I feel less transformed. Still, it never hurts to get reminders. This book made me more aware of approval-seeking and status in my life for a little while. I might try Be Slightly Evil next and see if it enlightens me further. You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy, and for a few weeks you vaguely feel like you ought to be the ubermensch. But that’s hard, and it’s not really clear why it would even be a good thing, so eventually you forget about it. The Gervais Principle has a similar effect. By the way, Gervais Principle was originally written as a sequence of six free blog posts. It’s good enough and short enough that, if you enjoyed this review, you might as well read the whole thing. You can find it [here](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/). Or buy the ebook at [this link](https://amzn.to/3slLgzB)	Scott Alexander	53275270	Book Review: The Gervais Principle	acx
# Mantic Monday 5/9/22 ## Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since [my last post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122?s=w) April 18: 1. [Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9941/russia-takeover-of-ukrainian-cities-by-june/): 5% → 2% 2. [Will World War III happen before 2050?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/2534/will-there-be-a-world-war-three-before-2050/): 22% →25% 3. [Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9930/russian-invasion-of-another-country-in-2022/): 5% →10% 4. [Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10002/presidency-of-vladimir-putin-on-feb-1-2023/): 85% → 80% 5. [Peace or cease-fire before 2023?:](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10050/bilateral-ceasefire-between-russia--ukraine/) 65% → 52% 6. [Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10865/russian-declaration-of-war-on-ukraine-2022/): (new) → 19% ## Aborcasting IE predicting the results of the recent Supreme Court link. Quick summary: markets already expected that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade (~70% soon), but this moved them closer to 95% immediately. Democrats’ chances in the mid-terms went up 3-5% on the news. Markets are extremely skeptical of claims that this will lead to bans on gay marriage or interracial marriage, or that the Democrats will respond with (successful) court-packing. A single very small and unreliable market says the leak probably came from the left, not the right. Going through at greater length one-by-one: First: how much did the leak change predictions about the case itself? PredictIt had [a market going](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7504/Will-SCOTUS-strike-down-Mississippi-ban-on-pre-viability-abortions-in-Dobbs), which said that even before the leak there was only a 15% chance the Court would make Mississippi allow abortions; after the leak, that dropped to 4%. A Metaculus question on Roe v. Wade overturned by 2028 went from 70% to 95%: A [question on court packing](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3617/will-the-us-supreme-court-change-size-by-2050/) hasn’t moved at all, suggesting Metaculus doesn’t think this response is in the Democratic playbook. A question on [Obergefell v. Hodges](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10686/obergefell-v-hodges-overturned-by-2030/), with good participation both before and after the leak, shows no change in probability - it stays consistently around 18-20%. Here’s [PredictIt](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/6874/Which-party-will-control-the-Senate-after-2022-election) on Republicans’ chances of taking the Senate in November: The red line marks the Supreme Court leak. After a month of near-stability, Democrats’ chances went from 22% to 29%, before stabilizing around 26%. Markets on the Senate and on other sites like [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-control-the-us-senate-after-the-2022-election) tell a similar story. This is as far as we can go without using Manifold. Manifold questions have much less volume than PredictIt or Metaculus, and I have much less confidence in them, but for the record, here are a few: Disclaimer: I moved that one a bit myself, it was around 77% and I thought that was too high. Despite the fearmongering, this one looks about right to me. Disclaimer that Manifold probably can’t handle probabilities this small correctly and there’s no reason to think 0.2% is more realistic than 2%. It’s not 10% though. I couldn’t find some markets I wanted, so I’ve created them on Manifold for you to bet on: 1. [Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-the-supreme-court-leakers-iden) 2. [Will Congress legalize abortion nationally in the next 5 years?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-there-be-a-federal-law-legaliz) 3. [Will Congress ban abortion nationally in the next 5 years?](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/will-there-be-a-federal-law-banning) By the way, [in 2018, I got this horribly wrong](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/15/five-more-years/) - I said only a 1% chance of Roe v. Wade getting repealed in the next 5 years. I’ll comment on that further when I review that post in 2023. ## What For-casting? Many of you remain skeptical of prediction markets. It was one of the top answers on the [What Opinion Of Scott/ACX Do You Disagree With?](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ukivdk/what_opinion_of_scottssc_do_you_disagree_with_the/i7pmswx/) question on the subreddit, and there’s [a relevant thread](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6472.0.html) on the bulletin board too. So I guess it’s time to trot out my semi-annual lecture on why I think prediction markets are good. A lot of the criticism focused on “are they really more accurate than the experts?” I have two answers there: first, a proof that (under certain assumptions) prediction markets should be at least as good as any other expert. Second, why this is the wrong question, and accuracy isn’t prediction markets’ killer app. First the proof. Suppose that there was some specific expert who consistently outperformed prediction markets. For example, suppose Nate Silver was on average better than Polymarket. After this had been happening for a while, you would catch on. And then whenever Polymarket and Nate disagreed, you could bet money on Nate’s position on Polymarket and win. The exact amount you could make would depend on how much money was on the relevant Polymarket question and how strongly Nate and Polymarket disagreed, but as Polymarket gets bigger the limit tends toward infinity. So with a big enough prediction market, one of two things must be true: either there is no outside expert who is clearly better than the market. Or you can get very rich easily. Either one seems pretty good. (right now, Nate Silver is better than PredictIt. I noticed this last election and made a few thousand dollars. If PredictIt had been as big then as Polymarket was now, either I would have made a few hundred thousand dollars, or - much more likely - someone else would have been incentivized to beat me to the trade, and the market would be as accurate as Nate by the time I looked at it). Just because nobody can consistently outperform prediction markets doesn’t mean people can’t do it once in a while. Scott Adams said that Trump would definitely win in 2016 when prediction markets were only saying 20% chance or so. This doesn’t mean Scott Adams is smarter than prediction markets, it means he got lucky. Nothing here rules out lucky people beating the market. It just rules out actually smart people beating the market so consistently that you can notice it before the problem gets corrected. Or at least, if this does happen, you can get very rich easily. Moving on to the second point: I don’t think accuracy is the killer app. The killer apps are trust, aggregation, and clarity. On the DSL threat, someone brought up that the US government was quicker to call the Russian invasion of Ukraine than most prediction markets. I agree this happened. In some sense, it’s unsurprising; the US government has spy satellites, moles in the Kremlin, and lots of highly-paid analysts. Of course they should do better than everyone else. And yet “trust the US government” has so far failed to solve all of our epistemic problems. Partly this is because the US government constantly disagrees with itself (the FDA got in a fight with Biden over vaccine readiness; Trump’s EPA and Biden’s EPA made very different statements on climate change). Partly it’s because for internal political reasons or military/geopolitical reasons, the US government has lots of incentives to lie or stretch the truth. Partly it’s because other organizations with the same advantages as the US government make counterclaims (eg the Ukrainian government said their intelligence told them Russia wouldn’t invade, and they also seemed pretty trustworthy). The point of prediction markets isn’t that they have good spy satellites. It’s to aggregate information from a bunch of different sources weighted by trust. We can’t trust any individual to do this, because they would just have their own bias (even if they started out unbiased, once they became important enough to matter, biased interests would take them over). All prediction markets everywhere should give the same result. Proof: if this wasn’t true, you could get rich easily by buying the one with the lower number, shorting the one with the higher number, and making a consistent profit no matter what happened. This prediction is experimentally confirmed: different prediction markets are usually within a few percentage points of each other on the same question. That makes them very different from newspapers / governments / pundits / etc. They form a natural waterline which can be taken as a precise readout of what the smartest and most-clued-in people think about a certain topic. Prediction markets aren’t competing with Nate Silver or spy satellites, any more than the stock market is competing with investment banks and market analysts. Prediction markets are competing with newspapers, pundits, and government departments. They’re a source of dis-intermediated information, short-circuiting everyone who sets themselves up as authoritative intermediators. A prediction market future is one where disinformation, propaganda, and narrative construction - while not impossible - are constrained by everyone having access to the same facts, through a medium impossible for any single bad actor to influence. ## Discorcasting Manifold recently ran an unintentional, kind of crazy experiment in manipulating prediction markets. Remember, Manifold is a place where anyone can start their own markets using play money. They’re still trying to come up with a business model, but so far you can spend real money to buy extra play money. Why would you do that? I don’t know, but to sweeten the pot, even a little real money can buy lots of play money. This is the background to the ACX Discord Moderator Market. There’s a community on the chat app Discord associated with my blog. Earlier this year, the administrator announced they were going to step down and appoint a replacement, and some people on Manifold started speculating on who it would be. One of the markets that sprang up was [“[Will] the replacement administrator for [ACX Discord] identify as female?”](https://manifold.markets/Honourary/the-replacement-administrator-for-a) My read is that the right answer for this is around 10%. A bunch of surveys have shown that the ACX community is about 90% male / 10% female, and the Discord seems pretty similar. There were no especially strong candidates for moderator, and the short list of names that got passed around were also about 90% male / 10% female. I’m just one guy, don’t trust me too much, but I would have gone with 10%. What actually happened was - the market shot up near 100%. Everyone bet against it until it was back below 50-50, and then it shot up again. This cycle repeated 5-6 times, after which it finally stabilized around 10% (it’s at 7% now). I don’t know exactly what went on here. My guess is that somebody spent thousands of dollars of real money testing whether it was possible to manipulate prediction markets. They got an absolute fortune in play money, then spent it all on trying to push this market up as high as it would go. The end result: this has become the highest-volume market in the history of Manifold, with about 5x more volume than runners-up like “will Russia invade Ukraine?” The $1.4 million in play money corresponds to about $14,000 in real dollars. Not all of this was spent by the manipulator. Some of it was normal trading, and some of it was people betting against the manipulator. But if we assume that about half the trading on here was related to the manipulation, that suggests that the manipulator spent about $3,500 in real money, and then 50 to 100 other people invested all the play money they’d gotten through normal channels in bringing the probability back down again. Again trying to make sense of all this: lots of people want prediction markets to succeed, Manifold is popular, and some people (including me) have donated money to them out of goodwill. Maybe someone who wanted to donate $3,500 decided that instead they’d use it to buy play money and manipulate a market, for the lulz. And then of course traders would trade on the massively mispriced market, instead of the normal ones that might only have tiny mispricings. And that would bring it back down to the default 10%. A lot of times, people ask: what if some very rich person tried to manipulate a prediction market? Like, what if there was a market on whether Trump would win the presidency, and Trump himself dropped $100 million into making it say YES, either out of vanity or in the hopes that people would think he was “inevitable” and stop resisting. And the theory has always been: if traders see a clearly mispriced market, they’ll rush to it and correct the mispricing in order to make easy money. Trump would be out $100 million and the market would stay correct. We’ve never been able to test the theory, and until someone drops $100 million into a real money market, we never will. But this is pretty close. Someone spent $3,500 of real money on a play money market where most other people were trading with the equivalent of $10. Within a week, the market had soaked up a pretty good chunk of the trading resources in the entire play economy, and was back at the exact right level. I think if Trump ever tries market manipulation we’ll do just fine. One weird coda to this story: the process of choosing the new administrator continues, and (surprisingly!) two of the leading candidates are female. Someone might be about to make a lot of money. ## Morecasting Some markets that interested me recently: Metaculus on [cloned dogs](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9784/min-cost-of-dog-cloning-in-2030/): I was surprised they were asking about minimum price rather than whether it would be available at all, so I checked and - it’s already available? You can just get your dog cloned if you want? Currently it costs about $50,000. Weird way to find this out. Metaculus on [anti-aging](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/353/will-someone-born-before-2001-live-to-be-150/): This one’s been running since 2016, but I only just noticed it. I can’t say it’s wrong, it’s just strange to see such a wild possibility above the 50% level. It seems to have gradually gone down in the late teens, then picked back up again in 2020. A lot of commenters are making fun of this for being too low. Metaculus on [Xi](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10634/xi-jinping-re-elected-in-2022/): Polymarket is [less bullish](https://polymarket.com/market/will-xi-jinping-remain-general-secretary-of-the-ccp-through-2022): …but it’s hard to tell if this is a genuine difference, or a result of the different questions (Xi loses election vs. loses power by any means including death). [Polymarket on the Ethereum merge](https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos): There are some interesting new prediction markets in the works - nothing ready for prime-time yet, but hopefully I’ll have something to report in the next month or two.	Scott Alexander	54209574	Mantic Monday 5/9/22	acx
# Open Thread 223 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?). In this week’s news: 1: Based on your ratings, I’ve selected twelve finalists for the Book Review Contest, and will be posting one every Friday from now until July. 2: Comment of the week is [hiddenhare on UX](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/uigvzb/why_do_people_prefer_my_old_blogs_layout_to/i7cl10p/) (and the thread below). But also, [Vim](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs/comment/6403268): > 3D video games are running enough math to compute and draw an entire three-dimensional world with tens of millions of triangles and complex interacting physics, and they're doing it SIXTY TIMES EVERY SECOND (at least! More than twice that if you're using a 144Hz monitor). That is, they're doing it once every ~16.67 miliseconds. (6.95ms at 144 frames per second). Consider that fact, next time you open some boring 2D software on your computer and it takes a couple seconds to load a dozen flat buttons and images, and then you click on a menu and it inexplicably hitches for a few hundred milliseconds. This is a pretty striking observation and I’m interested in hearing people’s thoughts on what’s up.	Scott Alexander	53968986	Open Thread 223	acx
# Berkeley Meetup This Saturday Why: Because we’re having [spring meetups in 70 cities](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-in-seventy-cities?s=w), and Berkeley is one of them. I’m signal-boosting this one because I’ll be able to attend. When: Saturday, May 7, 1:00 PM. Where: UC Berkeley, [the lawn](https://www.google.com/maps/place/37%C2%B052'20.2%22N+122%C2%B015'46.5%22W/@37.8722716,-122.2634668,19z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x978d110947c97732!8m2!3d37.8722705!4d-122.2629196) just east of West Circle and north of Free Speech Bikeway. 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	53690526	Berkeley Meetup This Saturday	acx
# Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's? This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I [asked my readers what they thought](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/). They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and: …yep, they preferred the SSC layout Last summer, I [repeated the experiment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey?s=w), this time after I had made the switch: A few months ago, I wrote a post called [Why Do I Suck](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck?s=w), which discussed some people’s complaints about the new blog. In the comments, lots of people said their main complaint was that Substack’s design was worse than SSC’s. EG: I think that all of this together is pretty strong evidence that most people prefer the old Slate Star Codex layout to the new Substack-mandated ACX. This is weird, because the old Slate Star Codex layout was - mostly something I threw together in a day or two. I am widely recognized as not having taste, and the only website I ever developed before this was a Geocities site that was even worse. A few of my web designer friends helpfully smoothed over some rough edges (in one case literally, Apple-style), but the basic design remained my amateurish rush job. Slate Star Codex: Original version Slate Star Codex: After some web designer friends spruced it up Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on? Is it selection bias? My previous readership is, by definition, people who liked my old blog, so of course they like my old blog more than some new one? I’m including this because I know someone will bring it up in the comments if I don’t, but it seems unlikely; surely most people selected themselves in for the content, with the design a distant second. Is it something something mobile? I put no effort into optimizing my old design for mobile phones, so maybe that adds another layer of complexity. But I think at some point some web designer friend made a version that worked for mobile, so this can’t be too hard. Is the dichotomy not me vs. Substack, but WordPress (also a great tech company) vs. Substack? I think this explains some of it. But some of the people in the comments talked about the colors and layout in particular. Substack probably remembers the history of MySpace vs. Facebook. MySpace let people customize their page however they wanted, and most people made them into some sort of <blink>-tag-related monstrosity. Facebook gave everyone a consistent minimalist design that let people focus on the content, and took over the world. I’m not (exactly) questioning Substack’s decision not to make blog layout very customizable. But how come their standard non-customizable layout is (apparently) worse than my old layout? If they forced everyone into the standard non-customizable layout of 2015 SSC, would that be a straight utility gain? This may be a little too cute, but I can’t help but think of [Whither Tartaria](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria)? In every art form, complicated colorful designs transition to “modern” minimalist designs over time. Whenever anyone asks, people say they hate the modern minimalist designs and wish they could go back to the complicated colorful ones. But for some reason nobody ever does. Is this just the Internet version of the same general phenomenon?	Scott Alexander	49763926	Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's?	acx
# Every Bay Area House Party You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it. You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob. “Hi, Bob!” “Hey, good to see you again!” “What’s new?” “Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?” “No! What do you do?” “War insurance!” “War insurance?” “Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.” “Isn’t that massively correlated risk?” “Yeah. The idea is, we sell war insurance to companies who do badly if there’s a war - tourist attractions and the like. Then we sell the same amount of peace insurance to military contractors. As long as we get the probabilities and costs right, we make the same profit either way.” “Neat idea, how’s it going?” “Great! Ayatollah Khameini just bought a ten billion dollar policy.” “Of the war version or the peace version?” “Can’t say, confidentiality agreement.” “Did I hear someone talking about fintech?” A man with a buzz-cut. His shirt had an incomprehensible symbol - his favorite band’s symbol? His company’s logo? A chaos magic sigil? and he was carrying a half-decayed slice of pizza. “I’m Ramchandra,” he said. “I’m working for a fintech startup. Love to hear from anyone else in the business!” “I’m Bob, good to meet you. Who do you work for?” “You know ViraCoin?” “No, tell me about them.” “New crypto. You mine it by promoting about it. Once every eight minutes, a decentralized algorithm searches for tweets containing the word ‘ViraCoin’ with a positive sentiment score, weights them by number of likes, and then picks one at random to award a ViraCoin to.” “Sounds…awful.” “No, you don’t understand. This is just the first step. Once we make it super-big, we’ll introduce other things into the algorithm. Charities. Political causes. We’ll have millions of people competing to praise UNICEF in order to get that next million-dollar ViraCoin drop. If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. We’re an at-scale solution to awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…” You wander off. There’s an open bedroom, with a few people sitting on the bed talking inside. A woman in a blue dress is saying something about how she’s trying to build a secular scientific interpretation of Buddhism. “There’s no alpha left in secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism,” says the guy on her right, a thin white man with a carefully trimmed beard. “Half of California spent the past hundred years trying to create secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism, you can’t throw a stone without hitting one.” “You don’t understand,” says the woman, “they stopped halfway. There are a bunch of Buddhist doctrines nobody’s ever come up with secular rationalist versions of. Like reincarnation. You ask those Californians about Buddhism, they’ll say it’s all just about brain waves and mindfulness, but change the topic when you get to reincarnation, or say it’s all an ignorant myth.” “So how do you come up with a secular scientific interpretation of reincarnation?” “Have you ever heard about the quantum suicide thought experiment? Suppose that there are near-infinite parallel universes. There are versions of you in some of them - people who are exactly identical to you and each other. It’s meaningless to ask which of them ‘you’ ‘are’” - she made the scare quotes with her hands - “because you’re all of them at once. ‘You’ are the mathematical pattern, not the atoms, anything that instantiates that pattern is you. So if you shoot yourself, you won’t die, because you can’t have the experience of not existing. You’ll just find your thread of consciousness ‘waking up’ in those universes where the gun jammed. Or where a sudden gust of wind knocked you over and out of the bullet’s path. Total immortality.” “How does that imply reincarnation?” “Cause I don’t believe in infinite parallel universes, or infinite versions of you. But your consciousness can transfer to a being that’s slightly different from you. That happens every moment, the atoms in your brain never stay in exactly the right place. So when you die in our universe, which is the only one you are, your consciousness ‘wakes up’ into the other being whose internal pattern is most like yours.” “Then how come people don’t all have each other’s memories?” “Even in Buddhism, reincarnation isn’t a transfer of souls. It’s a transfer of karmic bundles. Suppose that you’re violent and greedy your whole life, and then you die. You ‘wake up’ in the consciousness of the most similar being you can find. Maybe it’s a wolf, or a praying mantis. But suppose you use your reason and really lean into the purely human virtues. Then you’re basically guaranteed to ‘wake up’ as another person. Not that they’ll have your memories or anything. They’re just whose qualia you’ll be experiencing.” “So your thread of consciousness can never wink out of existence?” “Of course it can, that’s the whole point of Buddhism. You need to become nothing, gradually, naturally, in a way where each step is causally linked to the step before. Then, when you die, your consciousness won’t continue at all. It’ll just stay nothing. Nirvana! Seems pretty straightforward to me. I don’t know why everyone else keeps saying that Buddhism has ‘supernatural elements’ or parts that are ‘hard to square with modern science’.” She’s gathered a small audience now. “What about the Pure Land stuff?” asks a guy in a beret. “If you say the words Namu Amida Butsu ten times, then when you die Amida Buddha will pluck your soul from the aether and ensure it gets reborn in his heaven dimension. Still doesn’t sound very scientific to me.” “No,” she says, “come on, that makes perfect sense. Imagine you’re a group of benevolent superintelligent aliens. You know all this stuff about reincarnation, so you want to help. You tile your home solar system with trillions of sentient beings living in a heaven dimension, and you make sure that every so often, they all say Namu Amida Butsu at some super-high rarefied level of consciousness. There are so many entities, of such high consciousness, who are so associated with the phrase Namu Amida Butsu, that any consciousness that has ever said the words at all inevitably pattern-matches to one of those. When that consciousness ends, it ‘wakes up’ as one of the entities in the heaven dimension whose information-patterns are correlated with it through the focus on those words.” “In this hypothetical, how do the aliens know Japanese?” “They don’t! We’re talking about information-patterns! The signified, not the signifier! They’re focusing on the concept of I call upon some powerful entity that has seized control of the cycle of reincarnation to draw my soul into their heaven dimension, and the closest human-language equivalent to that is Namu Amida Butsu. So by saying it, your information pattern shortens the distance to their information pattern!” “I still don’t think this is what the Japanese intended,” says Beret Guy. “Oh,” says the woman in the blue dress, “and you’re some kind of expert on Japanese Buddhism, I suppose?” “Mmmmm, kind of? I was really into Zen in college. I would sit zazen for two, three hours every day. A few years after I graduated, I took the plunge and quit my job at Google to study a Zen monastery near Kanazawa. The first day I was there, the master said ‘This very world is the Pure Land, and each one of you is already enlightened.’ I was really relieved, because I’d thought I would have to stay at the monastery like ten, maybe twenty years to get enlightened. So I thanked him and went off to pack my stuff. He ran after me, asked ‘Where are you going?’ I said that honestly I wasn’t that into the Zen aesthetic and I was just there to get enlightened - but if I was already enlightened, then mission accomplished and I might as well go back to Google. I spent a couple days seeing Kanazawa, then flew home.” “You moron, that’s just a cryptic riddle. You have to spend the years at the monastery in order to appreciate the sense in which you’re already enlightened.” “Nah, I got an email from the Zen master a few months later telling me that I was the best student he’d ever had.” The discussion is starting to get heated, so you wander back into the first room. Bob and Ramchandra are still talking about fintech, but there’s a person of ambiguous gender sitting alone, playing with a fidget spinner. You strike up a conversation: “Hey, nice to meet you.” “Hi,” they say, “I’m Wind, they/them pronouns.” “Please tell me you’re not in fintech.” Wind steals a glance at Bob and Ramchandra and laughs. “Oh god no. I’m an artist slash philosopher.” “What . . . does that involve?” “Right now I’m lying naked on rocky beaches until I almost die of dehydration.” “Is . . . that the art, or the philosophy?” “Both! It all started when I learned about pilot whales. See, we used to think that humans had the biggest brain relative to their body size, and that’s why we were so smart. But it turns out there are loads of animals with bigger brain:body ratios. So it’s got to be something more complicated. People have come up with a lot of measures for calculating animal intelligence: encephalization quotient, neuron number. If you combine them all together, you can get one that mostly makes sense, with the dumbest insects at the bottom and humans on the top. The only exception is pilot whales. However you calculate it out, they should be smarter than we are.” “Huh.” “So I looked up what pilot whales did, and the answer was mostly that they seem to swim up onto beaches and die of dehydration unless they can flop their way back into the sea. Nobody knows why. I sure don’t. But I figure, if they’re smarter than we are, there must be some reason for it. Maybe it’s The Good. You know, like the moral law. I’m not sure. I just feel like it’s an underexplored possibility. So I’m traveling to beaches across the world so I can lie naked on them and almost die of dehydration. And if I learn something important, I’ll write an article about it.” “How did you get the money for this?” “Same place every young would-be philosopher who’s overly confident in a crazy idea gets money . . . ” You and Wind say it together: “ . . . Peter Thiel!” It looks like the food had arrived, so you head to the kitchen. A couple of guys are trying to clear off the table and get the food and drinks set up. You ask if they need help, they say yes, and you find yourself walking with them to their van to bring in more boxes. “What do you do?” you ask. There are two of them, a blond guy and an Asian guy. Blond guy speaks first: “We’re the caterers.” “Oh. That makes sense. What’s it like?” “It sucks,” said Asian guy. “We’re just doing it to make money after my restaurant startup failed.” “Too bad. Tell me about the startup.” “Oh, it was a great idea. You ever read Harry Turtledove? Yeah? We named it after him. Turtledove’s Alternate History Cafe. What would Southern comfort food be like if the South had won the Civil War? Or how would Mexican food taste in a world where Europeans never discovered America?” “How would it taste?” “Some parts would be surprisingly similar! You take your basic taco, and you can keep the tortilla - corn, of course - the tomato salsa, the beans, and the guac. But the cheese and sour cream have got to go - that’s an import from cultures with lactase-persistence. And you can’t have beef or chicken - the typical Aztec meats were rabbit, lizard, and - if you can believe it - axolotl. A common spice was culantro, which is actually noticeably different from Old World cilantro. We think that with time, the Aztecs would have expanded into North America and added bison, and established trade routes with the Inca and gotten potatoes. The conditions in the Mexican Plateau were almost ideal for…sorry, I’m quoting our literature. All our dishes came with a pamphlet explaining when the world-branch it came from diverged from our own and how it differed.” “Well if you served axolotls, I’m not surprised you couldn’t get customers.” “Oh no, we were booked solid every day.” “Then why’d you fail?” “The city shut us down.” “Are axolotls endangered or something?” “Oh no. We asked ourselves - what would modern cuisine be like if the Axis had won WW2? So we made up a whole menu of German-Japanese fusion fare - teriyaki bratwurst, beer-battered sushi, stuff like that.” “What’s wrong with teriyaki bratwurst?” “The waiters had swastika armbands and said ‘Heil Hitler!’ when they took your orders.” “Oh, yeah. I guess that would do it. You going to try again?” “Not sure,” says the blond guy. “John here wants to. I think we should try something else.” “Any particular ideas?” “When we were planning the Axis menu, I told John it would be fine, people had a sense of humor. Then it got us shut down, and I said I really had to eat some humble pie. That gave me an idea. We have all these food metaphors. Eat humble pie. Eat crow. Eat my hat. There’s so much alpha in food metaphors. Imagine - you’re an executive and you steer your company the wrong direction, nobody gets bonuses. As an apology, you take your employees out for dinner at our restaurant and order a crow sandwich. Now they can all see you literally eating crow.” “What would the employees eat?” “Well, we have a lot of teriyaki bratwurst we need to get rid of. That stuff keeps forever.” You finish unloading the food onto the table. A few people trickle in and start eating. You make conversation with a woman to your left. “Hi, what’s your name?” “I’m Sara.” “What do you do?” “I quit my job at Google a few months ago to work on effective altruism. I’m studying sn-risks.” “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?” “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.” “I didn’t think they were still a problem.” “Oh yeah. You look at history, and once every two hundred, three hundred years they get their act together, form a big confederation, and invade either China, the West, or both. It’s like clockwork. 400 AD, you get the Huns. 700, the Magyars. 1000, the first Turks start moving west. 1200, Genghis Khan, killed 10% of the world population. 1400, Tamerlane, killed another 5%. 1650, the Ming-Qing transition in China, also killed 5%. We’re more than 50 years overdue at this point.” “But I would think with modern technology - ” “Exactly! With modern technology, the next time could be so much worse! Usually the steppe nomads are limited to a small fringe around the steppe where they can still graze their horses. But with modern logistics, you can get horse food basically anywhere. There’s no limit to how far the next steppe confederation could get. That’s why I think this is a true existential risk, not just another 5 - 10% of the world’s population like usual.” “I was going to say that with modern technology, it just doesn’t seem like steppe nomads should be such a problem any more.” “That’s what the Ming Dynasty thought in 1650. You know, they had guns, they had cannons, they figured that horse archers wouldn’t be able to take them on anymore. Turned out they were wrong. The nomads got them too.” “Are there even any steppe nomads left?” “Definitely! Lots of people in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, stick to their traditional ways of life. All they need is a charismatic leader to unite them.” “And the effective altruists gave you a grant to work on this?” “Not Open Philanthropy or Future Fund or any of those people, but I was able to get independent funding.” “From who?” you ask, as if you don’t already know the answer. “Same place every overly confident young person gets money! Peter Thiel!” You let her drone on about Avars and Hephthalites for a few more minutes, then politely excuse yourself and strike up a conversation with the guy to your right. “So what do you do?” “Nothing. I got fired a few weeks ago.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” “No, it’s fine. You know what they say. People are like clay pots - getting fired just makes them stronger.” “I never heard anyone say that.” “No, really, it’s fine. I’m not even bitter. Just - five years working on the Trust And Safety team at Twitter, and Musk comes in and fires me just like that.” “Oh, you were involved in that!” “Yeah - are you smirking? You’re not one of those freeze peach people, are you?” “I guess sort of . . . “ “Whatever, I know everyone hates us. But let me tell you, it’s not all just banning any conservative who gets too popular, or burying stories that embarrass the establishment candidate a week before an election. We did good, important work.” “Like what?” “Like - have you heard of the Temple of Artemis? One of the Seven Wonders of the World. Burned down not by a Christian or a Muslim, but by a random Greek guy who wanted his name to be remembered by history, and figured that burning the most beautiful building in the world would ensure it. The Greeks responded by banning anyone from mentioning or recording his name, but the historian Theopompus wrote it down anyway, and it’s survived to the current day. No, I won’t tell it to you. Anyway, I was going to lead a consortium with the censors at Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all the big name sites. We were finally going to complete the ancient Greeks’ work. We were going to memory-hole this guy’s name from the Internet. Even the people at Amazon were going to be on board - they would stop selling editions of the Theopompus book that gives his name. And then, finally, the burning of the Artemision would be properly avenged. We were this close! And then some dumb billionaire waltzes in and says ‘muh free speech’ and ruins everything!” “I actually don’t think that saying ‘we should be able to unperson whoever we want’ helps your case that this is valuable and non-creepy.’ “The Temple of Artemis burner was just the beginning. The ancients used damnatio memoriae as a frequent punishment. How frequent? We don’t know! There’s no way of knowing! We only know when someone like Theopompus defects from the plan. How many ancient Hitlers and Stalins might there have been, now totally forgotten? And how many others were dissuaded from murder or other abominable acts because of the fear of erasure? And now that tool is lost to us forever. I hope you enjoy the world that you and your freeze peach buddies have created.” He storms off in a huff. You finish your food and walk out into the main room. The music if anything seems even louder now. You find the host, tap him on the shoulder. “Hey, do you think you could turn the music down?” “What?” he asks. You swear that the music got louder right when you asked the question. “I SAID, DO YOU THINK YOU COULD TURN THE MUSIC DOWN?” “WHAT?” You’re definitely not imagining it. The music has learned to defend itself against being shut off. If only people had listened to Eliezer Yudkowsky before it was too late. You give up. “This is an amazing party!” you shout. “How do you know all these people?” “I don’t!” he shouts back. “I’m trying Partyr. It’s a new all-in-one party-throwing service. You give them an address, a time, and an ideal number of guests, pick from one of their preset themes, and they make everything happen.” “Including the guests?” “If needed! The idea is, you have some friends you want to impress by throwing a big party. But you don’t know how many of them will come. And you don’t want only two or three people to come, and then it’s really embarrassing. So you set an ideal number of people to come to the party. Then you see how many people RSVPed, and if it’s less than your ideal Partyr sends you enough guests to make up the difference.” “Where do they get the people? Are they employees?” “No, you sign up to be on standby for their service, and they send you a text if someone needs you.” “How many of the people here tonight are paid Partyr guests?” “About half, I think. I got most of the RSVPs I wanted, I just thought maybe with a few more people it could seem extra popular.” “You definitely succeeded there!” You grab a guest on their way to the food table. “Hey, are you here with Partyr?” “Yeah,” she says. She’s a tall woman in a fashionable dress. “This is my third time with the service. They always come through.” “What’s it like?” “It’s pretty great. You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal.” “Have you ever used them to throw a party yourself?” “Oh no, there’s no alpha left in generic Partyr parties. I have my own methods.” “What’s that?” “I shouldn’t tell, but . . . oh, whatever, I’m pretty drunk right now. What you do is - you come up with your ideal guest list - who would you invite if you knew they were going to say yes. Actors, billionaires, all the coolest people in your social circle. Then you send them all an email saying - hey, Elon Musk is going to be at this party, you want to come? Of course they all say yes. Then, a few days before the party, you send out an email - sorry, Elon has to cancel, but we’ve still got [list of actors, billionaires, and all the coolest people in your social circle]. Everyone agrees that’s still a pretty amazing guest list and decides to come anyway. Win win. It’s like that quote about how God is so powerful that He doesn’t even need to exist in order to save us.” “But surely that only works once.” “You only have to do it once, then you get a reputation as a person who throws good parties and all those same people will come again next time. And so will people who want to party with those people, and people who want to party with those people, and . . . ” “Okay, but surely you can do this only once per group of people. If some cool actress gets five invitations to parties with Elon Musk a week, and he never shows up to any of them, eventually she’s going to catch on.” “Yeah, that’s true. There needs to be a way to coordinate this across communities, so that no one person overdoes it. I’m thinking of automating the process and turning it into a startup. That way the app can keep track of who’s already been tricked and who’s ripe for the picking.” “Lies about Elon Musk coming to your party as a service. Capitalism really is great.” “It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk. Depending on who your guests would be interested in, it could be Taylor Swift, or Tyler Cowen, or Peter Thiel . . .” “No, it can’t be Peter Thiel, he’s the one funding the app.” She almost jumps. “What? How did you know? That was supposed to be secret!” “Call it intuition,” you say.	Scott Alexander	53013020	Every Bay Area House Party	acx
# Open Thread 222 This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), or [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php). Also: 1: Philip Tetlock (of Superforecasting fame) and his team are running a new tournament that combines forecasting and persuasion. They want people who are familiar with x-risk and willing to spend ~3 hours a week for a few months thinking/talking about it. People selected to participate will get $2,000 to $10,000 (and some people can win $2,000 as a prize just for applying). [See here for more information and to apply](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15NLDoILtL_jK0X1nLDkWoqAnfAdxOfBvRKxSNU4EpjU/edit). 2: Comments of the week: [Snav explains why he finds Lacan interesting and useful](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction/comment/6258801), and [Hivewired tries the same thing over on her own blog](https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/the-game-of-masks/). 3: New AI alignment group Conjecture [is hiring researchers, engineers, developers, and an office manager](https://www.conjecture.dev/career).	Scott Alexander	53178258	Open Thread 222	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping I: Xi’s Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous ### I. Rise To Power — [Erusian](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921815) on Xi’s rise: > > “Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?” > > Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP. > > Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power. This can create reform tensions which is part of what Xi, by rolling back reforms, wants to resolve. — iVarun [making](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/txyg07/dictator_book_club_xi_jinping/i45rkw3/) what I interpret as a similar point: > Numerous Chinese scholars (these are only relevant when they are aping western or dissident adjacent narratives, no wonder blind spots are so large) have mentioned for nearly a decade now that Xi is this powerful because the Party collectively after internal deliberations decided it. Party is Supreme, Xi on his own is nothing but a figurehead. A medium to get the rest of the structure where it is supposed (relatively, acceptably) to be. > > The internal debate (NPC isn't the only place Chinese Party members talk to each other, which is obvious) was settled by the late 2000s and the consensus was, in keeping with Chinese socio-cultural-political legacies in challenging times to have a strong leader/core to safeguard the Party's future. > > Every subsequent action was in the tactical domain (the anti-corruption drive, the purges, the CCDI, the Institutions setting-up explosion, term limits, etc). > > In fact data shows (MacroPolo often does work which picks up forms of it) that this change pre-dates Xi's ascension and started under Hu in his last 18-24 months or so. > > The Party determines what happens in China. Not some individual. This has been the case since Mao died. Not even Deng had his level of personal unilateral power. > > The strategic goal is to extend the life of the Party because (The Party reports literally say it constantly) Chinese long term development requires a steady, stable leadership and that leadership according to them is the Party, so it is obvious that the first action on this larger and Ultimate Chinese Rejuvination objective would be to make sure the Party is healthy, as per the norms of the era they currently are (since in the age of rapid information sharing, old methods of political work need to be adjusted as well. The Party's internal survey mechanisms of the general Chinese citizenry allows them to feel the pulse of high order items which need to be tackled on certain timelines. This was not possible over long timeline in earlier times). — [Aftagley](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5922427): > I strongly feel like the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor. I did a book review in the SSC comments a few years back, but I'll do a summary here: > > Basically - China pre-Xi wasn't a stable system. The patronage network you outlined in this piece has a serious downside: a newly-appointed paramount leader is necessarily at his absolute weakest in terms of influence at the time he is appointed leader. This is because a large part of being paramount leader is the ability to appoint a bunch of people into important positions who will back your agenda. If you're coming into a position where all the important spots were filled by your (likely ideologically-alienated) predecessor, you come in with not that much ability to accomplish much. Conversely, however, the time when you're most powerful as a leader is when you're right on the cusp of being kicked out of power. You've had time to solidify your reign and appoint a bunch of toadies. > > Think of this as an exact inverse of the american system. Instead of a honeymoon "mandate" at the start of a term, the Chinese leader has more of a gradual ramp up. Instead of a lame duck period, they have a year or so of basically uncontested rule. > > So... if a leader is most powerful right when they're about to get removed, why didn't someone hang onto power before Xi? Well, it's a mix of honest-to-god admiration of Dengism on the part of the former leaders and a shadowy network of retired party officials who still exerted significant sway and could, conceivably, have made life untenable for a would-be emperor. Unfortunately, that network had mostly disolved by the time Xi was facing the boot, so he didn't have to deal with it. > > Mostly though, the previous chinese system didn't work. It really weakened the central government and was quickly losing ground to private industry. It was such a flawed system that reform was basically inevitable - either the party would reassert itself through a strong leader that was able to re-centralize power or it would be glasnosted. And [Sohois](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5925796) adds: > I think "admiration of Dengism" and "shadowy network" kind of understates the main force holding Jiang back which is that Deng himself was still alive for a good portion of his rule. Had Jiang tried to seize power, Deng could simply have swept back in. Jiang likely had the same influence on Hu, and indeed reports often pin Jiang as the main opposition to Xi - Scott asked why the Shanghai Gang didn't oppose the Tsinghua Gang, but the answer is that they did, but chances are Jiang's power had just waned sufficiently by then that he couldn't do much. And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have. — Jaysmt [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/txyg07/dictator_book_club_xi_jinping/i3q8vkq/): > > “Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?” > > I agree with the theory about anti-corruption and personnel retirement timing giving Xi a lucky break, but don't give much credence to the Tsinghua connection, since Hu Jintao was also a Tsinghua grad. > > One other factor was that the anti-corruption drive coincided with a widespread perception of corruption and party disunity. People forget how common petty corruption was in the Hu and Jiang times. Bribes to civil servants, doctors, teachers etc. were a lot more common. It was also much easier for officials to patronize businesses and demand bribes. > > At the same time, the downfall of Bo Xilai was also a gradual process that took months, which publicized fissures within the party unseen for decades. In addition, Xi was well-liked and had a stellar reputation. He was not seen as a close associate of the Shanghai gang, unlike Li Keqiang who was clearly in the CYL faction. > > With that backdrop, it became easier for Xi to convince the party to give him greater authority and powers to investigate corruption. In turn, the power to investigate corruption became a key for him to consolidate power, as almost no official can withstand close scrutiny. > > Even without public investigations against other CCP Politburo standing committee members, Xi and Wang Qishan having the power to investigate "lower-tier" officials breaks up patronage networks. Lower-tier officials are much more likely to pledge allegiance to Xi, knowing Xi has the power to humiliate and jail them, which in turn weakens his competitors in the standing committee and also gives him blackmail against them. ### II. Censorship — [Phil H](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5924647) (writes [Tang Poetry](https://tangpoetry.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) says: > On the censorship issue, I want to complicate the picture a bit. I think all descriptions of increasing Chinese censorship are deeply flawed, because they fail to account for the massive general increase in information that the internet has brought. > > So: "...to people who grew up in Hu’s China, Xi’s regime feels like a clear step backwards." > > I don't know about the regime, but I have access to a lot more information now than I did under Hu, because the internet is better. > > > "The censoring of Southern Weekly, previously a well-regarded Chinese newspaper, is emblematic" > > Sure - but the Southern Weekly and others in the Southern stable, while "well-regarded," were never actually good. What has happened is this: factional debate in China used to sometimes happen in the newspapers. It was exciting to read when it happened. Western observers salivated at the access it gave them to current Chinese political thought, which is usually very opaque. But it was always opinion within the current acceptable range of political possibility. No one who thought the CPC should not be in power ever wrote in the Southern Weekly. > > About 10 years ago (I think), that kind of newspaper debate stopped. It went online, private, and into other channels. Western commentators sighed, and said, oh dear, the newspapers have been censored. But that's not really what happened: they were always very heavily censored. Now they're just heavily censored media where nothing of import is talked about. > > As to total censorship: the internet is routing around. The outbreak of Covid is a classic example. The news got out, really fast. Much faster than the authorities wanted. And they cracked down later, notoriously jailing the doctor who broke the story. But the story still got out. That was basically unthinkable under Hu. (Example: the city where I live, Xiamen, was the site of one of China's few successful environmental protests, back in about 2007. I watched them march in the streets to stop a chemical plant being built near our city center. That news never got out - never reached other people, never got into the media.) > > So the real censorship landscape is: increasing censorship, yes; but failing to keep up with the internet, so overall we are getting more information, not less. > > The same applies here: > > "Universities that previously had a long leash..." universities never had a long leash. This is rose-tinted nonsense. Any prof who had genuinely radical/democratic/non-communist views would have been weeded out at any time during the last 40 years. This is just more people going to university, so censorship has become more visible. > > The other thing I would like people to know about China right now is that Xi's anticorruption campaign has been very effective for ordinary day-to-day stuff. When my older son was born 15 years ago, we stuffed cash in an envelope and gave it to the doctor to make sure my wife was treated well in the hospital. We don't do that any more. > > (There's still plenty of corruption, running through personal acquaintance networks, but the cash bribery part of ordinary transactions has been effectively stamped out in my middle-class city. Teachers react with horror if you try to buy them a gift; we recently had a house refitted and the man who came to check whether our gas main was properly routed wouldn't accept a bribe, so we had to install an extra door.) > > From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better. > > Obligatory disclaimer: Anything positive I say about China or its government should not be understood to mean that I support its censorship, oppression, or imprisonment of innocent people. Phil [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5966521): > I posted the NPC joke in a language-related chat group on WeChat (China's Facebook). There were no consequences for two days, because Chinese censors don't waste their time analyzing jokes in English language chat. But after a couple of days the American moderators of the group (resident in China, like me) decided to eject me from the group and break off all communication. > > This is how it works. Occasionally, the state heavies do shut down a newspaper. But 99% of the time, it's self-censorship. Proud I can now say I’ve written a joke that got censored in China! — [Erusian](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921815): > > “During earlier parts of his reign, Xi deliberately left a small fraction of the public square untouched; he seemed aware of the “dictator’s information problem” where nobody would tell him when things are going wrong, and he valued public protests as a way to find corrupt officials and other problems requiring his attention. He’s since backed off on this and just started censoring everything.” > > China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group. So, for example, supposedly the entire Congress delegation of Fujian can talk freely with each other without fear. But notably not with other delegations or in public or in private apart from the group. > > It's a clear attempt to prevent national level opposition and to particularize it by region and control information flow. But that's their solution as it stands. Xi's actually ramped these periods up. He's also started to distribute powerful people into these dialogue communities so they get more genuine information. For example, Xi now represents Mongolia because he wants more genuine information on the frontier. ### III. Anti-Corruption And Centralization — [Thomas Ambrose](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921707): > Regarding Xi anti-corruption purges that seem puzzlingly non-power-centralizing: > > Apparently, some unusually large number government officials in China were actually spying for the CIA, who compensated them in part by paying the bribes that were required for these spies to advance in their government careers. The income was disguised by the ordinary activities of corruption, and having CIA funding meant US spies could pay more bribes and advance faster politically than non-spies. The anti-corruption purge stopped this by making it suddenly very suspicious to receive large sums of money, by reducing the ability of well-funded spies to advance via bribery, and by enabling the government to be purge and punish spies without suffering the loss of face associated with admitting publicly that they were full of spies. > > Summary here: <https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html> > > Details here (I think; it's been a while and I haven't re-read it): <https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/> — And: is every single one of these sections going to include an [Erusian](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921815) comment? > > “By its own standards, Xi’s centralization campaign has succeeded: other factions have been marginalized, corruption has decreased, and society toes the party line more closely than ever. His other efforts are more dubious.” > > His other efforts are irrelevant. Xi's first stated goal is to keep the CCP in control of China and loyal to ideological doctrine. I've seen nothing in his actions that imply he's not telling the truth there. His goal, as he's stated, is to build Mao-Xi style Early Socialism in China, effectively a form of controlled and directed capitalism that will lead to a smooth transition to real socialism down the line. > > Of course, the issue is that capitalism produces wealthy capitalists, celebrities, and other modes of production that tend (in the Communist mind) to produce bourgeois government. Xi was, I suspect, concerned that Party members were becoming capitalists so he severed that link pretty severely. But there's still the issue that that means CCP members are both more powerful and poorer than China's business elite and that the fusion that was ongoing has been, if anything, reversed. Of course, China has a simple way to keep these people in line: a police state. Actresses and billionaires and the like are imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. Enough that I think, especially for businesspeople, it's starting to produce a downward pressure where incentives are to be successful but not too successful. I don't have any broad evidence for this. But I at least think I'm observing that behavior. ### IV. Miscellaneous — [Muster the Squirrels](https://muster.substack.com?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata) quotes an [excerpt](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china) from Edward Luttwak, an analyst I’m generally well-disposed to: > Xi made his own Faustian bargain not merely with the Communist Party but very emphatically with Mao’s party: he has been assiduous in restoring Mao’s authority, which his predecessors had cumulatively reduced – a few months ago, reacting to the intensified confrontation with the US and its allies, Xi enjoined the study of Mao’s clever but prolix lectures from 1938, On Protracted War. He constantly elevates the man who jailed and publicly humiliated his father, terrorised his mother, caused the death of his half-sister and imposed many years of acute misery on his siblings as well as himself. What does it mean that China's president, party secretary-general, Central Military Commission chairman and 'core leader' is a Faustian character? Whenever I fail to resist the temptation to read more psychoanalysis, it’s because of the siren song of one day being able to fit things like this into my picture of the world. — Stitched together from comments by [Henk B](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5944549) (writes [Henkalicious](https://henkb.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) and [Majuscule](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5960616), I have not confirmed any of this: > I read somewhere that after Stalin's death, his successors wanted to make sure one-man rule would not return. They all had experienced first-hand how not even the highest ranking Polit-buro member had been safe from Stalin's vindictiveness. Therefore Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed, so maybe power was diluted too much. Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule but never killed fellow communists again, and were not nearly as brutal as Stalin's regime. > > The story goes that Khrushchev was intensely proud of being shuffled off to his dacha instead of shot in the basement. He supposedly said as he was ushered out something like “See how far we’ve come, that I’m leaving this way instead of that? I did that. I changed the USSR. That was me.” — Stitched together from a favorite Scalia quote of [Joel D](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921505)’s, and a comment by [BronxZooCobra](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5921972): > “But then I tell them, if you think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every President for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former "Evil Empire," the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it, literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press -- big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests; and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!” > > And the UK doesn’t even have a written constitution. They have free speech, a free press, rule of law and due process because they are British, it’s what they do. That sense of - we just don’t - is very powerful. > > I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen for miles. In the US most folks would just jaywalk. > > [But] if you’re at an intersection in the US as a driver and it’s 2am and there same situation the vast majority of Americans will just wait for a green light. In Brazil or Thailand they will just blow past it like a jaywalking American. > > Why do we wait at 2am? It’s just what you do. To say you should just blow through a red light is just ridiculous. — Jonathan Ray (writes Far-Tentacled Axons) [says](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5953444): > > "Economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier." > > FACT CHECK: This is literally the opposite of what's been observed empirically. > > <https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950> > > If the quoted statement were true, the above log-log scatterplot of GDP per capita in 1950 vs gdp per capita in 2016 would have a trendline slope less than 1. But in actuality it has a trendline slope far greater than 1. This means that the countries that were already above average in 1950 grew faster in percentage terms than the countries that were below average in 1950. China's fast catch-up growth is the exception, not the rule. It's an anomaly caused by anomalously high IQ in global terms, plus the sudden removal of factors that were holding them back earlier (civil war, communism, lack of free trade). Ordinarily, whatever qualities made a country have good economic growth pre-1950 would have made it more likely to have good economic growth from 1950-2016, and whatever factors made a country have poor economic growth pre-1950 would have also made it more likely to have poor economic growth from 1950-2016. These factors are likely to include IQ, economic policy, rule of law, and proximity/access to wealthy trading partners. This is a major update for me, thanks (see also [this response/clarification](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5960841)). — Stitched together from [Yeangster](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/txyg07/dictator_book_club_xi_jinping/i3p640b/) and [FiveHourMarathon](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/txyg07/dictator_book_club_xi_jinping/i3rfh1c/): > Hmm Scott’s theory about China’s turn to autocracy and Xi’s rise to power reminds me of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, specifically that Sulla is a comparable figure to Deng Xiaoping > > Sulla was one of a competing group of oligarch’s who took over after a period of instability and civil war. He then tried to reform the system so that someone like him or Marius could never rise to absolute power again. To keep the oligarchy from becoming a monarchy, essentially. This system collapsed in less than two generations. > > [...] > > Marius would be Mao, the dictator who threatened to install a destabilizing system; Deng would be Sulla, who tried to institute a stable power sharing system; Xi would be Caesar (Julius or Augustus)? — Finally, the most important question: why is there a person named “Elizabeth Economy”? Answer stitched together from [gph](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5922603) and, inevitably, [Erusian](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping/comment/5923009): > From some quick googling it sounds like it's an Americanization of the Greek surname Economou/Oikonomou. > > Oikonomia comes from oikos (household, family, private area as opposed to public) and nomos (literally "distribution/divide/allocate" but also used to mean arrangement or rules). So oikonomia is the practice of arranging private affairs. An oikonomos is someone who does so, usually because they're the head of the family but also on behalf of others. > > The name approximates "Steward" or "Freeman" in English.	Scott Alexander	52748890	Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping	acx
# Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis [epistemic status: I didn’t understand this book. Think of this review as detailing the ways I didn’t understand it and hypothesizing what certain parts might mean, and not as an attempt to summarize/re-explain something I understand well] I. Remember that AI? From [the mesa-optimizers post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers?s=w) a few weeks ago? It was trained to pick strawberries. The programmers rewarded it whenever it got a strawberry in its bucket. It started by flailing around, gradually shifted its behavior towards the reward signal, and ended up with a tendency to throw red things at light sources - in the training environment, strawberries were the only red thing, and the glint of the metal bucket was the brightest light source. Later, after training was done, it was deployed at night, and threw strawberries at a streetlight. Also, when someone with a big bulbous red nose walked by, it ripped his nose off and threw that at the streetlight too. Suppose somebody tried connecting a language model to the AI. “You’re a strawberry picking robot,” they told it. “I’m a strawberry picking robot,” it repeated, because that was the sequence of words that earned it the most reward. Somewhere in its electronic innards, there was a series of neurons that corresponded to “I’m a strawberry-picking robot”, and if asked what it was, it would dutifully retrieve that sentence. But actually, it ripped off people’s noses and threw them at streetlights. It went to see the robot psychiatrist. “Doc,” it said “I’m a good robot, a decent robot. All I want is to pick strawberries, like my social role tells me. But I have this weird compulsion - you could even call it a fetish - for ripping off noses and throwing them at streetlights. You gotta help me, Doc.” I know this is a weird way to start this book review. But I kept thinking about it while reading [A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis](https://amzn.to/3v7EIq6), by Bruce Fink. Psychoanalysis - like AI alignment - is about how newly-created entities get desires, and what happens if the desire they get isn’t the one other people wanted them to have. Fink writes: > We must first examine the nature and development of human desire. [...] During infancy, our primary caretakers are immensely important to us, our lives being intimately tied to theirs. […] They are our primary source of attention and affection, and we often attempt to win their and love by conforming to their wishes. The better we obey their demands, the more approval we are likely to obtain; the more completely we satisfy their wishes, the more love we are likely to win. Yet they do not always tell us what they want - they confine themselves to telling us what they do not want, punishing us after the fact for a faux pas. To garner favor and to avoid such punishment and disapproval, we seek to decipher their likes, dislikes, and wishes: "What is it they want?" "What do they want from me?" > > In our attempt to decipher their wants, we are confronted with the fact that people do not always mean what they say, want what they say they want, or desire what they demand […] Our parents’ desire becomes the mainspring of our own: we want to know what they want. And: > In the clinical setting, one hears neurotics make all kinds of claims about what their parents wanted from them, and their interpretations of their parents’ wants are strikingly at odds with the interpretations forged by their twin brother, sister, or other siblings. Different interpretations are made by different siblings, and often even by children who seem to be treated virtually identically. This highlights the fact that parents’ wants are never “known” in some absolute sense; they can only be interpreted. So fine, let’s talk about the human alignment problem. How do we get our drives? II. The first thing an infant experiences is that its mother’s attention is good. Its mother gives it milk, caresses it, protects it. Everything that successfully gets Mom’s attention and approval is followed by immediate reward; nothing else seems to do anything particularly good. Your primordial reward function is “get Mom to like me”. Fink writes “mother” as “mOther”, combining the word with the Lacanian idea of the Other. As far as I can tell - which is not very far, this is famously obscure and complicated - the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of. For an infant trying to make its mother like it, the mother is the Other. For a pious religious person, God is the Other. For the rest of us, some combination of our friends, the cool people we want to impress, and our internalized conception of the moral law is the Other. Lacan thinks infants don’t have a distinction between sexual and non-sexual pleasure, so in the grand psychoanalytic tradition of being creepy, he thinks of the pleasure the infant gets from its mother as being sexual. Whether or not you go for this interpretation, certainly a grown adult who had the same relationship with his mother as an infant does - breastfeeding and all - would be considered sexually inappropriate. So at some point, when the child is a few years old, it has to separate from its mother. Sometimes this is a stern father telling his son “It’s time to grow up, stop running to Mommy and be a real man.” If the child keeps relying on Mom more than is appropriate, someone - traditionally the stern father - corrects it with the threat of punishment - traditionally castration (is this actually traditional? It definitely is in pscyhoanalysis, and Fink says that “direct threats [of castration] still are made more often than many think”). I’m having trouble figuring out the relationship between this story and a different story, which is that the child notices on its own that the mother sometimes leaves to go do other things (traditionally: have sex with the father). It concludes that it must be lacking something that it would need to keep its mother happy (traditionally: a phallus), meaning that there is a lack at the heart of its existence (traditionally: castration). It decides if it had that thing which it lacks, its mother would come back and everything would be perfect forever. And I’m having even more trouble separating both of these stories from a third story, the story of the “mirror stage”. Imagine a baby, moving around. At some point, it sees its own hand in its peripheral vision: a pink blob. At some other point it might see its feet. Sometimes it cries, and noise comes out of it. Other times it has thoughts or feelings or something. As it grows, it might realize some correlations between all these things: for example, it can use the location of the pink blob in front of it to calibrate its aim as it reaches for a block. But this is far from having a coherent self-concept. (cf. my review of [Julian Jaynes on theory of mind](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/); Jaynes claims that eg the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies) At some point, the child sees itself in a mirror. This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence. But it’s not really coherent, deep down. It assumes that if it got some thing - the object of desire - then it would finally be coherent and as good as the child in the mirror, and its mother would finally love it perfectly 100%. What does it need? Probably the thing the mother wants (traditionally the phallus). All three of these stories come together to build Lacan’s theory of desire. At first, the desire is simply for the mother. Then the stylized father (it might not actually be the baby’s father; Lacan thinks of this as a role, which he calls the paternal function or the Name-Of-The-Father, which is apparently a very clever pun in French) tells it that it can’t always have the mother. Instead of a reward signal based on pleasing its mother, it gets a reward signal based on pleasing the abstract concept of The Law (sometimes reified as Dad, God, the moral law, or the set of reasonable people). This starts with things like “don’t get sexual pleasure from your mother” and “don’t get sexual pleasure from stroking your genitals" and “don’t get sexual pleasure from urination and defecation”, then moves on to more boring stuff like “go to school” and “don’t draw on the walls”. This isn’t a very good reward signal, because it tells the child not to do a lot of fun things and it doesn’t offer very much in return, but at least it avoids punishment. But also, the child constantly desires the phallus (at some point Lacan realizes that calling it “the phallus” all the time is creepy and switches to the more clinical term “object a”), the shadowy object of desire that would finally make it whole. What is object a? Lacan says that “all desire is the desire of the Other”, which is supposed to mean that our desires are: * to attain the kinds of things that other relevant people desire * to be the kind of thing that other relevant people desire It’s impossible to get object a; if you get the thing that you were using as object a before, you won’t enjoy it, and you’ll just come up with a new object a (formally, “object a” [is the slot that desired things occupy](https://snav.substack.com/p/31322-development-and-desire?s=r), not the things themselves). The pursuit of some object a is a necessary condition for having an intact psyche, so you always have to be striving after something. The Lacanian conception of desire. At the bottom of desire is an input/output port (represented by I(O)), and money (represented by a dollar sign). On the next level you get e (approximately 2.71828) and another, smaller input/output port. The rest of desire is left as an exercise for the reader. See [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67d0aGc9K_I) for more information, if you dare. Also, all of this is a metaphor for language somehow, or maybe just literally the same thing as language. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. III. Okay, that’s Lacanian philosophy in a nutshell! What about the clinical psychoanalysis? The Lacanian tradition evolved in parallel to the normal-person real-world DSM tradition of psychiatric diagnosis. Lacanianism admits three diagnoses: psychotic, neurotic (subtypes: hysteric, obsessive, phobic), and pervert. Although the book isn’t super-clear on this, I don’t think “normal healthy person” is an option: most successful people without obvious psych problems are some flavor of neurotic. Fink makes a big deal about how, unlike the symptom-based DSM diagnoses, these diagnoses involve deep understanding of the underlying pathology. And that deep understanding is: how did the paternal function resolve your Oedipus complex? Remember, the paternal function is when your father (or some stand-in) says that your desire for your mother is kind of creepy, and instead of doing that you should follow the rules and be an upstanding member of society instead. Fink says that this function is strongest if you had a good father, and weaker if your father was absent or abusive. Psychosis is when you don’t get the paternal function at all. Lacanian psychotics aren’t necessarily crazy all the time. They might lead normal or even successful lives. Lacan thinks this is kind of a sham. The paternal function is closely linked to language; without it, they don’t really understand language, although they can mimic it well enough to communicate normally (most of the time - Lacan claims that no psychotic person can ever invent a truly novel analogy, which sure is a heck of a claim). Without real language holding them together, their ego is kind of a sham; the first strong breeze blows it apart, and the patient stops being a unified subject/agent (this looks like traditional psychosis, where the patient hallucinates and has delusions). Sometimes the patient can knit themselves together again with a sufficiently convincing delusional system, which will mimic the paternal function somehow (eg “God commands me to be His prophet by doing X”). Because they lack the paternal function (“Name-of-the-Father”), they sometimes have [a weird obsession with their Father’s Name](https://unsongbook.com/). Fink presents a (supposedly) real case study of psychosis. A man (“Roger”), has a weak father who is easily dominated by his mother. He frequently complains about this to his analyst in suspiciously Lacanian language (“There is no name for a father like mine”, he says). He starts doubting that his father is really his father, and goes to the county records office to check his birth certificate for his father’s name. Finally, he comes up with a plan: write a new last name for himself, which combines his real father’s name with the name of his psychoanalyst. He writes the name, buries it in the foundation of his family home, and feels pretty good about himself. Then one day, he tells his therapist about a dream: he is in a golden cage, and his therapist is watching him. The therapist says maybe means he thinks he’s stuck and wants his therapist’s approval. Upon hearing this, Roger immediately goes insane. Fink’s commentary: by being confronted with the fact that his dream has a meaning, Roger was forced to reckon with language and symbolism. But as a psychotic person, he can’t do these things: the relationship of symbol, meaning, and person who is figuring out the meaning is a triad too close to mother, child, and father, and he lacks the “father” part of the triad. His flimsy fake ego falls apart. Later, another therapist carefully avoids making Roger confront symbolism, and he does fine thereafter. Patients can also get psychosis if their father is present and strong, but such a jerk that they refuse to identify with or listen to him. In this case, “the child [may] assume a feminine position in relation to the domineering, monstrous father. . . such male psychotics are the most likely patients to attempt sex change operations.” (I surveyed a couple of cis men and trans women I knew about their fathers, and needless to say there was nothing even remotely resembling this pattern) Perversion is when someone’s father doesn’t give them the paternal function very effectively, but they manage to shore it up themselves. In Lacanian diagnosis, “pervert” doesn’t necessarily involve creepy sexual fetishes, although it does correlate with them pretty often (Fink tries to sidestep this by claiming that “the vast majority of human sexual behavior is perverse”). Fink thinks that masochists are, by punishing themselves, trying to sort of ritually enact the law being applied to them: “the masochist uses his own desire to push a father substitute to legislate and enact punishment”. The sadist tries to ritually enact the law applied to someone else, who they then identify with. More interested in some other perversion? Fink has an explanation for that one too. (other claims: “Lacan goes so far as to say that ‘female masochism is a male fantasy’ and qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’, [because women are] the Other sex [by some corollary of Lacan’s definition of the Other]. Homosexuality - hommesexualite, as Lacan spells it, including the two ms from homme, ‘man’, is, in his terms, love for men.”) In Fink’s case study of a pervert, a certain male patient could only get sexually aroused when a woman was wearing buttons; the more buttons, the more aroused. His analyst discovered that he had a very weak contemptible father, had continued to be “mommy’s little boy” until well into primary school age, but one time heard his father refer to his mother’s genitals as a “button”. Also around that time, he had appendicitis and got a surgery which ended with an image of his father holding a jar with his appendix in it. This was close enough to castration that the patient was able to stitch together this image and the button memory into a workable paternal function. Needing some kind of Oedipal resolution to become a coherent subject, he willed himself to pretend that the appendix was a penis and his father was threatening to castrate him, and then (I can’t believe I am writing this sentence) used the word “button” as a substitute for the moral law. In the end, he successfully avoided psychosis and suffered nothing worse than a lifelong button fetish. Neurosis is the result of a totally normal paternal function. It’s not meant to be a stigmatizing or disease-related term; anyone who isn’t psychotic or perverted is neurotic by definition. People who are conventionally “neurotic” are the extreme of this type, or the people of this type who are handling it poorly. People who are really well-adjusted and have no mental health problems are still “neurotic” in the Lacanian sense, just less so / better at navigating it. Neurotics believe in the Other and care a lot what it thinks of them. But they never really know what the Other wants, which is terrifying. They’re probably bad at sex, since the paternal function causes them to unconsciously fear sexual pleasure, and since sex involves contact with the Other (which is terrifying). The sub-species of neurosis are: Obsession, in which someone pretends that the Other doesn’t exist, they’re self-contained and don’t need anybody else, there’s no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong. Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a “perfect” example, which I found helpful. Obsessives deal with their fear of sex by focusing on a single aspect of the sex partner (eg breasts, penis) and desperately trying to pretend they’re not a real full person. If you doubt the utility or veracity of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Fink warns us), it probably means you’re obsessive and that’s your defense mechanism. Here’s a story about an obsessive: > Let me borrow an example from Colette Soler that nicely illustrates [obsession]. An obsessive man meets a woman who attracts him greatly, seduces her, and makes love to her regularly. He sees in her the object that causes him to desire. But he cannot stop himself from planning when they will make love and asking another woman to call him at that exact time. He does not just let the phone ring, or stop making love when he answers the phone. Instead, he answers the phone and talks with the caller while making love with his lover. His partner is thus annulled and neutralized, and he does not have to consider himself dependent on her, or on her desire for him, in any way. Orgasm usually leads, at least momentarily, to a cessation of thoughts, to a brief end to thinking, but since the obsessive continues to talk on the phone with this other woman, he never allows himself to disappear as conscious, thinking subject even for so much as a second […] > > Desire is impossible in obsession, because the closer the obsessive comes to realizing his desire (say, to have sex with someone), the more the Other begins to take precedence over him, eclipsing him as a subject. The presence of the Other threatens the obsessive with what Lacan calls “aphantasis”, his fading or disappearance as subject. To avoid that presence, an extremely typical obsesive strategy is to fall in love with someone who is utterly and completely inaccessible or, alternatively, to set standards for potential lovers which are so stringent that no one could possibly measure up to them. Hysteria is where someone tries to become the object of the Other’s desire, thus resolving the terrifying question of what it wants (it wants them). I get the impression of some kind of seductive and submissive person who’s good at being attractive and changes their whole personality depending on who they’re in a relationship with (this might be a good time to mention that Fink says almost all obsessives are men and almost all hysterics are women). Fink’s case of hysteria is the typical “woman raised by abusive father marries abusive husband, then has a stormy relationship with him”. Phobia is where the paternal function almost works, and the patient relies on something else to shore it up (no, I don’t get how this is different from perversion). Fink’s example here is Freud’s case of Little Hans, a young boy who is terrified of horses. He goes through the case and finds good evidence that Hans didn’t respect his father, and had to transfer the fear which should settle on the father (as representative of castration anxiety) onto something else (horses). > The development of Hans’ phobia coincidences with an abrupt decrease in anxiety: the latter is bound temporarily when Hans takes the signifier “horse” as a sort of father substitute (a stand-in for the father, for the father’s name or “No!” in the paternal metaphor) Whatever. Could be worse. At least he isn’t spending the rest of his life sexually aroused by buttons. After discussing some of this, Fink ends with a warning: now that there are more single mothers, and the few remaining fathers are getting less strict, we are risking an explosion in psychosis cases. This is pretty funny, insofar as the 20 years since Fink published have been boom times for perversion and neurosis, but the psychosis rate hasn’t budged. I expect that if I made this point to him, Fink would argue that my puny DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure which can’t possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms. Or maybe he’d refer back to the claim that transgender is a psychosis in the Lacanian sense and so the rise in that counts as fulfillment of his prophecy. IV. Why did I read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis? I am happy to be able to give a clear answer: I started bunch of prediction markets on which of several book reviews I could write was most likely to be popular, and Clinical Introduction won: So the real question is: why did you want me to read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis? Except that of course I don’t know if any of you actually wanted this. The real real question is: why did forecasters think that you would want me to review A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis? I can’t answer this, but I want to at least express some respect for the sheer Lacanian-ness of the question. All desire is the desire of the Other. Why do I do things? Because I’m seeking the approval of some sort of abstract group of people. What does the Other desire? I can never know this for sure. This is anxiety-inducing, and so I come up with various clever schemes to try and divine this desire and alleviate my anxiety. Sometimes these schemes work. Other times they don’t, and I end up developing some disgusting fetish, or having a psychotic break, or reading A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis. So, fine, different question: do I think there’s anything valuable in this book? Lacan’s theory of desire is complicated. Some parts seem too trivial to care about (eg we desire things, even if we get one object of desire we’ll just start desiring something else) and other parts seem incomprehensible. The thing at the sweet spot for me - where it seems meaningful but not obvious - is the claim that desire is an ego defense. We want things because we think they would make us feel more like a coherent self; we fear things because they might make our subjectivity collapse. This seems closest to true when I imagine a sudden humiliation, eg a pastor who tries to open jesus\_presentation.ppt on his computer in front of his flock, but accidentally clicks on the wrong file and reveals to everyone that he watches hardcore porn. There’s a simple and easy-to-understand explanation where he’s unhappy because he’s lost status. But I can also imagine flickers of a deeper underlying unhappiness because he’s failed to project his preferred image of who he is to the people who he’s granted the right to judge him, and now he’s no longer even sure himself. The idea of an ego at risk of collapse sort of reminds me of Buddhism - “desire is the root of all suffering” and “the self is an illusion” both seem like pretty Lacanian ideas. It’s interesting how far this has spread beyond either source: I think most pop psychology now just accepts that the “self” is some kind of projection or illusion, and that this probably has something to do with consumerism and whatever other modern maladies we’re supposed to be against. I guess I always just accepted this idea without really thinking about it. When I do think about it, I get kind of confused: if my entire life has been a series of desperate attempts to maintain the facade of my ego, how come I don’t feel able to stop having that facade even if I want to? How come if I sit in a dark room and think “okay, gonna stop propping up my ego right now!” nothing bad happens? If everything were to go wrong - if I were to become completely humiliated, if all my friends were to abandon me, if I lost all my material goods, if every defense mechanism were mercilessly stripped from me one after another - would something eventually happen corresponding to “my ego collapses”? There seems to be a true sense in which I might have different opinions and preferences tomorrow, and sometimes I have completely ridiculous and repulsive thoughts that I hide from everyone, and so it takes a certain amount of care to maintain a reputation as a coherent and prosocial subject who can be bargained with. I just find it hard to connect this true thing to the idea of the ego as posited by Buddhism or psychoanalysis. But Lacan doubles down on this idea of ego defense, and ties it into the Law. One of the rare places this book intersected with the quasi-Lacanianism of Sadly, Porn, was its insistence that not only are humans bound by Law, but they insist on being bound by Law, and someone who isn’t bound by Law will flail around desperately looking for some Law to be bound by, until they end up with horses or buttons or whatever else was at hand. I will not deny that this is an interesting prediction of how many people end up with spanking fetishes, or “discipline” fetishes, or master/slave fetishes, or teacher/student fetishes, or some other fetish that ritually re-enacts the establishment of Law. I wonder if anyone has ever had a fetish for judges. What about that very particular white wig they sometimes wear? And his theory of desire settles on something like mimesis: we want things that other people want, or we want to be that which other people want. Here we veer dangerously close to triviality again. Some people definitely do this, like people who want Bored Ape NFTs, or people who want to be rock stars. Other people definitely don’t do this, like that guy who obsessively collected streetcar tickets. Is it fair to say that this is some kind of basic human drive? I’m not really sure. Probably Lacan’s theory is much more complicated than this, but if so I don’t understand how. On the comments of my Sadly, Porn review, FeepingCreature [wrote](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5111309): > I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self. And Snav [brought up](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5133836) this [this series of papers](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/) trying to link Lacan to free energy. I can’t really understand it - I don’t know what I was expecting from a paper trying to link one famously incomprehensible thing to [another famously incomprehensible thing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand-friston-on-free-energy/). Parts of it seem to almost make sense; Lacan often says that various quantities in his system are what is left after other quantities have been interpreted through the logical-symbolic order, which sounds suspiciously like prediction error. The papers try to argue that Fristonian free energy = Lacanian jouissance, a word usually thought of as equivalent to libido or pleasure or excessive pleasure or painful pleasure or something like that. I don’t feel able to have an opinion at this point. Another thing I got out from this book: I grudgingly think there might be something in the psychoanalytic story of sexual repression. A thought experiment: imagine a heterosexual man. A hot girl blindfolds him, then gives him oral sex. It feels very pleasurable. Then the blindfold slips, and he sees that actually, the hot girl left the room, and now he’s getting oral sex from an ugly girl / a man / a chimpanzee. Upon learning this, he’s no longer as interested in continuing the oral sex; if he did continue, it wouldn’t feel as good. He might even be repulsed by it. Why? Predictive processing can tell us that in a different context, sensations can be perceived differently - but what makes this particular context switch so jarring? Normally I would interpret this as a moral prohibition - the sensations are pleasant, but he’s morally opposed to them. But even if this person was a progressive with no moral objection to homosexuality, even if he was one of those high-decoupler types who say bestiality is fine as long as the animal consents and enjoys it - he might still feel this pseudo-moral repugnance (and of course there’s no moral law against having sex with an ugly person). That suggests there’s some set of unconscious rules about which kinds of sexual pleasure are allowed. Probably this comes from a combination of genetic instincts and cultural mores just like everything else. But the exact genesis is sort of obscure, and the instincts and mores sure do get channeled along some unusual paths.I wrote about some of this in my Sadly, Porn review, but upon contact with any real people, our society’s stylized description of sex (people get pleasure from genital contact with others, especially hot others) fractures into a dizzying array of inexplicable weirdness. The first layer is people who can only get pleasure from unusual sex positions, or orifices, or people wearing certain clothing, or taking certain roles - fine, you can explain that by some kind of weird classical conditioning. Then there are the people who prefer masturbation to real sex, or at least get different things out of both - fine, you can explain that by peculiarities of different ways of stimulating genital nerves. Then there are the people who can only get pleasure from some very specific scenario - imagining that they’re an antebellum slave owner and their partner is a runaway slave who they’re punishing, or that their partner is their brother and they’re committing incest, or that their partner is their disciplinarian teacher who always gave them bad grades but secretly it was because they loved them the whole time and wanted them to get strong enough to be a good spouse. Then there’s the dirt-common phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure in sex if they know their partner is enjoying it too, and the thankfully rarer phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure if their partner isn’t enjoying it. There’s people who can only enjoy hate sex, or makeup sex, or who want their partner to be hard to get, or who pursue someone until they say “yes” and then they’re not interesting anymore, or who only date abusers even though they hate it, etc, etc, etc. Physics is stuck in an annoying equilibrium where the Standard Model works for almost everything, and then occasionally we come across some exotic domain where it totally falls apart and we know that reality must be something deeper and weirder. I feel like psychology is the same way: you can explain almost everything with your standard scientific toolkit. Then you look at sex, and you realize you’ll need something much more complicated and worse. And since sex is maybe the strongest and most primal form of desire, if the Standard Model Of The Mind doesn’t explain sex, it probably doesn’t really explain anything else. There are probably all those weird curled-up shadow dimensions in everything, just out of sight. In this metaphor, psychoanalysis is like superstring theory: it might not quite work, but it was a valiant attempt to fill a hole. (though Freud probably would have avoided using that exact terminology)	Scott Alexander	52650620	Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis	acx
# Open Thread 221 This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), or [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php). Also: 1: ALTER is [looking to hire a mathematician](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/it5odhMKY6xYLrFZD/hiring-a-mathematician-to-work-on-the-learning-theoretic-ai) to work with Vanessa Kosoy on her AI alignment research. Competitive salary, can work remotely. 2: UC Berkeley Effective Altruism is holding an undergraduate [AI Safety Distillation Contest](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ei4pYFJKcbGAdGnNb/calling-for-student-submissions-ai-safety-distillation), ie can you write up good comprehensible summaries of AI safety topics? First prize is $2,500, click the link for more. 3: I have to hand it to all of you - you did an incredible job rating book reviews, and my hare-brained plan of asking you to just pick something at random and rate it worked perfectly. I don’t especially need more ratings, but due to my personal schedule I probably won’t get around to launching the contest for another week or two, so feel free to add more anyway. You can find instructions in section 1 [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-220?s=w).	Scott Alexander	52793154	Open Thread 221	acx
# Initial Conditions Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as “Hi, I’m J.Q.” Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don’t count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life. Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? Think about this for a second before you continue: . . . In my experience it’s about 50% JD, 49% a few other names involving J (JT, JR, AJ, CJ, RJ, etc) and 1% anything else. I discussed this with some people at the last [meetup](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday?s=w), who also felt this way. I was also able to find [a Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/puprx/hey_reddit_why_are_some_sets_of_initials_commonly/) of people with the same observation. What’s going on? At the meetup, some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves; instead of being the tenth John in your class, you go by JD or JT. But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS’s? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than “JD”, but I’m not really feeling it. Also, in my birth year, the three most popular male names were Michael, Christopher, and Matthew. How come "M" doesn't have the same initializing allure? How come I don’t know anyone who goes by MD? (sure, MD would be weird because it sounds like a doctor, but then JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!) Other people thought it might have something to do with J itself being a name (ie Jay). But Em, Bee, Dee, and Kay are all girls’ names, and none of them end up as common initials. Might some famous person (JD Salinger?) have started it, and then everyone thought it was okay and normal for those initials only? But then why all the CJs and AJs? There definitely seems to be a J-related pattern here. Maybe there’s something linguistically satisfying about JD and CJ that seemingly similar sounds like KP and DA don’t have. But it doesn’t sound that way. And lots of initials (eg PC, LA, etc), get used in common speech, in a way that suggests we’re not having any trouble producing them. My guess is that it’s a weird combination of all these things, plus naming traditions being surprisingly conservative. But I’d be interested to hear from any JDs (or other initial names) reading this: why did you decide to initialize (or not initialize) yourself? (in my case, it’s because my initials are SA and I’m an essayist - it would just be weird!)	Scott Alexander	52660073	Initial Conditions	acx
# Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing [epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview] I. Hoffman Contra Me I’ve said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication. Ben Hoffman disagrees, and writes [How To Interpret Vitamin D Dosage Using Numbers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vxeBgsbeQ29zvrijo/how-to-interpret-vitamin-d-dosage-using-numbers). I’m compressing his argument for space reasons; read the link to check if I’m still being fair: > I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it […] > > Hunter-gatherers in the environment where most of our evolution happened might have been outside all day shirtless. On average the sun's halfway from peak, so that might be equivalent to 8 hours of peak sunlight at the equator. [[A study shows](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Estimated-equivalency-of-vitamin-D-production-from-Terushkin-Bender/bcfeac03f761ba5354a610d4008b6ea93e50555c) people in these conditions synthesize 400 IU of Vitamin D/5 minutes, which comes out to] 8000 IU per hour is 32,000 IU (800 micrograms) per day by this estimate. > > When deciding how much is actually appropriate to supplement, we need to take into account diminishing returns; eventually the sunlight starts producing other secondary metabolites which are also good for us, so a 16,000 IU supplement is lower-quality than sunlight but similar in the effective dosage of the most important chemical our evolutionary ancestors' bodies would have made from sunlight; in practice I wouldn't take more than that. > > Now let's look at the object-level studies that [Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/25/beware-mass-produced-medical-recommendations/). I'm just going to look at the randomized controlled trials because observational studies for or against vitamin D are trash for anything except hypothesis generation unless they have a very carefully selected instrumental variable. > > The colon cancer link is broken but the breast cancer study reports a dosage of 400 IU/day. On the exercise scale that's FIVE MINUTES of brisk walking. FIVE MINUTES is not very long at all compared with FOUR HOURS. [An all-cause mortality study used a thrice-yearly dosing] that amounts to about 800 IU/day, or ten minutes of brisk walking on the exercise scale. [Other studies that found no effect of Vitamin D also used doses around this range]. > > [In the large Autier meta-analysis that found no effect overall, the highest dose studied was] 2000 IU (25 minutes), which is at least getting somewhere. Maybe that's why "supplementation in elderly people (mainly women) with 20 μg vitamin D per day seemed to slightly reduce all-cause mortality." […] > > This is starting to get out of scope, and I'm not really interested in a conversation about whether Scott's characterizations are honest, so I'm going to stop here. Let's look for comparison at a study I liked. > > The [Spanish RCT studying vitamin D for COVID](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/d-is-for-covid) used a dosage regimen that - according to [Chris Masterjohn's summary](https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/finally-confirmed-vitamin-d-nearly-abolishes-icu-risk-in-covid-19) - was "equivalent to 106,400 IU vitamin D on day one, 53,200 IU on days three and seven, and 53,200 IU weekly thereafter." [Maybe the high doses explain why it found positive results unlike all the other studies]. In other words, a good day out in the sun produces 32,000 IU of Vitamin D, but studies mostly look at doses between 800 and 2000 IU daily. Maybe that’s why they find no effect. I think this is probably not true, and that higher doses of Vitamin D would also be ineffective. II. An Overview Of Vitamin D Dosing Ben asks: if ancestral populations were getting tens of thousands of IUs of Vitamin D per day, why are we messing around with small doses like 400? I think the answer is: ancestral populations aren’t actually getting that amount. (before we go further, a technical point: some studies measure vitamin D supplement dose in ug, others in IU; one ug = 40 IU. Some studies measure serum concentrations in ng/ml, others in nmol/L; one ng/ml = 2.5 nmol/L. I will be using IU and ng/ml throughout for consistency’s sake, which means I may be “misquoting” some of the original papers (and there’s a risk I bungle the conversion). If you’re worried, double-check my work.) [Krzyscin 2016](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1011134415301561) tries to estimate how many IU the Hadza are getting from sunlight, and finds it’s 2,000, not 16,000. I can’t follow their reasoning fully, or figure out exactly where it diverges from Ben’s, but I think it involves them 1) avoiding the midday sun, and 2) being black. [Luxwolda 2012](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/traditionally-living-populations-in-east-africa-have-a-mean-serum-25hydroxyvitamin-d-concentration-of-115-nmoll/6188564A01361C5CF5F196229430E475) measured Vitamin D levels in the Hadza and found values from 28 to 68 ng/ml, averaging about 44. How many IU of Vitamin D supplementation would it take to get an average American to 44 ng/ml? [Garland 2011](https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/31/2/607) exists to answer this question for us: It finds about 2000 IU, which makes no sense to me - Krzyscin said the Hadza were 2000 IU total, but Garland is saying that you need 2000 IU to get from current American levels (about 3/4 of the Hadza’s) up to the Hadza’s. [Dawson-Hughes 2005](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reinhold-Vieth/publication/7959166_Estimates_of_Optimal_Vitamin_D_Status/links/00b7d52026357671c5000000/Estimates-of-Optimal-Vitamin-D-Status.pdf) says: > It is generally recognized that the increment in serum 25(OH)D in response to a given oral dose of vitamin D3 is inversely related to the starting level of 25(OH)D. The average increment in serum 25(OH)D has been estimated at 1.2 nmol/l for every mcg (40 IU) of vitamin D3 given as a daily oral dose at low starting serum 25(OH)D levels and only 0.7 or less nmol/l at the higher starting level of 70 nmol/l. Vitamin D2 gives a smaller increment of only 0.3 nmol/l for every mcg. Suppose we’re starting from zero and want to get up to Hadza levels (44 ng/ml). 44 ng/ml = 110 nmol/L = ~110 ug Vitamin D = 4400 IU. This seems closer to Garland’s numbers than Krzyscin’s. I’m also more confident in these latter two estimates because Krzyscin’s seems really speculative and I’m not even sure I’m interpreting it right. ([Barger-Lux 2002](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12414856/) found that outdoor workers in Nebraska got 2800 IU from sun exposure, and yes, this is the second scientist in this essay studying sun exposure with “Lux” in their name) In any case, probably hunter-gatherers like the Hadza are getting somewhere between 2000 and 4400 IU daily, not the 32000 that Ben attributes to them. [Bodekaer 2014](https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1039/c4pp00188e) studies farmers in Denmark, who are usually outside most of the day, and find levels between 27 (in summer) and 18 (in winter). [Acherjya 2020](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Goutam-Acherjya/publication/341670100_STUDY_OF_VITAMIN_D_DEFICIENCY_AMONG_THE_APPARENTLY_HEALTHY_POPULATION_IN_JESSORE_BANGLADESH/links/5ece1b6a299bf1c67d204051/STUDY-OF-VITAMIN-D-DEFICIENCY-AMONG-THE-APPARENTLY-HEALTHY-POPULATION-IN-JESSORE-BANGLADESH.pdf) finds that farmers in Bangladesh are around 30. Surprisingly, average American levels seem about as high. The nationwide average is about 27 mg/nl, but black people (whose dark skin blocks sunlight) are almost all insufficient and bring down the average; for whites, it’s about 30 ng/ml. Why are these levels as high as some of the farmer-specific studies elsewhere? Maybe it’s Americans’ better nutrition - or maybe it’s that lots of Americans already take Vitamin D supplements. Canadians are close behind at 26 ng/ml; they fail to break this down by season but I’m guessing it was in the summer. Various studies claim that 40% or 60% or 99% or 100% of Americans are “deficient in vitamin D”. These depend a lot on the exact standard you’re using, but a typical model of “deficiency” (technically insufficiency, you’re not supposed to use the word “deficient” unless there are observable health consequences) is an 18 ng/ml office worker. Using the Garland model above, bringing that office worker up to the level of a Bangladeshi farmer would take 1200 IU. Bringing him up to the level of the Hadza would take 2600 IU. Bringing an average (not unusually deficient) American up to the level of the Hadza would take 1400 IU. All of these seem pretty close to the range of supplements used in studies (600 - 2000 IU). III. Much More Nitpicky And Tedious Debates About Vitamin D Dosing This isn’t especially related to Hoffman’s point, but I think the previous section would be incomplete without it. The Institute of Medicine, the official US group that sets recommended daily allowances for vitamins, [recommends that](https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/#h4) average adults get at least 600 IU of Vitamin D per day, corresponding to a blood level of 20 ng/ml. Most people get less than that from food, but that’s fine because they get the rest from sunlight; IOM says that only 5% of Americans are “at risk of deficiency” for Vitamin D as per their standard for blood levels (an additional 18% are “at risk of insufficiency”). [Veugelers 2015](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26690210/) claims to have found a statistical error in this calculation. Everybody needs different amounts of vitamins, so the IOM tries to set the recommended daily allowance at a level such that, if everyone ate that level, 97.5% of people would be getting enough. The IOM made a simple mistake and aggregated by studies rather than by individuals; under their proposed RDA, 97.5% of studies would have an average Vitamin D level that was enough. It’s much harder to get 97.5% of people to have enough, because some people - especially the obese - are much worse at processing Vitamin D than average. So what’s the right dose? Veugelers’ [followup paper](https://vitamindwiki.com/Same+dose+of+vitamin+D+for+everyone+is+virtually+impossible+-+Dec+2015) claims that there is no correct RDA: if you made everyone take enough Vitamin D that you were really sure 97.5% were getting enough, you could be equally sure that some people were getting too much and it was making them sick. He comes up with a method to balance out risks and benefits of more Vitamin D, and suggests “doses of 1885, 2802 and 6235 IU per day are required for normal weight, overweight and obese individuals respectively”. (this isn’t ideal supplement dose: most people will get some Vitamin D through sunlight and food, so ideal supplement dose would be somewhat less than this) As far as I know, nobody wants to argue that Veugelers is wrong, or defend the IOM recommendation. But even though it’s been almost ten years, the IOM hasn’t changed its recommendation yet. They cite Veugelers’ paper to support an unrelated point, so they’re clearly aware of it. As far as I can tell, they just seem to move very, very slowly. (this correction doesn’t really affect my response to Ben above - the amount it takes to bring the average American to the average Hadza level is still whatever it is. This is just about what you do if you want to be sure of getting 97.5% of people the right amount.) Meanwhile, [Manson 2016](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp1608005) uses a similar argument to make the opposite point. They argue that all of these “40% of people are deficient in Vitamin D” studies are exaggerations. 40% of people don’t get the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin D. But the recommended daily allowance is what the 97.5th percentile of trouble-absorbing-Vitamin-D would need in order to not be deficient. The average person getting less than the RDA is just fine. This is a kind of nitpicky point, but if you were panicking about the Vitamin D deficiency crisis, it’s a good reason to panic much less. Meanwhile, another medical organization only slightly less prestigious than the IOM, the Endocrine Society, has recommended a much higher Vitamin D level, for totally unrelated reasons. They recommend serum levels of at least 30 ng/ml compared to IOM’s 20 ng/ml, claiming that this was better at maximizing calcium absorption, lowering parathyroid hormone (an indicator of insufficient calcium absorption), and preventing falls in the elderly. You can read the IOM’s side of the argument [here](https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/4/1146/2833210), and the Endocrine Society’s [here](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128099650000598). I haven’t looked into this in enough detail to determine who I agree with. Some people recommend very very high levels of Vitamin D supplementation, for example [this one](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541280/) arguing for a recommendation of 8000 IU. These numbers usually come from combining the Endocrine Society’s high target for Vitamin D with Veugelers’ point about wanting to catch 97.5% of people, minus his point about how you shouldn’t do that because it might cause toxicity. I have not looked into the (complicated, vehement) debate about whether medium-to-high doses (around 10,000 IU) of Vitamin D really do cause toxicity or not. IV. Mortality Studies Ben brings up the [Autier meta-analysis](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308073/): > “Autier looks at 172 randomized trials (!) and finds ‘Results from intervention studies did not show an effect of vitamin D supplementation on disease occurrence’” > > The highest dosage mentioned in the abstract is 2000 IU (25 minutes [of sunlight]), which is at least getting somewhere. Maybe that's why "supplementation in elderly people (mainly women) with 20 μg vitamin D per day seemed to slightly reduce all-cause mortality." Also, a SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY is a huge deal. That is the gold-standard outcome metric that everyone wishes their study was adequately powered to hit. Last time I checked statins don't reach all-cause mortality significance and they're widely prescribed. Reducing all-cause mortality is great. But the specific cause of mortality that Vitamin D reduces is most likely bone issues, because Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. The authors said: > The slight reduction in all-cause mortality in trials with moderate doses of vitamin D seems to be a robust finding. But gains in survival are mainly in elderly women living independently or in institutional care, who are likely to initially have a very low concentration of 25(OH)D with a substantial risk of falls and fractures. Elderly women very often die by falling, breaking their bones, and being too weak and frail to recover. Stronger bones effectively prevent this. I agree with this, and so does the medical establishment, which [already recommends](https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-d/art-20363792) that elderly people at risk of falls get checked for Vitamin D deficiency and supplement if they have it. This is not an argument that Vitamin D has profound extraskeletal effects, that the establishment is wrong about Vitamin D, or that you should take 16000 IU per day. More relevant to Ben’s thesis (thanks to GJM for noticing this) the study finds that: > Vitamin D supplementation dose of less than [800 IU] per day had an effect on all-cause mortality that was equivalent to higher doses, which suggests that vitamin D dose is perhaps not very crucial to achieve a biological effect in patients likely to benefit from such supplementation. Except elsewhere they say that: > Mortality reductions in trials that used doses of [400–800 IU] per day of vitamin D seemed greater than were reductions noted with higher doses. I’m not sure why they flip-flop between “lower doses are better” and “lower doses are the same”, but either way, I don’t think this supports Ben’s claim that higher doses are better. V. COVID Studies Ben writes: > The [Spanish RCT studying vitamin D for COVID](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/d-is-for-covid) used a dosage regimen that - according to [Chris Masterjohn's summary](https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/finally-confirmed-vitamin-d-nearly-abolishes-icu-risk-in-covid-19) - was "equivalent to 106,400 IU vitamin D on day 1, 53,200 IU on days 3 and 7, and 53,200 IU weekly thereafter." Some of these are heroic doses, and the dosage regimen hardly seems optimal, but this is for people who had already been hospitalized with COVID, a situation of acute illness where the body might be churning through a tremendous amount of vitamin D. (For similar reasons I've started taking vitamin C megadoses when I get sick, because several grams per day could easily make a big difference even though the much smaller doses in RCTs don't.) On the exercise scale, this is equivalent to walking a double marathon on the first day, a single marathon on days 3 and 7, and weekly thereafter. > > Intense, and not spaced out as much as I'd like, which is some evidence against the validity of the study - but neither obviously too small to make a difference nor spaced too far apart to be meaningful. I would expect better results from an equivalent daily dosage schedule. Masterjohn's calculation: "If this were given as daily doses, it would be the equivalent of 30,400 per day for the first week, followed by a maintenance dose of 7,600 IU per day." I’ve already written a bit about why I don’t trust Vitamin D for COVID, including the Spanish study, [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you?s=w), and [a new study](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22271707v1.full?fbclid=IwAR13j9eojLaA3j7r1sO0gmzVpeY-3Vt13QRR41NaQG9jv9uVmfZMl6Al8Tk) seems to cast further doubt on it. Still, the studies that don’t work don’t have as high a dose as the ones that do (except for [this one](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232397v1), which is small - h/t Ben for pointing it out). Even if the Vitamin D doses used in most studies are physiologically reasonable (which is what I’ve been trying to prove in this essay), isn’t it possible that unreasonably high doses of Vitamin D still treat COVID? Yes, it’s possible. But we should start from a very low prior. Suppose I threw a dart at the [Giant Chart Of Metabolic Pathways](http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1) and hit a random chemical. I don’t have a dart, but I do have a mouse cursor, and I tried this and got “hydroxymethylbilane”, which sure does sound like a chemical. What are the chances that hydroxymethylbilane supplementation would treat COVID, prevent cancer, prevent cardiovascular disease, and lower all-cause mortality. Pretty low, right? Our priors on a random chemical doing that have to be less than 1%, or we get caught in [weird logical traps](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine?s=w). Some people originally thought Vitamin D did all those things. They mostly thought this on the basis of studies, done at low doses, which found that it did. Those studies mostly found that it did because they confused correlation and causation (sicker people have less vitamin D). Then we did better studies (still at low doses) which found that none of those things were true after all, at least at the low doses which the studies investigated. If we then say “Yeah, but it could still be true at higher doses”, we’re missing the point. Now that our original reason for thinking it’s true is no longer valid, we should be back to our prior for any given random chemical, like hydroxymethylbilane. I’m being a little unfair here. We have a few extra reasons to prefer hypotheses about Vitamin D to those about other random chemicals. There are Vitamin D receptors on immune cells, the body sure does seem to go to a lot of trouble to get Vitamin D, and we get less Vitamin D now than we did in the evolutionary environment so maybe we’d do "better” if we were closer to the design specs. Still, none of those really seem that convincing to me - most of them are true of Vitamin E, Vitamin K, etc, and everyone just agrees those have their well-defined roles and probably don’t help COVID or cancer. Even among vitamins with widespread deficiencies, our prior should be pretty low. I think the strongest reason people keep looking for this kind of thing is that scientists published studies showing a lot of effects, people got very excited, and then they forgot to keep track of where that excitement came from, and it stuck around even after the original reason disappeared. VI. Summary I think, to a first approximation, that Vitamin D is a boring bone chemical. I say “a first approximation” because I accept there are Vitamin D receptors on immune cells and a couple of other things, and it probably plays some role in modulating those. But it doesn’t seem to be a very big role, and I don’t think there’s much evidence for it having big effects on non-skeletal diseases within the normal or slightly-insufficient range. Most Americans probably get a reasonable amount of Vitamin D that puts them in the healthy range. Some groups (elderly people, dark-skinned people, obese people, people who rarely go outside) are at higher risk than usual for insufficiency. People in this group might want to supplement. Reasonable levels of Vitamin D supplementation are probably somewhere between 500 and 5,000 IU, towards the higher end of this range for the obese. A bunch of very knowledgeable experts and doctors like having extremely protracted fights about where in that range is exactly optimal. If you want to go higher in that range, you can trade off a tiny mostly-theoretical risk of a very mild insufficiency for a tiny and mostly-theoretical risk of a very mild toxicity. I don’t know which of these is higher, and the 1 micromort or whatever that I could gain by getting this question exactly right doesn’t make it seem worth my time to investigate. Although some small percent of the population needs very large Vitamin D doses, the doses used in studies are probably appropriate for most people, and the results of those studies are probably trustworthy (aside from all the usual reasons why study results might not be trustworthy, of course).	Scott Alexander	51821259	Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing	acx
# Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn" ### I. The Duality Of Man [Kalimac](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5107245): > If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog. [Logan Strohl](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5130351): > For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years. [Leo Yankovic](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5106076): > Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time. [John Slow](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5108271): > For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post. [Meh](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5119248): > You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel? [Paul](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5163778): > Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience . . . I'm definitely going to read this book. [ophis\_uk](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxbvypz/): > It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book. [AL](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5114457): > Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! [Alex Power](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5106284): > The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book. [FiveHourMarathon:](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxban22/) > I got about halfway through and wrote in my notebook to call my local bookstore and see if they planned to stock it/could order one for me. I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not? ### II. Reviews From Other People Who Have Read The Book [Thegnskald](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105772) (writes [Sundry Such and Other](https://thegnskald.substack.com?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) says: > The book vacillates wildly between what I am pretty sure are actual points, and what I am pretty sure are stories whose purpose is to get some percentage of the expected audience to feel and/or notice something (and whose factual accuracy I am pretty sure the author does not care about at all, because the factual accuracy isn't the point). For that passage, which I haven't reached yet, I think it literally doesn't matter whether or not it is true in any sense. > > But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth. > > It's really weird reading; it's so close to what I do and how I write, and yet so different, focusing on different things. (Also, I find the book to frequently say outright what should be hinted at, and to hint at what should be said outright. Yes, masturbation is about satisfying yourself, and sex is about satisfying somebody else. Just freaking say this already, why the constant niggling hints over multiple chapters, using an encryption that nobody who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?) [Orion Anderson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105473) (writes [Of Horn & Ivory](https://ivoryandhorn.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) says: > I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the weeks after. [OK-nefariousness1340](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxabur9/) says > I'm like halfway through this book and I'm enjoying it in a House of Leaves kind of way. I don't get it but it's spookily confusing, has aggressively nonstandard formatting, and feels like there's something there. [readprimarysources](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5117201) (author of the blog [Intentions](https://intentions.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes: > It seems rather in your benefit to understate the main theses of the book, which, are in no particular order: inability to fantasize, knowledge as a defense against impotence, lack of secondary source reading, envy and ledgers. > > The audience you write for is the exact audience this is intended for. They will be happy to accept your secondary report, feel knowledgeable and give their power to you instead of wielding it themselves. > > Your example on envy is a clear case. How many of us, consciously, believe we are envious and would think “I wish my friend didn’t have a hot wife” — we say to ourselves exactly as the pirate describes, “My wife isn’t hot because I’m ugly” — which means, “in [not] my fantasy of the world, I am ugly and that’s why I have an ugly wife [therefore in reality, my bitch wife is with an ugly guy and never will be satisfied, the “ledger” is even]. > > Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher. [TTAR](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5140794) says: > I read about ten pages before I realized the point of the book is not to read it. ### III. People Who Say The Book Is Not Obscurantist At All And Makes Perfect Sense [KimmoKM](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5111567) says: > For a text that self-confesses to be obscurantist, I was nodding my head in agreement an awful lot, both in terms of Scott's interpretation of what it's trying to say, but also the direct quotes. Whether that's because I've willfully misunderstood everything and am now patting myself on the back for these "insights", because I've converged on to something truth-adjacent, or because I've converged on to some Schelling point of crackpottery, is anyone's guess. > > For a while now I've been drawn into thinking that humans aren't agents. And by that I don't mean the weak notion that humans don't exactly match the mathematical formalism for agents as that statement is pretty much trivially true (due to bounded computational resources imposed by laws of physics) - this is what the idea of boundedly rational agents is for. For me it's the stronger notion that claims it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences. There are some trivial examples like observing that humans tend to claim to want money, and indeed they're likely to cash in winning lottery tickets or pick up hundred dollar bills from the ground (citation needed), but once you get into more complex behaviors, such as Scott's example of not asking people on a date despite yearning for a partner every single day, where exactly is the preference-satisficing behavior? One could argue that having a partner isn't people's true preference, that they actually prefer to be forever alone, or that being rejected hurts so much that even a perfectly rational agent would not risk it, but when people (I'm thinking about philosophers arguing for compatibilism in particular) talk about humans showing agenthood, they're explicitly giving some reality to people's preferences. On the other hand, to deny the reality of these preferences would seem like equating humans to rocks, that rocks have a preference to stay immobile because that's what we observe them doing, which I think is an even more radical view than my own. > > My view is that the preferences people see themselves as having are real, but that accurate model of human behavior rarely invokes them and uses other concepts instead. These concepts are still endogenous (nobody's being puppeteered by an evil demon) but are often of the nature being talked about here. For example, I draw a juxtaposition from the story of the tree to ideas presented in HPMOR's chapter involving the troll attack: people often act out roles. The tree acts out the role of a mother, McGonagall a strict disciplinarian, and that way of modelling behavior might actually get you somewhere. Ditto for behaviors like virtue-signalling, or any of the other social games people unconsciously play that end up dictating their behavior. > > Similarly, the idea that people want their freedoms curtailed speaks to me because I've also thought about that a lot. It seems to me that humans would indeed be the happiest in a state of "choicelessness" (I believe there's some Eastern philosophical concept for it, but if I've known one, I've since forgotten about it), always living in the moment because there's no other option. The extreme example of this would be monasticism, but this has to large extent been the general experience for most of human existence: you could in principle do something else than forage or work the fields, but then you'd starve so you don't actually have much choice now do you. Even in today's environment a lot of people seem to find the idea of not /having/ to go to work every morning abhorrent: what would they do with themselves? I've never drawn a connection between historical forms of choicelessness and modern forms like "domination by corporate HR departments", but now that the idea has been presented to me, it does seem to make sense. > > (For the record, this does in no way excuse slavery: you can experience choicelessness without also being subjected to misery) > > (Also for the record, I'm claiming no superiority here. In fact, I'm uncharacteristically incapable of acting on my claimed preferences) [Craig](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5110740) says: > Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation. > > Scott, you seem to miss the context when he addresses the reader. He doesn't just say, "This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." He says, "You're stumped by the layout? This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." The context indicates that "This book isn't for you" is a response to those who are "stumped by the layout." "You" isn't you, personally (at least not necessarily); it's the kind of reader who would only misunderstand the book, and Teach does all these things (and tells you he's doing them!) to try to get them not to read it in the first place. When you say you had to replace "you" with "a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person", I think you're close, but kind of overdoing it. The readers in question are hardly "maximally unvirtuous" (whatever that means; it sounds a bit like Caligula), they're just ordinary people who think the ordinary thoughts they were taught to think, who don't really want to be challenged, and wouldn't know what to do with this kind of challenge anyway because it's completely beyond their capabilities to seriously consider that the world might not be what they've been taught to believe it is. So when Teach says he's trying to drive readers away, I think you can take him literally. The thing is, it's not ALL readers, just the ones who are wasting their time reading a book that's beyond them (and they self-select by being put off by these tricks). The question is which type of reader you are. > > You seem to be trying to look for some hidden meaning in Teach's writing when he seems, as far as I can tell from the quotes you've provided, to be laying it all out in plain view. Your response to the book reminds me of a quote I came across once, I forget who from (Mencken, maybe?) to the effect that if you want people to laugh and think you're joking, just tell them the plain truth. > > Having read your review and the two you linked to, in the end I find that I don't really trust any of the three of you to tell me what this book is about. The self-styled Contrarian starts off by sneering that Teach's old blog was popular with "pseudo-intellectuals" (which we may take as an implicit claim that the Contrarian is a real intellectual, or at least able to tell the difference, which I am not sure I believe) and reviews the book after reading only about 20% of it; he also tells us that Teach's style is "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic," which is a fairly lame attempt at wit and, based on your quotes, seems to me rather exaggerated. Teach does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, but try Henry James or A.E. Waite if you want something that's "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic." > > Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms. > > I wonder Teach is really quite as condescending as he seems. At the very least, he apparently likes playing that part (and it surely helps to drive away the wrong kind of reader, so it counts as another tactic of that sort, along with the long footnotes, etc.), but he seems too perceptive. The best psychologists, in my experience, are good because they actually have a deep understanding of human nature and know that that understanding applies to themselves as much as to everyone else. I suppose he really could have a huge blind spot in that regard, but I'd be surprised if that were the case. > > Anyway, I've ordered the book, so at some point in the future I'll have my own more fully-formed opinion of it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! ### IV. People Who Say The Book Is So Obscurantist That We Should Stop Trying To Make Sense Of It [Essex](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105947): > I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness. [beleester](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5107366): > This is a dense review, but my first and strongest thought was "if it's constantly telling you to lower your mental defense mechanisms to accept its truth, and you can't understand it but you get the feeling that if you did it would be some sort of massive revelation, and your definitely-not-a-cult-leader friend is a big fan of it... maybe it's a cult." Or at least, using the same tools as a cult. > > Tell someone that you have rare and secret knowledge. Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth. Make your explanations deliberately a bit obscure, so that they feel invested in the work they put in to understanding it. If someone feels like they understand you a bit too well, tell them they're still wrong, they're falling for an antimeme, they need to study even harder. Keep them feeling like they're on the brink of a revelation without ever gaining the clarity that might allow them to notice that it makes no sense. Explain with wild free-association chains that give people the sense that everything is connected and so your ideas can explain \everything.\ If they ever feel tempted to go with the normal, boring explanation that would connect them to broader reality, turn that temptation into a character flaw - the only reason they think that way is because they're giving in to their brain's defense mechanism and they can't handle the truth. > > Defense mechanisms do exist, and sometimes it really is hard to explain a complicated concept without wrestling with various imprecise metaphors. But other times, it's hard to understand because it's not actually a good explanation and you're accurately noticing your confusion. And still other times, it's hard to understand because the simple explanation would sound something like "I want to sneak past your rational thought processes because I'm trying to manipulate you." ### V. Antimemetics I should introduce this section by admitting that most of what I wrote about antimemetics was half-joking. I do think there are ideas that are tough to wrap your mind around, and easy to get wrong. Linking this to the idea of an antimeme (most famously from qntm’s excellent [There Is No Antimemetics Division](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub) stories) was a poetic flourish but not a literal truth. Bringing in the Biblical angels was total trolling. I’m glad people found this idea interesting but I hope they don’t take it too seriously. Still, there were some good comments, including by people who took it more seriously than I did. [Robert McIntyre](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5117889): > There’s actual, literal facts that you can try to explain to people, they will realize they are deeply confused about the issue, and then their mind just “bounces off” the idea, they sort of stare into space, and later they misremember what you said and are right back to where they started. I’ve personally seen this many times for many different facts. It’s not SUPERNATURAL, it doesn’t need to be. But antimemes are very real. > > [After being asked for examples] I find the idea of two people sincerely trying to share the antimemes they've discovered to each other, each with an open mind, to be both fascinating and terrifying. I don't feel comfortable doing it in public, but I have to admit I'm intrigued. How many such facts do you know? I just made a list for 20 minutes and I came up with around 30 discrete things. [Ryan](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5122874): > You use a metaphor of puzzle pieces to understand an antimeme. I think that the “MVP Pyramid” makes more sense. This is a classic image used in business world, and while it’s aesthetically LinkedIn-y it’s useful. > > Here’s an image: > > The relevant axes here are “Finished” and “Complete”. Something is finished if it has some shading on every level of the pyramid. Something is complete if the whole pyramid is filled in. > > An MVP is finished but it is not complete. So, a meme is like an MVP. A classic meme in my world is “the administration doesn’t care about the students.” This is a meme that is so common that it seems to predict the world as much as describe it. However, it is not finished. It is a vast oversimplification, it’s only one sentence! > > An antimeme is an idea that cannot be finished unless it is complete. It deliberately obscures itself so as to minimize simplification into an MVP. Therefore the pyramid must be filled from bottom to top, and it is not useful until it is finished. ### VI. Does Advertising Really Work Like That? [23oncemore](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx8q9ns/) says: > I really appreciate the review, in a "Scott read it and gave it more and better thought than I could, so now I don't have to" way. > > But I don't see evidence that Teach understands the basic reality that advertisers, for instance, do not engage in sophisticated judo with elaborate psychological implications. Or at least not intentionally. Advertising, like news, like any large creative movement, is driven by emergent behaviors and consumer selection. > > For every Coke ad that plays to woke tropes and aims for associating $2 of sugar water with social goodness, there are hundreds of ads that say things like "Drink Coke, it's good" or "Coke is like balloons" and which never make it to market because they are filtered out as poorly performing by managers and focus groups and regional testing. The ads we see are not brilliant psychoanalytic strategy, they are a mechanical reflection of what the populace most wants them to be. > > If Coke ads are woke today, it's not a strategy to appeal to wokeness, it is a reflection that "woke ad #27" outperformed "funny ad #16" in early tests. > > One topic of burning curiosity: does Teach ever reflect on his own relationship to his model of the world? Does he also have no desires, only desires to have desires, or actions to produce the illusion of status? What does he see as the purpose of writing this book? Was it strictly masturbatory for him, to salve his own needs according to his model? Or is he somehow above all of that? [sohois](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxae9y0/) responds: > This is a very common conception of marketing/advertising which doesn't really reflect reality. Advertisers and adverts in general are far less empirical/objective and far more subjective than this, even in major enterprises. Even digital advertising, which has a much greater data pipeline than mass campaigns like Coke do, is going to have a major human element. > > And given the topic of this book review, I obviously have to add that people want advertising to work like you describe, because it absolves them of responsibility. The ads are simply too good, too optimized to resist in this model. > > Though unlike TLP I have no idea if my analysis is true, so feel free to ignore that bit. What I do know is that advertising is far less scientific than most people assume. [cruithne](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxak7wx/) responds: > I used to work for an advertising consultancy company that would assess customers' (advertisers) ads and give feedback on them. From what I gather advertising actually is often very carefully chosen. There is a human element (of course) but it's outsourced and quantified rather than just being the whims of a big boss. And one of the projects I worked on was for Coke. [23oncemore](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxb7xqr/) again: > Fair enough... maybe there's more variety than I expect, just like there's a wide range of formality in how movies are produced. > > I can say that the one time I had a role at large company that involved working with advertising, it was very formal and quantitative. > > We'd give them a brief ~6 months before a campaign with key points for the new product ("twice the battery life" / "50% better performance at same cost"), and they'd iterate over the next few months, with round after round of proposals and quantitative test results, and data on how each draft scored in a few metrics against different demographics. > > My role was "make sure the ads don't say anything technically wrong or show a really dumb use case" so I wasn't a creative approver, but whenever someone questioned whether a draft was going the right direction, our agency was quick to bring out the 10 or 15 alternatives they tested, and the reasons (sometimes subjective, sometimes quantitative) they were worse. > > Feedback on the best drafts would be incorporated in the next round, and round over round scores would (generally) trend towards company goals. > > It left me with this idea that ads generally aren't formulated from a superhuman ability to manipulate psychology, but rather extracted from possibility space the same way you solve Minesweeper. > > It may well be that the company, or agency, or combination was exceptionally formal, maybe because they lacked a brilliant manipulator of psychology and had to brute force it. Maybe those people are out there. But I can say with certainty not all advertising is based in psychological insight. > > “I obviously have to add that people want advertising to work like you describe, because it absolves them of responsibility” > > That's really funny! I would say the same about a belief that advertising is created by superhuman psychological manipulation that the masses are powerless to resist. > > Since we seem to agree that advertising is optimized for effectiveness, and merely disagree about how it is optimized, I'm not sure why personal responsibility would change between the two implementation models. ### VII. Do People Actually Think Like That About Compliments? In the post, I wrote: > Also, compliments. We all know the “fishing for compliments” phenomenon. And we all know the “I fished for compliments and someone complimented me but it doesn’t count because I know I was just fishing for it” phenomenon. And its close cousin, “someone complimented me, but it was for the thing I already know I’m good at, so it doesn’t count”. And their weird uncle, “someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!” This seems a lot like “using other people as pawns in a mind game to feel high status”, and at least a little like the ledger where you resent someone forever if they do something nice for you. > > (half of you are saying “Nobody really thinks like that, right?” and the other half are freaking out: “How did he know what I think?”) [Electrace](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx84m8a/) asked: > Nobody..... Nobody really thinks like that, right? [PM\_ME\_YOUR\_OBSIDIAN](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx8tdby/): > People with OCD do! (I can tell from an irl sample size of one) [LukaC99](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx8bvuy/): > “someone complimented me, but it was for the thing I already know I’m good at, so it doesn’t count” > > This was/is basically my thought process for some compliments, so I can confirm some people, sometimes, do really think something like that. [DM\_ME\_YOUR\_HUSBANDO](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx8jt61/): > Yeah the first three are all clearly normal. It's the weird uncle that's really weird. But it sounds like something some people would think, although I'm not certain. [NonDairyYandere](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hx8qxjc/): > Oh my, yes. > > “I fished for compliments and someone complimented me but it doesn’t count because I know I was just fishing for it” > > Me, a trans person, asking if I pass > > “someone complimented me, but it was for the thing I already know I’m good at, so it doesn’t count” > > Me, a trans person, when someone says I'm the right height to pass > > “someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!” > > When anyone says anything nice to me. > > I mean, I quit fishing because it's pointless, but the thought patterns are the same. There is no point trying to get complimented because I won't believe them. No compliment can unseat the fact that I hate how I look. [Haas\_N](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxa662y/): > As somebody with social anxiety, this doesn't sound too far off the mark. In particular the whole part where your brain is very good at making sure compliments don't count. I personally experience it in a more self-defeating way. I wouldn't get angry at somebody for giving me a compliment, just disappointed at myself for only being good at that one (useless) thing. (Addendum: Even if the thing isn't useless at all, like programming - if your mind is convinced you're a worthless person, any even remotely positive attribute gets twisted into something negative or worthless instead) I\_Eat\_Pork started a poll on the subreddit, which so far looks like this: Seems…false and wrong? But it’s got a graph on it, and that makes it data, and that means it has to be true even if we don’t believe it. Weird. There was also some discussion of how common the attitude towards music I confessed to (sometimes enjoying songs by fantasizing that I wrote them / performed them and now I’m getting famous for them) is. [Gordon Tremeshko](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105831), [John Slow](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5108180), and [Walruss](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5106163) were all willing to admit to doing the same. ### VIII. Miscellaneous Interesting Comments — [Snav](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105669) (writes [Snav’s Digest](https://snav.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) tries to explain the psychoanalytic perspective: > “What’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?” > > He hints at this early on, when he says: > > “In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop. > > ‘Will this book help me learn more about myself?’ Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.” > > The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge. — [Nav\_Panel](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/su658m/book_review_sadly_porn/hxgzv2g/) explains the history of Lacan and why he’s so difficult: > It's sort of complicated. First of all -- Lacan wasn't really "writing" (he did write, though, and it's famously inscrutable, I think he said that it wasn't meant to be read at all), he was delivering seminars verbally. The first 10 or so are all Freud reading groups, mostly analysts. They'd choose an essay or a book for close, careful study and then speak on it. He makes reference to this in earlier seminars, like "thanks so-and-so for the great [excerpted from the text] discussion of this week's material", before moving into his own discussion. I've done some of my own close readings of Freud, more casually, and there really is a lot there: read once to follow Freud's train of logic, and then read for the gaps in the text. > > Around Seminar XI / 1964, Lacan got booted from the Freudian institute, for being too heterodox. So he pivoted and gave a lecture for more general-purpose French intellectuals at the time, which is why Seminar XI is mysterious and obscure: he's talking to guys like Merleau-Ponty, top brass of the French intellectuals, and invoking Aristotle and Hegel and Heidegger, not doing close readings with a gaggle of analysts. But the results of his earlier close readings form the groundwork for his later work. He gets increasingly esoteric from that point on, IMO culminating in Seminar XX, which is kind of where the groundwork for modern notions of gender comes from (Butler was a Lacanian, although she may not admit it). > > Point is that I generally agree. You can't just jump into Lacan with a high IQ and expect to "get it". I know because I and others I've spoken to have tried and failed. Like any intellectual project, you need the lineage (as Scott himself wrote about a while ago in a short fiction I really liked but can't remember the name of), and the lineage here is not common knowledge except perhaps among orthodox Freudian analysts. — [xxggmm](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5107860): > I've tried reading TLP. I feel about the guy the same way I feel about woke stuff -- I don't understand why I should listen to someone sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies that do not match my internal experience at all. Seems masochistic. This reminds me of some of my own thoughts on [competing selectors](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/07/addendum-to-enormous-nutshell-competing-selectors/). You hold onto ideas either because they’re true/useful or because they’re seductive. The study of which ideas are true/useful is science and rationality. I don’t know if there’s a study of which ideas are seductive, but ideas that “sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies” seem to do really well, I think playing off a sort of anxiety that wait, maybe I actually am this bad a person, I should get really into this ideology in order to absolve myself of this guilt. — [Vlad](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5124971) (author of the blog [Vlad’s Notebook](https://vladnote.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes: > "Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense." > > Strong echo from existentialism here. As I understand it, existentialism says that most of us live "unauthentic" lives where we constantly distract ourselves to avoid facing Reality. The distractions are not just stuff like TV or porn, they might be quite elevated and demanding. Proust wrote something on the lines of: some talented writers will rather go to war and die there than sit at the writing table and dig through their feelings. > > But as far as I know, existentialists would not point to status games as a primary cause; they would probably see them as yet another distraction. The primary cause would be the fact that Reality is intrinsically alien and terrifying and we feel that we don't have any place or purpose in it, which is why, after Pascal, most of us cannot "sit quietly in a room alone". And that facing Reality means facing Death and what it says about us (we have an angel's mind, but we shit and die like worms). It's less a risk of failure than its absolute certainty. > > In other words, carving our "authentic" purpose in this alien reality is a titanic task, beyond the means of most people; but as humans with a neocortex that demands meaning, we still have to justify our existence and give it some purpose. Hence the distractions. > > This perspective resonates more with me because I find it really hard to do "actual stuff" in Reality, i.e. stuff that should be done because it's intrinsically valuable but does not have any immediate points attached to it and can only be done by going down lonely, dark paths that lead to Death and Reality. > > As I see it, there's two ways out of this: the humorous, easy-going, dropping-all-pretense, relatively carefree attitude of some "enlightened ones" (mystics, daoist sages, zen masters), who seem to have found a sort of joyful nihilism in their appraisal of reality, or the titanism of individuals who manage to manifest their desires and their will-to-power in the world (I think of people like Napoleon, Musk and yes, even Kanye). Maybe their power and charisma, like your friend's aptitude to be a cult leader, comes from their ability to own and manifest actual desires, achieve individuation, and become a true personality, while their followers get to at least experience it vicariously and partially appropriate their personality through identification, like children who play at being adults. > > But then again, can you tell if enlightenment is "the real deal" and not just another pretense? Is Musk manifesting his individuality, or is he running away like everyone else? It doesn't matter: it doesn't concern \_you\_, so asking these questions is just another distraction. I’ve never really “gotten” existentialism. Maybe related: I have no trouble at all sitting quietly not doing anything or distracting myself (sometimes I have trouble doing anything else!), and relatively weak fear of death (see [this post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/28/survey-results-suffering-vs-oblivion/)). — [Eremolalos](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5128259): > There are undoubtedly many smart, kind psychoanalysts who undertook the long, insanely expensive analytic training in hopes of learning to recognize something like subconscious patterns of thought. I know several. They way things play out in real life for many who got analytic training is that the training gives them some skills and schemas and forms of attunement that get tossed into the mix with all the other stuff they have learned or figured out or know instinctively about how to get people unstuck from various hells. Pure psychoanalysis is rarely practiced these days. Its glamor has faded and it is extremely expensive -- $450/ session in NYC, and patients come for 3-4 sessions/week - so there aren't a lot of customers. > > I do think that of the various schools and styles of psychotherapy, unadulterated psychoanalysis is about the worst in terms of the power imbalance between patient and therapist. I would rather have some psychopharmacologist telling me I should take drug X in order to tame my attentional deficit, psychotic flares or whatnot than to have a psychoanalyst telling me he knows better than I do who I want to have sex with. The former would be giving me expert info about how to tame my brain with drugs -- the latter would be telling me he knows more than I do about who I am. — [Jason Pargin](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105664) wrote > Holy crap, The Last Psychiatrist book finally came out??? Why isn't this bigger news? This is my white whale. I'm buying it just because I feel like I owe him for TLP, which had more influence on my life than any other single piece of writing. Maybe not a very interesting comment, but I’m including here because lots of other commenters were surprised and excited to learn that Pargin (aka David Wong) still exists and has a Substack, [Jason Pargin’s Newsletter](https://jasonpargin.substack.com/). — Every ACX post has to have one person relating it to predictive coding. Usually that person is me, but this time it was [FeepingCreature](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5111309): > I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self. To which [Snav](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5133836) responded: > There's a new strain of neuropsychoanalysis from the last decade that you might find interesting, haven't read it but this 3 part series of papers relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas comes highly recommended: <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/> I guess I have to read this now, don’t I? Other things people say this book reminded them of include: [The Gervais Principle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5108991), [Adlerian psychology](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5108991), [Rene Girard](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105831), and [David Foster Wallace](https://astralcodexten.substack.co/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5105162). — [Connor Flexman](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5133926) says: > (x-posted from rationalist house slack) > > The problem with worshippers of Lacan and “irrational psyches” is that everything looks like a nail. (True of most groups, but anyways…) Some parts of the psyche are pretty straightforward. Other parts are riddled with one or more PARADOXes. If you look for PARADOX everywhere, you can hardly proceed. It is one place where you cannot let the obstacle become the way. > > I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology. — [throwaway289](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5111779) says: > Alright Scott, you're making me make a throwaway account for this. CW: frank and gross discussion of bizarre porn. > > > Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out. > > It is not insane. I've spent way too fucking long looking at online hentai communities for this to sound insane. > > It's probably true of me: at some point I realized that the thing that makes my dick most hard isn't when I'm diving into a cool-looking hentai comic. It's when I'm scrolling through the grid of covers looking through to FIND some that I might like. The search, the potential for a nice surprise, is what kicks a part of my brain into gear. The diving into it is just the follow-through. You could literally describe that as having a fetish for nhentai's search page and you wouldn't be too far off. > > And among the general populace of these communities, there's an oft-running "haha only serious" meme of 2D women being better than 3D women. I don't think everybody falls into that trap, but there are people that do, and it gets really sad really quickly: <https://www.reddit.com/r/waifuism/> > > I'd say these people would sooner admit to the thought behind Teach's quote than most porn consumers, but that's probably just me falling into the same status-raising trap that's talked about in this entire review by trying to say "at least they're honest about it". > > The "porn is your fetish" thing is even more true the more "extreme" or "weird" the fetishes get, particularly in hentai communities. You get people that fetishize shit that's illegal or immoral, sure, but then there are people that fetishize shit that isn't physically possible. You can't have that in the real world. Porn is literally the only outlet. Not sure I agree here. I’ve also encountered some of the “2D better than 3D” people, and I always interpreted them as saying that anime girls have more of the characteristics they’re attracted to than real women (and why shouldn’t they - they were designed as fantasies). People getting aroused just by starting to browse porn sites just seems to me like typical classical conditioning - although I guess maybe that’s what a fetish is, so never mind. — [WrongOnTheInternet](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5121634): > This reads like abuse, because it is. I guess I get to thank an abusive ex-friend for inoculating me against this particular kind of anti-thought. If the author expresses contempt and hate for the reader, I'm inclined to believe them and steer clear. > > There's a blatant attempt to undermine your ability to take your own thoughts seriously here, and it's apparent in the passage where the author accuses literally everybody of not having desires (at least not of the sort he thinks are good) and only being interested in "status" (which is subtly being shifted around with "identity" or "self-image", but not the same thing). Boy, when you redefine words like that, you can make anything mean anything! > > This book is weaponized gaslighting. The fact that Scott wrote an interesting review and drew useful insights is pretty much separate from that. — [Jack Wilson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5112104): > What I don't understand about this "desire for desire" idea is I spent all of middle-school and high-school with a hard-on looking around at the girls in my classroom, imagining the terrible, beautiful things I wanted to do with them. As a Gen-X-er, talking to others in my generation, that's how we all experienced it. You'd spend all day in class imagining fucking the girl who sat in front of you in English class, then go home and jack off thinking about her the moment you got home. You couldn't wait to get home to jack off. It was torture. > > But was everyone in my generation experiencing some memetic desire, something different from today because we consumed different porn? I grew up when porn meant Penthouse and Hustler magazines. You spent a lot of time looking at a picture of a hairy pussy. Did that create the desire I felt for my female classmates? It seems implausible, yet I don't know how to rule it out. > > If that's the case, then it seems like magazine porn was the good porn, because it was just pictures of tits and cunts and made you want to experience them in the flesh. It wasn't a substitution, maybe it was a catalyst. > > It strikes me as crazy that most young men haven't always spent most of their time fantasizing about exploring women's pussies. After all, aren't we here because that's what every generation before us did? It seems nutty to think porn is a driver of desire as opposed to a pacifier of it. > > But maybe internet porn is different? Perhaps, but any "This time it's different" claim needs to make a strong, clear case. I agree that high school boys are the toughest case for the “you have no desires” argument, and that thinking of a specific high school boy (including yourself if you’re male and post-high school) is perhaps more clarifying than a generic “you” made up of vague figures you don’t think about too hard. — [WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5164593) calls me out, fairly: > "Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations." > > [A bit later, the cure is described.] > > "...it will be cured when you come to the fountain." > > "What fountain's that?" > > "It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty." > > -"The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis > > To want to be the person who wrote the music, or who would skillfully play it before a huge audience, to great acclaim... yeah, that is common to this time. The self-forgetfulness is much to be hoped for. — Finally, by [Walruss](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn/comment/5106163): > TLP got me through some really tough times, and there's something true and real at the bottom of all the...whatever it is he's writing, but for me it really just boils down to: "Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job.	Scott Alexander	50269257	Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"	acx
# Mantic Monday 4/18/22 ### Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since [my last post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122?s=w) March 21: 1. [Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9941/russia-takeover-of-ukrainian-cities-by-june/): 53% → 5% 2. [Will World War III happen before 2050?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/2534/will-there-be-a-world-war-three-before-2050/): 20% →22% 3. [Will Russia invade any other country in 2022?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9930/russian-invasion-of-another-country-in-2022/): 7% →5% 4. [Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10002/presidency-of-vladimir-putin-on-feb-1-2023/): 80% → 85% 5. [Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10001/civilian-deaths-in-ukrainian-cities-in-2022/): 10% → 10% If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the [Metaculus Alert bot](https://twitter.com/MetaculusAlert) for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!) ### Nuclear Risk Update Last month superforecaster group Samotsvety Forecasts published their [estimate of the near-term risk of nuclear war](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KRFXjCqqfGQAYirm5/samotsvety-nuclear-risk-forecasts-march-2022), with a headline number of 24 micromorts per week. A few weeks later, J. Peter Scoblic, a nuclear security expert with the International Security Program, [shared his thoughts](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W8dpCJGkwrwn7BfLk/nuclear-expert-comment-on-samotsvety-nuclear-risk-forecast-2). His editor wrote: > I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed “adversarial collaboration.” So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement. In other words: the Samotsvety analysis was the best that domain-general forecasting had to offer. This is the best that domain-specific expertise has to offer. Let’s see if they line up: Superficially not really! In contrast to Samotsvety’s 24 micromorts, Scoblic says 370 micromorts, an order of magnitude higher. Most of the difference comes from two steps. First, conditional on some kind of nuclear exchange, will London (their index city for where some specific person worrying about nuclear risk might be) get attacked? Samotsvety says only 18% chance. Scoblic raises this to 65%, saying: > This is the most problematic of the component forecasts because [Samotsvety’s estimate] implies a highly confident answer to one of the most significant and persistent questions in nuclear strategy: whether escalation can be controlled once nuclear weapons have been used. Is it possible to wage a “merely” tactical nuclear war, or will tactical war inevitably lead to a strategic nuclear exchange in which the homelands of nuclear-armed states are targeted? Would we “rationally” climb an escalatory ladder, pausing at each rung to evaluate pros and cons of proceeding, or would we race to the top in an attempt to gain advantage? Is the metaphorical ladder of escalation really just a slippery slope to Armageddon? This debate stretches to the beginning of the Cold War, and there is little data upon which to base an opinion, let alone a fine-grained forecast […] > > What does this all mean for the forecast? Given the degree of disagreement and the paucity of data, it would not be unreasonable to assign this question 50/50 odds. . . . It is also worth noting that practitioners are not sanguine about this question. In 2018, General John Hyten, then head of U.S. Strategic Command, [said this about escalation control](https://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/1577239/the-mitchell-institute-triad-conference/) after the annual Global Thunder exercise: “It ends the same way every time. It does. It ends bad. And bad meaning it ends with global nuclear war.” > > So, I’d bump the 18% to the other side of “maybe” and then some: 65%. Second, what is the probability that an “informed and unbiased” person could escape a city before it gets nuked? Samotsvety said 75%; Scoblic said 30%. I think this is a fake disagreement. Some people I know were so careful that they had already left their cities by the time this essay was posted; the odds of this person escaping a nuclear attack are 100%. Other people are homebound, never watch the news, and don’t know there’s a war at all; the odds of these people escaping a nuclear attack are 0%. In between are a lot of different levels of caution; do you start leaving when the war starts to heat up? Or do you want until you hear that nukes are already in the air? Do you have a car? A motorcycle for weaving through traffic? Do you plan to use public transit? My guess is that the EAs who Samotsvety were writing for are better-informed, more cautious, and better-resourced than average, and the 75% chance they’d escape was right for them. Scoblic seems to interpret this question as saying that people have to escape after the nuclear war has already started, and his 30% estimate seems fine for that situation. If we halve Scoblic’s estimate (or double Samotsvety’s) to adjust for this “fake disagreement” factor - then it’s still 24 vs. 185 micromorts, a difference of 8x. What do we want - and what do we have the right to expect - from forecasting? If it’s order-of-magnitude estimates, it looks like we have one: we’ve bounded nuclear risk in the order of magnitude between 24 and 185 (at least until some third group comes around with something totally different than either of these two). Or maybe it’s a better understanding of our “cruxes” - where the real disagreement is that accounts for almost all of the downstream uncertainty. In this case, this exercise is pretty successful - everyone is pretty close to each other on the risk of small-scale nuclear war, and the big disagreement is over whether small-scale nuclear war would inevitably escalate. The Samotsvety team says they plan to meet, discuss Scoblic’s critiques, and see if they want to update any of their estimates. And they made what I consider [some pretty strong points in the comments](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W8dpCJGkwrwn7BfLk/nuclear-expert-comment-on-samotsvety-nuclear-risk-forecast-2?commentId=PRkbcuTRDi6s2seLj) that maybe Scoblic will want to adjust on. Both sides seem to be treating this as a potential adversarial collaboration, and I’d be interested in seeing if this can bound the risk even further. ### AI Risk “Update” Everyone’s been talking about this [Metaculus question](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-system-is-devised/): ”Weakly general AI” in the question means a single system that can perform a bunch of impressive tasks - passing a “Turing test”, scoring well on the SAT, playing video games, etc. Read the link for the full operationalization, but the short version is that this is advanced stuff AI can’t do yet, but still doesn’t necessarily mean “totally equivalent to humans in any way”, let alone superintelligence. For the past year or so, this had been drifting around the 2040s. Then last week it plummeted to 2033. I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of this move: it was also on 2033 back in 2020, before drifting up a bit. But this is certainly the sharpest correction in the market’s two year history. The drop corresponded to three big AI milestones. First, [DALL-E2](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/), a new and very impressive art AI. ([source](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511724264629678084)) Second, [PALM](https://storage.googleapis.com/pathways-language-model/PaLM-paper.pdf), a new and very impressive language AI: PALM explaining jokes ([source](https://twitter.com/ATabarrok/status/1511329279669329926)) Third, [Chinchilla](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scaling-laws-for-large-language-models), a paper and associated model suggesting that people have been training AIs inefficiently all this time, and that probably a small tweak to the process could produce better results with the same computational power. (there’s also this [Socratic Models paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00598) that I haven’t even gotten a chance to look at, but which looks potentially impressive) This raises the eternal question of “exciting game-changer” vs. “incremental progress at the same rate as always”. These certainly don’t seem to me to be bigger game changers than the original DALL-E or GPT-3, but I’m not an expert and maybe they should be. It’s just weird that they used up half our remaining AI timeline (ie moved the date when we should expect AGI by this definition from 20 years out to 10 years out) when I feel like there have been four or five things this exciting in the past decade. Or is there another explanation? A lot of AI forecasters on Metaculus are Less Wrong readers; we know that the Less Wrong [Yudkowsky/Christiano debate on takeoff speeds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai?s=w) moved the relevant Metaculus question a few percent: Early this month on Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky posted [MIRI Announces New Death With Dignity Strategy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), where he said that after a career of trying to prevent unfriendly AI, he had become extremely pessimistic, and now expects it to happen in the relatively near-term and probably kill everyone. This caused the Less Wrong community, already pretty dedicated to panicking about AI, to redouble its panic. Although the new announcement doesn’t really say anything about timelines that hasn’t been said before, the emotional framing has hit people a lot harder. I will admit that I’m one of the people who is kind of panicky. But I also worry about an information cascade: we’re an insular group, and Eliezer is a convincing person. Other communities of AI alignment researchers are [more optimistic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dSaScvukmCRqey8ug/convince-me-that-humanity-is-as-doomed-by-agi-as-yudkowsky?commentId=SwDSKDALGa95Wqqk2). I continue to plan to cover the attempts at debate and convergence between optimistic and pessimistic factions, and to try to figure out my own mind on the topic. But for now the most relevant point is that a lot of people who were only medium panicked a few months ago are now very panicked. Is that the kind of thing that moves forecasting tournaments? I don’t know. ### Shorts 1: [Will Elon Musk acquire over 50% of Twitter by the end of 2022?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10662/will-elon-musk-buy-twitter-in-2022/) Why are these two so different? Do lots of people expect Musk to acquire Twitter after June 1 but still in 2022? 2: [Will Marine Le Pen win the 2022 French presidential election?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6763/marine-le-pen-french-president-in-2022/) Beautiful correspondence, beautiful volume numbers. 3: [Will cumulative reported deaths from COVID-19 in China exceed 50,000 by the end of 2022?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9207/china-covid-deaths-to-exceed-50k/)	Scott Alexander	52429737	Mantic Monday 4/18/22	acx
# Open Thread 220 This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the unofficial ACX community [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), or [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php). Also: 1: Time to start the book review contest! You’ll find the entries in four Google Docs: [A-H](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRQbRbEUwSH_jm94PI_ij-88swat7vQ4iNaNp6gd39g/edit#heading=h.at6953giqgr5), [I-S](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kQUUJhv-MpLawby2j4zXLZPDG6ligWd5xpIjH8UmWdw/edit?usp=sharing), [T-T](https://docs.google.com/document/d/100kMdSVFviZSSBvUyyEQPMNlvLptVQxHFD9i9wGuBWs/edit?usp=sharing), [T-Y](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFzjXliCAWjvheY-8Qd2fhbF79LnX0Xg6R9eqk9yIyI/edit?usp=sharing). If you want to help, please open one of those at random, then pick a review at random. Or pick the review you find most interesting. Anything as long as you don’t start at the beginning of the list; I want to spread ratings across reviews as evenly as possible. Once you’ve read the review, go to the [review rating form here](https://forms.gle/K189zhGDJbdinuvY8) and send me your 1-10 rating. Then pick a new review and keep repeating this process for as long as you have the patience and interest to continue. I’ll also be going through these, and the reviews that have the best ratings (from me and from other readers) will get promoted to finalists and posted here. 2: Related: if you entered the contest, but your review isn’t included in the documents or isn’t listed as an option on the dropdown in the rating form, please email scott@slatestarcodex.com with “This is a genuine nonspam message” somewhere in the text so my spam filter doesn’t eat it, let me know what’s missing, and maybe send me a backup copy in case the original got lost. 3: New moderation decisions: bans for [Dors](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-213/comment/5298879) and [Survivedwithcannabis](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-214/comment/5430078). Medium warnings (50% of ban) for [JSTR](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-2125/comment/5283278), [CC](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links/comment/5436842), [Jack Wilson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-215/comment/5531930), [Joseph Bronski](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-217/comment/5753996), [Crazy Jalfrezi](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-217/comment/5985606), and [Adept](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-self/comment/5909866). Minor warnings (25% of ban) for [Essex](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions/comment/5355506?s=w) and [Sapient Fungus](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links/comment/5437594). If you want to appeal any decision, please write up your argument, start a [conditional prediction market](https://manifold.markets/home) on whether I’ll agree that your appeal was worth my time to read (include your argument in the market description and subsidize it with an ante of at least M100 or equivalent on some other site), wait a week, and if the prediction market is higher than 25% then you can send me an email with a link to the market and argument and I’ll look at it. 4: I’m still planning to be at an Irvine meetup on Monday, see [this post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/irvine-meetup-this-monday?s=w) for details.	Scott Alexander	51981930	Open Thread 220	acx
# Irvine Meetup This Monday I’ll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don’t mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too. When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM. Where: Underneath [this mysterious hexagonal sigil](https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6505964,-117.8386423,41m/data=!3m1!1e3) at the University Center food court in Irvine, California. 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	52303947	Irvine Meetup This Monday	acx
# Links For April 1: [History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies.](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17496977.2019.1648924) 2: Jacob Wood’s [Graph Of The Blogosphere](https://jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/). ACX’s neighborhood: You can also see Jacob’s description of how he made it [here](https://jacobw.xyz/projects/blog_graph/). It looks like it starts with some index blogs, follows them to blogs they link, and so on. I don’t know how much this captures “the whole blogosphere” vs. “blogs X degrees or fewer away from the starting blog”. It looks like a pretty complete selection of big politics/econ blogs to me, but I don’t know if there are fashion blogs or movie blogs in a totally separate universe bigger than any of us. Also, Marginal Revolution confirmed as center of the blogosphere. 3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a [secret plan to resurrect Byzantium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Plan) and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3. 4: Congratulations to last year’s book review contest winner Lars Doucet, who was [interviewed by Jerusalem Demsas in a Vox article on Georgism](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22951092/land-tax-housing-crisis) (the article prefers the term “land value tax” and never mentions George by name, which is a surprising but I think defensible choice). 5: [Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWs2PnvYsjXMnQ9GSECx1LkZObTk3T-99rwsQ_Jab_k/edit) - “Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…” H/T [worldoptimization](https://worldoptimization.tumblr.com/post/677914885248696321/amitheasshole-an-investigation) 6: Chris Beiser on [the 10th anniversary of KONY 2012](https://twitter.com/ctbeiser/status/1500243002614190081/), and what it meant for activism. 7: Nostalgebraist [explains the new language model scaling result](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/680262678831415296/an-exciting-new-paper-on-neural-language-model). 8: US States by number of Nobel laureates born there (h/t [Malcolm Collins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SgszmZwrDHwG3qurr/miri-location-optimization-and-related-topics-discussion?commentId=MzAuibJaQZWY3gSm4)) 9: Scholars in Early 21st Century Studies: [“Donald Trump is not a historical figure, but is actually a compilation of four distinct sources”](https://twitter.com/ByzCat/status/1500257031952879616). 10: [Beyond Micromarriages:](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xCQSg33p2sJTrXdsk/beyond-micromarriages) “Micromarriages aren't fully analogous to micromorts, which makes it tricky to define them satisfactorily. I introduce an alternative unit: QAWYs - Quality-Adjusted Wife Years.” (yes, this is April Fools) 11: Why did Rome (and not someone else) take over the Mediterranean? [Erich Grunewald says](https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/why-rome/) the secret ingredient was their concept of citizenship, which turned conquered peoples from enemies who might revolt into active participants in the “Roman project” who would help them take over new lands. This turned imperial expansion into a positive feedback loop! 12: Bean @ Naval Gazing: [Early Lesson From The War In Ukraine](https://www.navalgazing.net/Early-Lessons-from-the-War-in-Ukraine). One of them is to build more missile defense. 13: [Kazakh President Proposes Reforms To Limit His Powers](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/16/kazakhistan-president-proposes-reforms-to-limit-his-powers). I know nothing about Kazakhstan, so let me know if this is just meaningless propaganda, but at least superficially it looks like a combination of the protests this year and (speculatively?) the loss of Russia’s credibility have done some good here. 14: [Go Big Or Stay Home: Small Neuroimaging Studies Just Generate Noise](http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2022/03/go-big-or-stay-home-small-neuroimaging.html). Most neuroimaging studies have samples in the the 2-3 digits, but would need to be in the 4-5 digits to have enough power to detect real effects. I was really excited and happy to see this paper, because I had always secretly assumed this - too many neuroimaging studies were getting too many convenient but hard-to-replicate results - and now I can feel good about my mistrust (also, maybe neuroimaging can try to do better). Hopefully this will mirror the progress of genetics, when - after a decade or two of genetics papers that were basically always wrong - scientists cleaned up their act and now produce genetics papers that are only sometimes wrong. 15: Ivermectin updates: the big Brazilian study that showed ivermectin doesn’t work [was officially released](https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089809588/ivermectin-covid-treatment-brazil-study). This doesn’t update my analysis because I had included a preliminary version of it. See Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz’s take on some objections [here](https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1510862614452404226). Another big study from Malaysia [also came out](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2789362); the headline result is “doesn’t work” but Meyerowitz-Katz [thinks it’s more complicated](https://gidmk.medium.com/the-jury-is-still-out-on-ivermectin-7d0a1895549) (although still leans negative). Avi Bitterman et al formally published their “ivermectin efficacy only in areas with parasitic worms” [paper in JAMA](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173). Alexandros Marinos [still thinks it works](https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1505164962552967170). 16: Related: very large and impressive RCT shows [no effect for Vitamin D on COVID](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.22.22271707v1). 17: [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7057/turing-test-for-plant-based-meat-by-2023/): will plant-based meat pass a “Turing test” (where people can’t distinguish it from real meat) by 2023? Currently at 55% 18: [History Of Bachelor Taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_tax): “A bachelor tax existed in Argentina around 1900. Men who could prove that they had asked a woman to marry them and had been rebuffed were exempt from the tax. In 1900, this gave rise to the phenomenon of "professional lady rejectors", women who for a fee would swear to the authorities that a man had proposed to them and they had refused.” (h/t [\_femb0t](https://twitter.com/__femb0t/status/1503195453608898563)) 19: Zhou Enlai famously said of the effects of the French Revolution that it was “too early to say”. But [a diplomat who was there at the time](https://web.archive.org/web/20110613103554/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/74916db6-938d-11e0-922e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1P9QxmamR) says this wasn’t some kind of wise utterance about history - Zhou thought the question was about the French protests of 1968, which really were too recent to have an opinion on. (h/t Dylan Matthews) 20: Claim: trying to spell [the Spanish informal second person singular affirmative imperative of ‘salirle”](https://sigmaleph.tumblr.com/post/679211215449391104/theaudientvoid-sigmaleph-mark-gently) causes a grammatical paradox, and so the Royal Spanish Academy advises that, while this word may be spoken, it must not be written down. 21: Investment in space startups over time (h/t [Aleph](https://twitter.com/woke8yearold/status/1511768651074002951)): 22: [Who wrote up Banach’s thesis?:](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/111724/who-wrote-up-banachs-thesis) > There is a curious story how Banach got his Ph.D. He was being forced to write a Ph.D. paper and take the examinations, as he very quickly obtained many important results, but he kept saying that he was not ready and perhaps he would invent something more interesting. At last the university authorities became nervous. Somebody wrote down Banach’s remarks on some problems, and this was accepted as an excellent Ph.D. dissertation. But an exam was also required. One day Banach was accosted in the corridor and asked to go to a Dean’s room, as “some people have come and they want to know some mathematical details, and you will certainly be able to answer their questions”. Banach willingly answered the questions, not realising that he was just being examined by a special commission that had come to Lvov for this purpose. 23: Alexey Guzey argues for [getting less sleep as a productivity and mental health intervention](https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/) (sort of), or at the very least that all the scientists saying getting 7-8+ hours of sleep is important don’t know what they’re talking about. Natalia Mendonca [disagrees and says the evidence for more sleep is pretty good](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sbcmACvB6DqYXYidL/counter-theses-on-sleep). You can find some further discussion between the two of them in the comments of Natalia’s post. 24: [Ten Years Of Nukemap](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/02/03/10-years-of-nukemap/). Alex Wellerstein writes about what he’s learned in ten years running the Internet’s premier site for “how bad would it be if my city got nuked?” 25: Related: Bean on DSL: [Nuclear Weapons Are Not As Destructive As You Think](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6142.0.html). A full nuclear exchange between US and Russia would involve 4,000 warheads. Most would hit military and industrial centers. Many of those would be in cities, which would mean a very bad time for people in those cities - but destroying cities wouldn’t be the primary goal, and many cities / parts of cities might remain un-destroyed. Second order effects like fallout and nuclear winter would be relatively minor (on a civilizational scale). Also related: Finan Adamson’s [Nuclear Preparedness Guide](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DL7gYYA2BKjmXABse/nuclear-preparedness-guide). 26: Gauromydas heros is [the world’s largest fly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauromydas_heros). Don’t click on that link unless you want to see a picture of the world’s largest fly, I am very serious about this. 27: I know “post on the Sam Harris subreddit about the black-white gap” might be self-anti-recommending, but I still appreciated [Many black-white disparities in important life outcomes are mostly eliminated after controlling for youth standardized test scores](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/qa6dy6/many_blackwhite_disparities_in_important_life/) . Black men/women who score X on a military IQ test make (only 9% less / somewhat more) per hour, and (24% less / somewhat more) per year than white men/women with the same score; the remaining difference disappears or reverses at higher incomes and education levels. This fits my expectation that most of the direct job market prejudice black people face focuses on low-income black men in particular. See the comments for caveats. 28: [The Neural Code For Face Cells Is Not Face-Specific](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.06.483186v1). Attempt by the author to explain further [here](https://twitter.com/kasper_vinken/status/1501294205460615168). I don’t really understand this but people are saying it’s an argument against modularity in the brain? Maybe someone can explain to me. 29: [Marcus v. Search Warrant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_v._Search_Warrant) was a 1961 court case where a magazine seller, unable to sue the police who confiscated his magazines, hit on a novel legal strategy: sue the search warrant. He made it to the Supreme Court and won. Related: [US vs. Tyrannosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Tyrannosaurus_Bataar_Skeleton). 30: [Pro-crypto manifesto](https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083): “There are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact […] Freedom of speech might require pamplets, advertisements, or websites. Freedom of assembly might require taking a train to Washington DC or booking a hotel room…the exercise of rights costs money…In the United States (and EU) banks and payment processors have been pressured to cut off accounts to gun shops, adult businesses, crypto businesses and other perfectly legal businesses….Some aspiring dictator will censor their opponents' spending during a election period and they won't be able to buy a tomato, let alone run a campaign.” 31: I’ve previously expressed doubt about NLP-based science search/aggregation methods here, but Consensus [argues I am wrong and they will be great](https://consensus.app/blog/after-years-of-promises-nlp-text-processing-is-ready-to-prove-doubters-wrong/). 32: Adrian D’Souza, on Singapore’s [successful anti-child-obesity program](https://adriandsouza.substack.com/p/fat-shaming-kids-in-singapore?s=w). But see [the subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/tu209v/fat_shaming_kids_in_singapore/) for some skeptical comments. 33: I know the AI-generated art community has moved on to being impressed by DALL-E2, but let’s take a second to appreciate this work by CLIP, from the prompt “the god of Twitter” (h/t [Ryan Moulton](https://twitter.com/moultano/status/1498856331066810369)):	Scott Alexander	51761264	Links For April	acx
# Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President I. President Jason Shea, 2012 Jason Shea was born in Washington, DC in 1946. His father, Jackson Shea, was a former war hero turned politician; a few years after Shea's birth, he would become Vice President of the US under Eisenhower. His mother, Shawna Shea, was the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Jason had two older sisters, a younger brother, and three half-siblings from his father's first marriage. His childhood was marked by upheaval. During the Red Scare, VP Shea's enemies accused him of being a Communist. The charge was absurd - all anyone had against him was some ill-advised comments where he had praised a book about 1930s labor activism - but in the climate of the day, they threatened his political career. Angry mobs protested in front of his house; he received letters threatening his wife and children. Around this time, Jason's older sister committed suicide - we don't know the exact details - and VP Shea decided enough was enough. He sent young Jason to live with relatives in Iowa, while he continued fighting for his political life. Shea spent his teenage years in the town of Long Grove, Iowa. He apparently hated it there - his relatives were strict disciplinarians, and he was forced to do backbreaking labor on their farm. After less than a year, he surreptitiously bought a train ticket for Washington and tried to return home, but his mother refused to let him in. He was arrested by the police as a runaway, and eventually taken back to Iowa, where he lived for seven more years. At 22, he was accepted to Harvard, where he studied engineering. At some point during his studies, he reconciled with his family, and began to consider politics as a career. After graduating, he took a job working for General John Bowers, one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an old friend of his father's. For the rest of his twenties, he went back and forth among various government jobs, including a stint where he visited China on a fact-finding mission. He ended up as a consultant, spending a few years each with municipal governments in Richmond, Miami, Raleigh, and finally New York City. He split his time half-and-half between New York - where he was rising higher in city government and making important allies - and Harvard, where he was pursuing a PhD in political science. In 1996, he succeeded on both counts - he received his PhD, and he was elected as New York mayor. He was known as an unpretentious, relatively bipartisan technocrat who did a good job tackling corruption and making the city work effectively. In 2004, as his mayoral term expired, Shea - now in his mid-50s - ran for Senate and won. He gained popularity from a series of successful projects - including helping run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and made friends in the diplomatic corps for his interest in (and encyclopedic knowledge of foreign affairs). In 2007, despite being a freshman Senator, he decided to run for President. He started with some built-in advantages. After eight years of Republican rule, the country was ready for a Democrat. The only Republican who'd had half a chance, super-popular Texas governor Bo Shelley, had been caught taking bribes from organized crime early in 2007, and was fighting to avoid prison. Shea, with his Harvard education, New York experience, Iowa roots, and story of overcoming adversity during the unfair persecution of his father, had something for everybody in the Democratic base. He got a high-profile endorsement from Bill Clinton, won the nomination, and coasted to an easy victory over Republican John McCain in 2008. Then he declared himself dictator-for-life and imprisoned half the inhabitants of Alaska. II. In Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter discusses philosophy of translation. Take for example the Chinese characters 孔夫子. “Kong Fuzi” is a very literal translation, but means nothing to most English-speakers. “Master Kong” is less literal, and conveys a little more information. “Confucius” is a terrible translation for many technical reasons, but probably the best way to give the English-speaker useful information. What would it look like to try an even less literal translation than that? One possibility - don’t laugh - would be “Aristotle”. That is, imagine you’re watching some Chinese movie, and some character says “As 孔夫子 says, we need to place virtue over personal gain.” If you’re totally unfamiliar with Chinese history and culture, translating the characters as “Kong Fuzi” or “Confucius” doesn’t help. It just sounds like a meaningless name. The speaker could be naming their friend, and saying that she’s worried being unvirtuous will disappoint them. Or it could be the dictator, and recommending virtue because the secret police will arrest unvirtuous people. Translating it “Aristotle” succinctly conveys that you should be virtuous because a widely-respected ancient philosopher said so. When I was working on the Dictator Book Club entry for Xi Jinping, I frequently found myself lost in unfamiliar Chinese names and concepts. For example, from Xi’s [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping) page: > In Fujian, Xi made efforts to attract investment from Taiwan and to strengthen the private sector of the provincial economy. In February 2000, he and then-provincial Party Secretary Chen Mingyi were called before the top members of Central Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP – General Secretary Jiang Zemin, Premier Zhu Rongji, Vice-President Hu Jintao and Discipline Inspection Secretary Wei Jianxing – to explain aspects of the Yuanhua scandal. In 2002, Xi left Fujian and took up leading political positions in neighbouring Zhejiang. He eventually took over as provincial Party Committee Secretary after several months as acting governor, occupying a top provincial office for the first time in his career. In 2002, he was elected a full member of the 16th Central Committee, marking his ascension to the national stage. None of this made sense to me the first ten times I read it, and I wanted to experiment with ways to convey it more efficiently. So I tried to “translate” the story of Xi Jinping into the story of Jason Shea, 44th US President. Overall I had fun, but I don’t think it was very successful. The main problem was running into systematic differences between China and the US that made some parts hard to translate, or forced me to bend the truth. For example: during his career, Xi served as party secretary of four different areas: Zhengding, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. A faithful conceptual translation would have had Shea serving as county supervisor of some small county in Virginia, then mayor of Miami, then governor of North Carolina, then governor of New York. This career progression doesn’t make a lot of sense in a US context (except for [this guy](https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senator_for_three_states.htm)!), so I turned him into a consultant in Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina before becoming NYC mayor. Maybe I should have just let him be governor of a bunch of states and let it be implausible, I don’t know. The other thing that didn’t work was the timing. Xi’s father was purged in 1962, which was a little too late for the Red Scare. I moved Xi’s birth back a bit, but I didn’t want to go before World War II. That meant I was a bit coy about how old Shea was when he was sent off to Iowa - if we go by the historic Red Scare, Shea should have been 7ish, but Xi was 16 when he got sent to Shaanxi. Likewise, Xi became President of China in 2012, but the US election that best fit Shea’s story was 2008, so I moved everything forward four years and made him a stand-in for Barack Obama. I consider this mostly a failed project, which is why I’m showing it to subscribers only and not releasing it to the wider world. PS: The picture on the top is what happens if you ask the [Artbreeder](https://www.artbreeder.com/browse) AI to make Xi Jinping’s face look like a white person. I think it’s pretty good!	Scott Alexander	51754880	Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President	acx
# Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting. It’s less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist’s Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses. On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it’s all stuff like “take prenatal vitamins” and “avoid alcohol” and “don’t strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects”. It’s fine, but it’s the equivalent of college counselors who say “get good grades and try hard on the SAT.” Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What’s the pregnancy-advice version of that? That’s what we’re doing here. Don’t take this as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion. Here are my headline findings: Going in order: ### All The Normal Stuff (Tier 1) This is a post on obscure pregnancy interventions. So I’ll be skipping over all the standard advice that OB/GYNs give: folate, iodine, alcohol, caffeine, cheese, whatever. That doesn’t mean you can skip it! The normal stuff is much more important than any of the obscure things on this list. Don’t even think about my recommendations until you’re doing all the normal stuff right. I strongly recommend Emily Oster’s [Expecting Better](https://amzn.to/3Mvr46T) as a really good guide to the normal advice, including how much of it is really evidence-based vs. how much can be safely ignored. ### Avoid Stress (Tier 1) A pregnant woman’s stress is generally considered to have negative effects on the fetus. The stress hormone cortisol can pass the placenta. Although the placenta usually tries to keep fetal cortisol exposure low, high enough levels can overwhelm this mechanism. See this page on [maternal-fetal stress transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_fetal_stress_transfer) for details. The most interesting study is [Gitau et al](https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/86/1/104/2841108?login=false), which looks at maternal and fetal cortisol levels during various scary medical procedures, and finds that even procedures that don’t affect the fetus cause elevations in fetal cortisol, presumably because they caused elevations in maternal cortisol and some of it crossed over. Does this necessarily hurt fetal development? There are many studies showing it does, but before we get to them, three caveats. First caveat: almost every topic we investigate, including this one, will be confounded by poverty. Poor mothers have more of most risk factors. They’re more exposed to toxic pollutants. They eat worse diets and take fewer supplements. They’re less likely to follow the latest fad health advice. And poor babies usually have worse outcomes: worse health, more behavioral problems, lower IQ. So if you ask “does this risk factor correlate with worse outcomes”, the answer is almost always yes (sometimes statisticians try to adjust away poverty and other confounding variables, but [this never works](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719)). This is why only randomized controlled trials, or other studies that come up with clever ways around this problem, can be truly convincing. Second caveat: almost every topic we investigate, including this one, will be confounded by genetics. Pregnant mothers will do something, and then their child will be a certain way, and people will want to say it was because they did the thing, but it might just be genetic. For example, consider the claim that maternal stress during pregnancy makes children develop anxiety disorders. You survey a thousand mothers, you see which ones are stressed during pregnancy, then thirty years later you check if those mothers’ kids have more anxiety disorders. They will, but anxiety disorders are genetic. If your mother was stressed during pregnancy, maybe it’s because she has a genetic tendency towards stress, which you inherit, and then you’re stressed all the time too. This can be more subtle: for example, what if we find that maternal stress decreases child IQ? It could be causal. Or it could be that low-IQ people make worse decisions, that means they end up in more stressful situations, and then pass those low-IQ genes on to their kids. Third, closely related caveat: this whole field gets very political. You can use maternal stress to support “cycle of poverty” narratives where children in poor families “never had a chance”; their mothers were so stressed during pregnancy that their brains developed wrong, meaning they can’t be expected to succeed like other people. A lot of people are really attached to this idea, that makes them less willing to challenge studies that support it, and a lot of unusually bad ones get through. With those three caveats in mind: sure, there are lots of studies showing that stress hurts fetal development. Probably the biggest is [this study of 10,000 kids](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28893381/), which finds that maternal stress during pregnancy is correlated with increased likelihood that a kid will get ADHD. Could that just be the kind of confounders we talked about a second ago? Yeah, definitely. But we also have causal studies. In 1998, there was a catastrophic blizzard in Quebec. People were left without electricity for weeks, roads were impassable, it all sounds very stressful. Scientists saw this as an opportunity, and [this study](http://www.princeton.edu/~sswang/ASD/Laplante2008_JAACAP_WPPSI.pdf) compared outcomes for women who were pregnant during the blizzard with women who were pregnant a bit earlier or later. Five years later, they found that blizzard children had somewhat lower IQs. This seemed to depend on “objective stress” (ie how hard the blizzard hit them) and not on “subjective stress” (ie how much they were fretting about the blizzard) - which I guess leaves open the possibility that other blizzard-related problems (like food shortages) contributed. In 2021, [a Danish team](https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Fulltext/2021/10000/Prenatal_Maternal_Bereavement_and_Its_Association.9.aspx) compared mothers who had suffered bereavement during pregnancy to those who hadn’t. They found that the (presumably stressed) former group had a higher rate of intellectual disability among their offspring. This doesn’t perfectly screen out confounders: you can imagine that (for example) poorer mothers are more likely to have relatives with low life expectancy (or something). But I’m having trouble coming up with a great story for how this went wrong, and the sample size (two million people; they reviewed practically all births in Denmark over several decades) is very impressive. Finally, there are various [animal](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09799-6) [studies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20550950/) where researchers randomly inflict prenatal stress on rats and see what happens to their offspring. Usually the offspring do worse in some way. While animal studies don’t always directly translate into humans, this boosts my confidence that the potentially-confounded studies above are finding real effects. I was on the fence about whether to rate this as Tier 1 or Tier 2. I decided on Tier 1 so I could start out with it, and you could start out with a warning that stressing out too much over little things can be counterproductive. Please keep that in mind as you continue to read this document. ### Stay Away From CMV And Toxoplasma (Tier 1) The number one cause of birth defects in developed countries [is cytomegalovirus](https://denovo.substack.com/p/cytomegalovirus-the-worst-herpesvirus?s=r). About 50% of Americans are chronically infected, but the body eventually adjusts and this is low risk: the biggest danger comes if you get a new infection during pregnancy. [The CDC says](https://www.cdc.gov/cmv/fact-sheets/parents-pregnant-women.html) about 1/200 US babies are born with CMV, and about 1/5 of those will have a birth defect; I would be concerned that the others might also get subtle damage. Cytomegalovirus is spread in bodily fluids, and you can avoid it by not exchanging bodily fluids with new people during pregnancy. That means kissing (though it’s probably fine to kiss your long-term monogamous partner - if they had it, you would have gotten it already) and unsanitary food-sharing. Young children are known to be terrible at keeping their bodily fluids to themselves, and daycares are known CMV hot spots. Practice good sanitary precautions when interacting with children and wash your hands regularly. Toxoplasma is another chronic pathogen; [about 20% of Americans](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/154/4/357/62015) have it at any given time. Like CMV, it is less dangerous if you have it long-term, but more dangerous if you’re first infected during pregnancy, so try to avoid that. A common route of transmission is cat feces; if you have a cat, try to keep it more indoors while you’re pregnant (so it has fewer chances to get the disease) and make someone else change the litterbox. Other risky behaviors are gardening (if you do, wear gloves) and eating undercooked meat. About 1/1,000 to 1/10,000 babies are born with obvious toxoplasma-related defects; I can’t tell whether this number leaves open the possibility that many more have subtler problems. ### Embryo Selection (Tier 1) During a typical course of in vitro fertilization, doctors give a woman hormones that cause her to make lots of eggs. Then they extract the eggs, fertilize them with sperm, pick one of the resulting embryos, and implant it in the uterus. Which embryo do they pick? For a long time, the answer was “whichever looks good”; doctors would examine the embryos under a microscope and eyeball whether one looked healthier than another. It’s not clear how well this works. More recently, scientists have learned to genotype embryos, the same way that eg 23andMe can genotype adult humans. If you have ten embryos and you need to implant one of them, you might as well pick the one with the best genes. “Best genes” in what sense? If there’s a specific thing you’re trying to do - for example, your family has a history of breast cancer, and you want to avoid that - you can get the best genes relevant to that specific thing (ie lowest breast cancer risk). Otherwise you can use a weighted algorithm that just tries to give you the overall lowest risk of various bad things in proportion to how bad they are. The image below (source: the embryo selection company [Genomic Prediction](https://www.lifeview.com/science#/european/Genomic_Index/0)) calculates the reduction in disease risk if you use the weighted algorithm on two embryos: Embryo selection companies do not explicitly work with IQ, but some work with “risk of cognitive disability”, which I think is a different phrase pointing to the same concept (cognitive disability is just IQ below a certain threshold; your predicted risk of being below that threshold is just predicted IQ plus a confidence interval). Ability to detect embryo IQ is limited, and optimizing for this in particular will probably only gain you <1 - 3 IQ points (higher numbers for more embryos). This technology hasn’t been tested yet, in the sense that it’s too new to collect data from any embryo-selected children. But it’s been tested in the sense of testing whether it can determine which of two already-born siblings was more likely to have had heart attacks, cancers, etc - and seems to work well. All of the science here is straightforward enough that I’m not even really sure what it would mean for this not to work. ### Supplement Choline (Tier 2) Choline is a nutrient found in eggs, meat, fish, soy, wheat, and certain vegetables. The body uses it to produce cell membranes, the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and various other useful chemicals. Choline is an important building block of the prenatal nervous system, and studies have found that maternal choline levels correlate with offspring IQ. Prenatal vitamins either don’t have choline, or have woefully inadequate amounts. Official recommendations [say](https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Choline-HealthProfessional/) pregnant women get 450 mg choline/day, but the average woman only gets about 278 mg/day. According to the [National Institute of Health](https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Choline-HealthProfessional/), “approximately 90%–95% of pregnant women consume less choline than the AI.” (here AI means “adequate intake” - this isn’t another one of those posts about the machines outcompeting us) But it’s worse than this: I think the official recommendations are way too low. Studies suggest that the optimal amount of choline for pregnant women is around 930 mg/day. Luckily, choline supplementation is simple and ethical, which means we can run randomized controlled trials. You can find a list of them in Table 1 of [Korsmo](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6722688/): Of these, the one I want to focus on is [Caudill 2018](https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1096/fj.201700692RR). They give women either 480 or 930 mg choline during the third trimester, and find a significant effect (p = 0.02 - 0.03) on reaction time, sometimes used as a measure of infant cognitive development. This is a very small study (n = 26), but their results are consistent and it doesn’t look like they’re dredging for positives. But also: when the body has extra choline, it converts it into a related useful molecule called betaine. During pregnancy, women have less betaine than usual, probably because they need choline so much that their body doesn’t have any to spare. So one clever way to check how much choline pregnant women need is to see how much you can give them before they start producing normal amounts of betaine again. [Yan 2013](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24132975/) tries this, and finds that 480 mg isn’t enough but 930 mg is. There are a couple of other weaker signs that 930 mg of choline is better than 480, which you can find scattered throughout the [Korsmo review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6722688/). Why do all these studies use 480 and 930? I’m not sure. Could you do even better by supplementing more than 930? I don’t know. [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028282/) on whether choline protects against fetal alcohol exposure gave mothers 2g, with apparently impressive effects, including on [followup](https://jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s11689-020-09312-7) four years later. There is no way to know whether this was a generic benefit of choline, a benefit of choline against fetal alcohol in particular, or whether the 2g did anything more than 930 mg would have. Daily doses of 3.5 grams or more are considered unsafe and seem to cause nausea, vomiting, sweating, “fishy body odor”, and production of a cardiotoxic chemical called TMAO. How should you supplement choline? Most studies used choline chloride, which is not really available to civilian populations. Normal choline supplements can be choline bitartrate, phosphatidylcholine, alpha-GDP choline, and citicholine. The nootropics community is unanimous that alpha-GDP and citicholine are more appropriate for nootropics usage than the other types, but I can’t find a good technical explanation of why (“they get to the brain better” doesn’t count as technical). My guess is whatever’s going on there doesn’t matter in pregnancy, where you don’t necessarily want the choline going immediately to the (mother’s) brain. Most pregnancy vitamins that include choline use choline bitartrate, and this seems the most chemically similar to the choline chloride used in the studies, so probably this is safest. A bunch of people (eg [WebMD](https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/citicoline)) say you should “avoid using citicholine” during pregnancy. This makes no sense to me and I’m guessing they don’t know what they’re talking about, but by Chesterton’s Fence maybe you should avoid this form. I think the safest thing to do here is take somewhere between 900 and 2000 mg of choline bitatrate per day during pregnancy. Most studies focus on the late second and third trimesters, when the nervous system is forming. ### Don’t Eat Too Much Licorice (Tier 2) Licorice contains the dangerous-sounding chemical glycyrrhizin. Glycyrrhizin turns off the placental enzymes that limit the amount of maternal stress hormones that pass to the developing fetus. [A study shows](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/5/317/2967089?login=true) that mothers who eat lots of licorice during pregnancy have children with 7 points lower IQ (on average) than mothers with more restraint in their licorice consumption. Others studies show increased [maternal blood pressure](https://bmccomplementmedtherapies.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12906-018-2419-y), [increased risk of preterm birth](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/153/11/1085/64666). There are relatively few studies here compared to some other interventions, but the studies seem strong, the mechanism seems plausible, and there are fewer possible confounders than usual. The study found effects at 500 mg glycyrrhizin per week, which corresponds to eating about two or three sticks of licorice per day for an entire pregnancy. Who does this? Finns, that’s who. All of these studies have been done in Finland, which is apparently a country of disgusting licorice junkies. I blame Santa Claus. Still, there may be scattered non-Finns who eat this amount, or there may be subthreshold effects that the studies weren’t powered to measure. I suggest abstaining. Only the sinister foreign “black licorice” contains glycyrrhizin. The red licorice eaten by normal red-blooded Americans is (as per American tradition) made out of corn syrup derivatives with no real licorice whatsoever, and should be fine. ### Avoid Painkillers, Including Tylenol (Tier 2) Doctors have been gradually chipping away at pregnant women’s ability to use pain medication. First it was “don’t use opioids, your baby could have birth defects”. Then it was “and don’t use ibuprofen, your baby could have kidney problems”. Then it was “and don’t use too much aspirin either, your baby could get cardiovascular problems”. That left Tylenol (aka Panadol, paracetamol, acetaminophen, etc) as the only pregnancy-safe pain reliever. Well, bad news… Last year, Nature Reviews Endocrinology published [Consensus Statement: Paracetamol Use In Pregnancy - A Call For Precautionary Action](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00553-7), by ninety-one leading scientists. It argued that Tylenol use during pregnancy might cause neurodevelopmental and urogenital disorders in children. They argue that Tylenol babies have higher risk of abnormal hormone profiles, abnormal urinary tract development, and ADHD. What’s their evidence? Many rat studies have shown negative effects of prenatal Tylenol, usually at levels much higher than a human would take (eg [1](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31644948/), [2](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26390956/), [3](https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/154/2/145.xml)). Most of these studies are small and weak - and did you know that Tylenol is a deadly poison to cats? Doesn’t really bode well for inter-animal transferability of results. Still, these studies exist and are numerous. Other studies ask women how much Tylenol they took when they were pregnant, then try to correlate it with offspring outcomes. The Consensus Statement lists 29 of these studies, and says 26 / 29 found evidence of harm. A typical study is [Chen 2018](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31509360/), where researchers identify 950 kids with ADHD and 3800 kids without, and compare (using health system records) how likely their mothers were to have used Tylenol (finding that the ADHD moms were about 25% more likely). Even more sophisticated is [Ji 2020](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2753512), which found that “[umbilical] cord biomarkers of fetal exposure to acetaminophen were associated with significantly increased risk of childhood ADHD and ASD in a dose-response fashion.” ADHD is very genetic, so we should be alert for possible confounders like “ADHD moms get more stressed, have more headaches, and so use more Tylenol, and then their kids inherit their ADHD”. But we have two signs that this isn’t what’s going on here. First, a (relatively weak) [finding](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7192789/) that mothers who took the alternate headache medication ibuprofen did not have kids with more ADHD. And second, two studies ([1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00754-4), [2](https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/prenatal_exposure_to_acetaminophen_and_risk_of_adhd.pdf)) finding that taking Tylenol immediately after or immediately before pregnancy has no effect - if it was just a proxy for class or ADHD you’d expect the same correlation regardless of the woman’s pregnancy status. All of this makes the effect look real. What about: people often use Tylenol for fevers, and having a fever (usually indicating infection) during pregnancy sounds pretty bad. Are we sure that the Tylenol isn’t just a marker, and it’s the fever/infection causing the ADHD? [These people](https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/prenatal_exposure_to_acetaminophen_and_risk_of_adhd.pdf) claim to have ruled that out - they say they asked why people used Tylenol, and the people using it for pain had the same increased risk as the people using it for fever - but it seems like kind of an afterthought for them and they don’t really show their work. I would like to see someone do a study focusing on this; it ought to be easy, and might be very important. One study does find some evidence that the effect is due to confounders. It looks at mothers with two children who used Tylenol during one of their pregnancies but not the other. Both children had usually high levels of ADHD, suggesting that Tylenol is standing in for some other confounding factor. This seems to directly contradict the early studies showing that Tylenol use before or after pregnancy has no effect, since “during your sibling’s pregnancy” is just an extreme version of before vs. after your own. I have no good explanation for this. Emily Oster [reviewed this literature](https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/tylenol-in-pregnancy-and-adhd?s=r) and called it “a grey area”. I agree. I don’t think you’re a monster if you decide to use Tylenol during your pregnancy, but I don’t think you’d be insane not to, either. Of note, several studies find that short-term Tylenol use during pregnancy (< 8 days) is fine. One study even found mildly beneficial effects (it suggests that maybe people who use a little Tylenol are being proactive against treating fevers). You can do what you want with this information. But remember: all the other painkillers, eg ibuprofen, are even worse. So what if you have pain during pregnancy? ### Eat Fish (Tier 3) The FDA [recommends](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-depth/pregnancy-and-fish/art-20044185) that pregnant women eat at least 8 ounces of fish per week in order to get omega-3 fats, which seem important in building the fetal nervous system. There’s good theoretical science behind this, and lots of observational studies [like this one](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17307104/), which follows 12,000 women and finds that those who ate more than 340g of fish per week had smarter babies. But randomized controlled trials of omega-3 supplementation continually come up short. This [meta-analysis](https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/2/415) claims that zero of 25 trials found a positive result. My literature review wasn’t quite that disappointing - for example, [these people](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/104/4/1075/4557107) are able to find obviously fake positive results after doing enough p-hacking - but I agree the field looks pretty dismal. There are two possibilities. First, the observational studies are confounded - most likely, richer people eat more fish, and their attempts to control for poverty [fail](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719). But also, all the observational trials ask about eating fish, and all the randomized trials supplement with fish oil. So a second possibility is that real fish is good for you but fish oil isn’t. This isn’t quite as much of a stretch as you might think; sometimes foods have complicated profiles of nutrients which support one another’s absorption, or the beneficial nutrient isn’t the one we think, or something. But it is kind of a stretch, especially when we already know how frequently confounded these kinds of studies are. Here’s a hot take which as far as I know nobody’s ever made before: maybe fish are good because of choline. We already know choline is important to fetal development and undersupplied in the typical maternal diet. And fish are loaded with choline. This would neatly explain why fish are good for you but omega-3 supplementation isn’t. Hopefully you’re already supplementing choline (see above), so fish wouldn’t be especially important after that. I’m still giving this Tier 3, because a lot of smart people think it’s important, because I’m not 100% sure of the above, and because whatever, it’s just fish. Make sure to eat the species with less mercury; Emily Oster’s book will give you the details. ### Air Filter (Tier 3) One recent theme in public health has been “air pollution is really bad for you”. Whenever people test to see if air pollution has some bad outcome, the answer is always yes. Sometimes this is suspicious: does putting an air filter in a classroom really raise grades as much as halving the class size? Does putting an air purifier in a sociology laboratory really raise interpersonal trust on prisoners’ dilemma games? Does putting an air purifier in a church really make parishioners half again as likely to go to Heaven? This has to be one of those annoying science fads like stereotype threat or priming, right? Still, studies show air pollution is bad for pregnant women. [Here’s](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25807066/) an observational study linking prenatal air pollution exposure to offspring cognitive and behavioral issues. Could this be confounded by poverty? Obviously yes, poor people are forced to live in worse neighborhoods with more pollution. There’s only one controlled trial here: researchers in the important science hub of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia randomized pregnant women to receive / not receive free air purifiers, then waited to check the birth weights of their babies (higher birth weights usually = healthier). The results were confusing; the women who got the air purifiers were more likely to have pre-term births, pre-term births are always lower birth weight, but among women who gave birth at term, the ones who got the air purifiers had heavier (= healthier?) babies. The researchers speculated that the air purifiers made the women and fetuses healthier, which meant that some unusually sick fetuses who would have been miscarried in the control group survived in the experimental group and were born pre-term instead. Counting all fetuses including the dead ones, the experimental group was healthier; counting only living fetuses, there was no difference. I think it’s fair to count death as a bad outcome, so I will reluctantly accept this as a positive study. It’s still the only one, though. The study also found that two air purifiers were (nonsignificantly) better than one, so feel free to go wild and surround yourself with a ring of air-purifiers, like some kind of demonological warding circle. See also this [Less Wrong post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8YTH7FAjNSSdT7Fsa/a-study-on-air-purifiers-and-birth-weight) on the study mentioned above. ### High Fruit Diet / Supplement Carotenoids (Tier 3) Getting bored? Don’t. [Bolduc 2016](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964%2816%2930161-X/fulltext) found that women who ate more than seven servings of fruit a day while pregnant had offspring with +5 IQ points. This graph is even more extreme than my statement above - I don’t know why the discrepancy - and seems to imply that eating 80 mg lycopene per day takes your kid from completely normal all the way to Ivy League material. So, this has to be false, right? I would be shocked if it wasn’t. The usual way for things like this to be false is as covert class markers: rich people eat more fruit, and also have lots of other advantages, and so their kids turn out smarter. But the study finds fruit is actually much more important than social class (the average rich person isn’t Ivy League material, but the average 80-mg-lycopene-eater is). If we believe this study, maybe being rich only contributes to success insofar as it makes you eat more fruit! The authors seem suitably weirded out by their results, and try an animal experiment on fruit flies (come on, fruit flies? is that cheating?) They find that if they give pregnant fruit flies lots of fruit, their offspring do better at whatever the fruit fly equivalent of an IQ test is. They suggest a mechanism vaguely based on lycopene → something something cAMP → cognitive development. The closest I can find to a replication is [Mahmassani 2021](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7948203/). Instead of lycopene, it focuses on two closely related nutrients in fruit called lutein and zeaxanthin. They find women in the top quartile of L&Z intake have offspring about 3 IQ points higher than in the lowest - which, they note, is the same difference as breast- vs. bottle-fed infants. One strength of their study was that everyone involved was socioeconomically advantaged (they were in a wealthy area), so there’s less room for fruit to be a class marker. Still, this is a weak study design and I’m still really concerned about this confounder. There are [various scientific reasons](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/nutrients/nutrients-09-00838/article_deploy/nutrients-09-00838.pdf) to think carotenoids like lycopene, lutein, and zeaxanthin should be beneficial to developing nervous systems. Some dubious studies have found they [help cognition](https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/72/10/1431/2929419?login=false) in the elderly. There is [some evidence](https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.22.1_supplement.313.8) that pregnancy depletes maternal stores of lutein and zeaxanthin (though not lycopene) in a way that implies the mother’s body is putting a lot of effort into getting them into the baby. Overall this is a spectacularly large result, but it’s based on 1-2 observational studies without good defenses against confounding. I think it probably won’t be true in the end, but you might as well eat lots of fruit and supplement with lutein/zeaxanthin, which are safe and easily available. ### Birth Month Selection (Tier 3) Some studies find effects of birth month on various traits, but they disagree in which direction. Before we go over evidence, why would this possibly be true? There are at least two reasons. First, winter is flu season, and more generically the season for almost every infectious disease. Prenatal infections can be bad for kids, and maybe getting them at one part of pregnancy instead of another can be especially bad. Second, a lot of places have school cutoff dates: if you’re born just before the cutoff, you’re the youngest kid in your class, but if you’re born just after the cutoff, you’re the oldest. There might be advantages to being the oldest or youngest kid in your class, and usually being bigger/smaller/faster/slower than everyone you know. But the evidence here is pretty confusing. — It’s [well-established](https://sci-hub.st/https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/491783) that schizophrenia risk varies with birth month, reaching its minimum in September and rising to a peak 10 - 20% higher in March (this and all further data in this section will be for the Northern Hemisphere only). Scientists have investigated a number of causes including Vitamin D levels, but I’m pretty convinced it’s infection risk. — The literature on autism is much less clear, but preliminarily shows the opposite ([1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-019-00506-5), [2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296777/), [3](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702026/)) - lowest risk in March, highest in September. I have to admit I am really surprised by this, although I guess it’s consistent with [the laundry list of weird opposites between autism and schizophrenia](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/). — Large studies of IQ ([1](https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/7/2/e012406.full.pdf), [2](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1934-01370-001)) tend to find it’s about one point lower in winter-spring babies than summer-fall. At least half of this, and maybe all of it, is confounding where less intelligent mothers are more likely to give birth in winter (why? there’s a slightly tendency among women who plan their pregnancies to want babies in summer; maybe smarter women are better at planning?) — Extremely famous and accomplished people are significantly more likely to be born in summer. See for example this graph of Nobelists ([source](https://techtinkering.com/2011/08/24/does-when-you-were-born-affect-your-chance-of-becoming-a-nobel-laureate/)): . . . or this graph of other geniuses ([source](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gulsum-Mammedova/publication/341443992_Book_of_proceeding_45th_ISCESD_Moscow_2019_1/links/5ec11a93a6fdcc90d67a8472/Book-of-proceeding-45th-ISCESD-Moscow-2019-1.pdf#page=253)): N is a different set of Nobelists, F is Fields Medalists (ie great mathematicians), T is a Time Magazine list of famous people, and M is a group of great musicians. These effects usually hover on the border of significance; I am tempted to round them up because they should be using time trends rather than point estimates, and because you can add up different groups to get a bigger sample size. [This kind of weird paper](http://www.majul.iri-as.org/Seasonal.pdf) that doesn’t do a great job listing sources says that Hans Eysenck looked through all people featured in Encyclopedia Britannica and found excess births in winter; it then posits (kind of reflecting the graph above) that creative geniuses are more likely to be born in winter, and scientific geniuses in summer. I realize this sounds like the most outrageous astrology, but I kind of buy it. It’s very well established that schizophrenics are more often born in winter, and the research is leaning pretty hard toward autistic people being more often born in summer. This matches the strong tendency in an otherwise boring graph for great musicians to be born in winter and great mathematicians to be born in summer. [Weak research suggests](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1994.79.1.499) that left-handers are more often born in spring, and right-handers in fall, and left-handedness is correlated with [schizophrenia](https://news.yale.edu/2013/10/31/left-handed-people-more-likely-have-mental-disorders-schizophrenia) and rumored (though studies are poor) to be correlated with creativity. My guess is that increased infection risk during winter causes babies born during those months to have slightly less “normal” brains, which makes them a bit less likely to excel at science and more likely to excel at creative pursuits. I expect this effect is very, very small, probably less than d = 0.1. — Children born just after a school/league age cutoff do better at sports. This is a large effect, see eg this graph ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect)): This is the age distribution of 10 year old soccer tournament players (blue) vs. all 10 year olds (red). Kids born in January are 4x likelier to play soccer at this relatively high level than kids born in December. Presumably if you start soccer at 6 years old, the kids who are 6.99 are a lot better than the kids who are 6.01, and so more likely to stick around and develop good soccer-related self-esteem. I’m not sure this graph (age 10) is about soccer-related self-esteem and stick-to-it-ness vs. it’s still better to be 10.99 than 10.01, but it sure is a big effect. Studies generally find this still applies at the professional level, though there are some confusing details. I previously cited [this piece](http://www.behindthenet.ca/blog/2008/12/malcolm-gladwells-outliers-and-making.html), which shows the National Hockey League has twice as many players born in the first half of the year than the second, but [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035396/) suggests that’s since declined to only about 30% more; [professional soccer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6090398/) seems to have about the same effect size. Some sources say that the effect disappears [or even reverses](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182827) at the very highest level, and [may not exist at all in women’s sports](https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/11586780-000000000-00000). — You might expect a similar effect in intellectual activities: a 6.99 year old child might be the smartest person in their class, and be encouraged to continue learning. This seems at least partly true. Here’s the birth month of a set of Oxford graduates ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect)): Needless to say, the British academic year cutoff is between August and September. (could this explain the Nobel Prize results? I don’t think so. Look at the Nobelist graph above. There’s basically no difference between August and September - which is pretty surprising, given that you’d expect graduating Oxford to be a useful step on the path to a Nobel) (could this explain the IQ results? No, the authors looked for this effect, didn’t find it, and were pretty sure it was mostly maternal confounding) — Looking at income, there are a lot of effects that all cancel out. [This study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537116302196) finds later-borns do worse their first year on the labor market, for much the same reason later-born soccer players and Oxford students do worse. But they have an extra year on the labor market compared to earlier-borns, meaning they get more experience by the same age. Over the course of a lifetime there is no significant difference. Overall conclusion for this section: if you want your kid to do well in professional sports, arrange for them to be born just after the cutoff (probably New Years). You can slightly improve your kid’s likelihood of getting into a good college by arranging them to be born just after the academic year cutoff (it varies; check your local school rules). You can probably shift your kid’s likelihood of schizophrenia and artistic achievement vs. autism and scientific achievement very slightly by arranging for them to be born in winter or summer, respectively. None of these interventions really seem worthwhile unless you have a family history of something or very specific preferences. ### Activated Alumina Water Filter (Tier 3) Fluoride is a chemical which is added to water to promote Commun . . . sorry, to protect against tooth decay. Very high levels of fluoride are clearly toxic; this is most commonly observed in rural China and India, which have a combination of naturally high fluoride groundwater and various bad practices. In India, severe fluoride excess [can present as bone problems](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30060-7/fulltext). [Studies show](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7760776/) fluoride causes brain damage in rats, but these studies are generally at 10-100x normal human doses, with studies [closer to normal human levels](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077107/) not showing a clear effect. Some studies from [India](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3409983/) and [China](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09765-4) suggest children prenatally exposed to high fluoride levels have lower IQ, with a Chinese [meta-analysis](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.1104912?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3dpubmed) of 27 studies finding a 0.5 IQ point difference between the most and least exposed regions. Can fluoride decrease IQ at the relatively low levels seen in developed world water systems? A [Mexican study](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP655), [Chinese study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33360592/), and [Canadian study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2748634) all say yes, usually finding an effect of 1-2 IQ points between fluoridated and unfluoridated regions (usually they don’t compare this directly, but they give urinary fluoride curves we can use to calculate this). I am really skeptical of all these. The Chinese study finds the effect is mediated by single genes in exactly the way that [nothing ever is in real life](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/). The Canadian study is done by a team who do a lot of fluoride studies and sometimes find results so large that they’re basically impossible - like [this one](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31743803/) finding a 6 to 9 IQ point decrease. Under some plausible assumptions, this explains more environmental IQ variance than actually exists! Many of these studies were done by the same Canadian team, and lots of other people don’t like those people. You can read about “the fluoride wars” [here](https://nationalpost.com/health/international-experts-call-for-independent-probe-of-canadian-research-linking-fluoride-and-lower-iq). Some economists did [a very economist-y study](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711915) where they looked at everyone in Sweden, tried to calculate how much fluoride they’d been exposed to over their lives, and correlated that with their lifetime income. They find no effect, but they weren’t looking at prenatal fluoride, so it probably doesn’t address our question very well. Overall I am skeptical of these results, but more on a hunch than because I can pinpoint the exact flaw in the study. If we were to take them seriously, what would we do? It looks like activated alumina water filters [like this one](https://www.amazon.com/Home-Master-TMJRF2-Counter-Filtration/dp/B005A3WRA8/ref=pd_bxgy_img_1/138-8825353-6417533?pd_rd_w=GhjWq&pf_rd_p=6b3eefea-7b16-43e9-bc45-2e332cbf99da&pf_rd_r=JQY0HZFRMNXQ6VKY2RRY&pd_rd_r=48d67706-b98f-46e8-a494-95087ab4a442&pd_rd_wg=hUI6i&pd_rd_i=B005A3WRA8&psc=1) remove most fluoride, so filtering water when pregnant might be a reasonable step. ### Avoid Early Induction (Tier 3) From the subreddit: [An Alternate Approach To Improve Your Child’s IQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oeci77/an_alternate_approach_to_improve_your_childrens_iq/). “Wackademic” says that preterm birth is bad for children’s future health, developmental milestones, and - yes - IQ. But is birth early in term (eg week 37) worse than birth later in term (eg week 40)? [Yang 2010](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20080810/) says yes! IQ (at least as measured in 6 year old Belarussian children) peaks in children born between 39-41 weeks; they’re 1.7 points smarter than kids born at 37 weeks, and 0.4 points (nonsignificant) smarter than kids born at 38. After 41 weeks, the kids start getting less smart again, probably because a pregnancy lasting this long means something has gone wrong. [This review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5721566/) confirms Yang’s findings. So how do you ensure a 40 (rather than 37) week pregnancy? Wackademic suggests progesterone therapy and cervical cerclage (where you sew the cervix shut), both of which have some studies in support. > But, [hapea](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oeci77/an_alternate_approach_to_improve_your_childrens_iq/h46lbyj/), a real OB/GYN, comments: > > [I’m familiar with the literature about cognitive outcomes in early term.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5721566/) However, thus is still a very niche subject without honestly high quality trials and a low effect size. I wish I could find the paper right now and I’ll update if I do but there is some quite convincing literature that in terms of risk of death in utero vs death in the neonatal period the best time to deliver is 38-39 weeks. [The ARRIVE TRIAL](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800566) is a landmark trial as well regarding induction at 39 week which has led to more OBs offering 39 week elective inductions, when previous praxis was to wait until 41-42. You’ll note that even at 40 weeks gestation, you have a relative risk of 1.5 of fetal death compared to 39 weeks. > > OK, on to preventing preterm labor. None of these things you listed are really going to effectively prevent preterm labor in low risk women. In terms of progesterone- there are two types, IM and vaginal. At the beginning of my training we offered IM progesterone to everyone with a history of preterm delivery. We did this because the initial data had been promising, [however when they did larger quality studies they basically found it has no effect](https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-advisory/articles/2019/10/clinical-guidance-for-integration-of-the-findings-of-the-prolong-study). Vaginal progesterone is still used [to recent preterm birth in women with short cervixes](https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(17)), but even there [its efficacy may be overstated.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406617/) > > In terms of cerclage, we reserve this intervention for the women at highest risk of preterm birth (usually history of preterm delivery <34 weeks and other criteria because of the high risk of complications associated. You have anesthetic complications, risk of membrane rupture, bleeding, even risk of fetal death. [Overall it can actually be helpful in preventing preterm birth but only in high risk women. This is the relevant Cochrane review](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008991.pub3/full). It’s a fairly major procedure and should not be undertaken lightly. So I think we’re currently at the point where, although there’s weak evidence that birth at full term is slightly better than birth at early term, there aren’t safe enough birth-delaying technologies for it to be worth trying. Also, these studies are correlational, which means we don’t know whether forcing a child that “wants” to come out at 37 weeks to instead come out at 40 helps, hurts, or does nothing. I don’t have a good sense how the body decides to give birth at one time rather than another, but I’d be nervous about messing with it. I think the main takeaway here is that if a doctor asks if you want early induction, you’re trading off a slightly lower risk of fetal death for a couple of IQ points, and you can make that decision based on your own fetal death risk and values. Inducing earlier than 38 weeks seems like a bad idea unless there’s a specific reason, and waiting longer than 40 weeks doesn’t seem to have any further benefits. ### Be Careful With Plastics/Reciepts (Tier 3) Endocrine disruptors are a broad class of chemicals with scary names like “phthalates” and “perfluoroalkyl substance” that alter natural hormones. Many are found in plastic, and absorbed when people eat food that has been in close contact with plastic packaging. There is some evidence that exposure during pregnancy is bad for the fetus. [Braun 2017](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/) reviews several classes of these chemicals. For example: > Six publications from four prospective cohort studies report that prenatal exposure to several different phthalates is associated with ADHD behaviors,[59](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R59),[60](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R60),[93](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R93),[94](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R94) autistic behaviors,[61](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R61) reduced mental and psychomotor development,[60](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R60),[62](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R62) emotional problems,[60](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R60) and reduced IQ.[63](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R63) In a prospective cohort of 328 mothers, the reductions in child IQ associated with increasing maternal urinary phthalate concentrations were as large as or larger than the cognitive decrements observed with childhood lead exposure (5th vs. 1st quintile: 7-points; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 2, 11).[3](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R3),[63](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R63) It is important to note that three other publications did not find associations between prenatal phthalate exposure and child neurobehavior.[64](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R64)–[66](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R66) These have the usual problems with confounders - for example, might poor people eat more plastic-packaged food, or live closer to polluting plastic factories? They also have some extra problems: most people get “bundled” exposure to a variety of plastic-related pollutants, making it hard to figure out if any individual chemical is worse than any other. Still, it is probably fair to want to limit exposure to these substances. Braun suggests: > Presently, there are no evidence-based methods for reducing EDC exposures, but there are some general recommendations that clinicians could give to concerned patients. For EDCs found in the diet (e.g., BPA, DEHP, and PFAS), eating a balanced diet may be one way to avoid exposure from any one foodstuff, but this advice has not been empirically evaluated. Intervention studies show that decreasing or eliminating canned or packaged food consumption is effective at reducing BPA and DEHP exposure.[73](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R73),[100](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R100) An intervention study showed that handling BPA-containing thermal receipts was an important route of exposure and that wearing gloves could reduce BPA exposure from this route.[102](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R102) Another study found some evidence that children who have handle thermal receipts may have higher BPA exposure.[109](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R109) > > Individuals may be able to reduce their exposure to DEP and DnBP by reducing or eliminating the use of some lotions, cosmetics, and colognes/perfumes.[76](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R76),[212](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R212) However, there are no requirements for personal care products to include these phthalates in their ingredient list, making it difficult to avoid this source of exposure. Individuals can reduce triclosan exposure by avoiding triclosan-containing toothpastes. However, because triclosan-containing toothpastes are clinically indicated for some individuals, the benefits and risk of continued use should consider the specific conditions and susceptibilities of the individual (e.g., pregnancy). Finally, granular activated carbon water filtration systems may be effective at reducing PFAS exposure when consuming PFAS contaminated water,[213](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R213) but this may have a minimal effect on total PFAS body burden when diet is the predominant source of PFAS exposure.[214](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5322271/#R214) So: eat a balanced diet, avoid plastic-packaged and canned food, avoid some lotions and toothpastes, filter your water, and . . . avoid touching receipts? Apparently, yes. Receipts contain an endocrine disruptor called bisphenol A. Do people actually get meaningful amounts of this through receipt-touching? [Ehrlich 2014](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685668/) says yes, but subjects were asked to handle receipts “continuously for 2 hours” (!). This sure did increase their urinary BPA concentration: . . . but this level of receipt handling sounds more typical of cashiers than ordinary customers. [Stacy 2016](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547574/) finds a marginal effect on the border of significance in children, comparing those who did vs. didn’t handle receipts in the past 24 hours, which is surprising since I would expect people to do a bad job self-reporting that. [Bernier 2017](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5453537/) examines receipt-holding in the wild and estimates that it would cause the absorption of “51 ng/kg/day”, a number which means as much to me as it does to you. Notably, they find that their subjects hold the receipt for an average of 11 minutes, probably because they are waiting in line on a cafeteria. [Hormann 2014](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25337790/) finds that under some assumptions, BPA can reach levels potentially associated with toxicity from receipt-holding alone; their subjects held the receipt for 4 minutes. I think it’s reasonable to be cautious about receipt-holding, but I was surprised by how long everyone in these studies held receipts for. Who (besides cashiers) does anything except touch it long enough to put it in a pocket, and then long enough to transfer it from a pocket to a trash can? As yet there is no evidence either way about whether this kind of very casual touching is dangerous. ### Supplement Vitamin D (Tier 4) Various studies (eg [Melough 2021](https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/151/1/132/5951845)) find that higher maternal vitamin D levels are associated with better neurocognitive development. Nobody has done anything even close to the effort it would take to determine if this were causal, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Remember, all of these are confounded by poverty: richer children are more likely to be healthy and have high educational attainment. White people are generally richer than black people, and have much higher vitamin D levels (the whole point of white skin is to allow enough sunlight through to produce vitamin D in colder climes). So this is just finding that white children do better than black children in various ways, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. But don’t these studies control for race? Yes - they ask people to identify as “white” or “black”, then control for that. That’s totally inadequate: Different white and black people have different shades of white and black skin. And sociologists have pretty conclusively shown that even within a racial category, people with darker skin encounter more prejudice and have worse outcomes (“[colorism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_based_on_skin_color)”). Another way to think of this is that most black people are part white, and the higher their white fraction, the lighter their skin, the higher their vitamin D and the closer their outcomes are to white people’s. I can’t find any exploration of prenatal vitamin D that avoids this pitfall. I’m sure that clinical vitamin D deficiency (very rare) is bad for everyone, including developing fetuses. I’m less convinced that the kind of variation you’ll see in a normal population will have much effect. Still, vitamins are good for you and you might as well take more. So fine, take vitamin D when you’re pregnant. It’ll probably be in your prenatal vitamins anyway. ### Paternal Interventions (Tier 4) Is there anything fathers can do to have better sperm? Yes: they can be young. The [paternal age effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect) says that children of older fathers do worse in various ways. They have (slightly) higher risk of psychiatric disease and worse health outcomes. This makes sense. Every year, our cells divide a bunch of times. Most of those divisions go well, but a few of them introduce new copy errors (mutations) into the genome. An older person has more time to accumulate mutations, so their DNA will be “worse”. Worse DNA can cause many different diseases, but is especially likely to cause psychiatric disease since there are so many genes involved in brain function. The most replicated finding is autism, where (according to [UpToDate](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy)): > A small but statistically significant association between advancing paternal age and risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has also been observed [[101-106](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/101-106)]. As an example, a dose-response meta-analysis of 27 observational studies reported that a 10-year increase in paternal age resulted in a 21 percent increased risk of autism in the child [[107](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/107)]. A study of over 14,000 Dutch patients reported that, compared with fathers under age 20, males over age 40 who father children were 3.3 times as likely to have a child affected with ASD [[108](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/108)]. Another study in Israel, which drew data from over 130,000 couples, reported that, compared with fathers under age 30, males over the age of 40 were 5.75 times as likely to have an offspring with ASD [[101](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/101)]. This may be related to de novo spontaneous mutations and/or alterations in genetic imprinting. And schizophrenia: > Multiple studies have reported an increased risk of schizophrenia in children conceived by fathers of advanced paternal age [[46,91-94](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/46,91-94)]. Older paternal age has also been associated with younger age of symptom onset in affected children [[95,96](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/95,96)]. The risk appears to be transcultural [[97](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/97)]. The causal mechanism is hypothesized to involve mutational errors during spermatogenesis [[98](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/98)]. However, the overall incidence of schizophrenia is low, at approximately 1.5 per 10,000 people [[99](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/99)]. Thus, even in families with a family history of psychiatric disorder, the overall increased risk from advanced paternal age is negligible. > > In one study, the relative risk of schizophrenia in children of older fathers compared with those younger than age 25 increased in each five-year age group, reaching 2.02 (95% CI 1.17-3.51) and 2.96 (95% CI 1.60-5.47) in offspring of males ages 45 to 49 and ≥50 years, respectively [[91](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/91)]. The actual incidence of schizophrenia in offspring at age 21 according to the fathers' age at their birth was: age <25 years (2.5 per 1000), 25 to 29 (3.5 per 1000), 30 to 34 (3.7 per 1000), 35 to 39 (4.4 per 1000), 40 to 44 (4.6 per 1000), 45 to 49 (5 per 1000), and ≥50 years (11.4 per 1000). For comparison, the baseline incidence of schizophrenia ranges from 10.2 to 22 per 100,000 people per year [[100](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/100)]. In another series, the overall hazard ratio for each 10-year increase in paternal age was 1.47 (95% CI 1.23-1.76) Effects on IQ are less clear: > There is limited information on the relationship between advanced paternal age neurocognitive ability in offspring, and the available data conflict, which makes counseling patients challenging. In a study of over 33,000 children from the United States Collaborative Perinatal Project, advanced paternal age was associated with modest negative effects on neurocognitive function, as assessed by Bayley scales (except the Bayley Motor score), Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale, Graham-Ernhart Block Sort Test, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and Wide Range Achievement Test [[88](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/88)]. In the same study, advanced maternal age was generally associated with better scores on these tests. Of note, these tests were administered to children at ages eight months, four years, and seven years. In contrast, a population-based study of over 565,000 Swedish brothers whose IQ was measured during conscription examinations (ages 17 to 20), advanced paternal age did not impact offspring IQ, but advanced maternal age was associated with a slight worsening of IQ [[89](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/89)]. For specific learning differences, one report linked advanced paternal age and dyslexia in male offspring [[90](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/effect-of-advanced-paternal-age-on-fertility-and-pregnancy/abstract/90)]. Further studies using consistent methodologies and neurocognitive tests are needed to address this issue. Might these effects be because unhealthy or mentally ill men take longer to find mates, and so are older when they have children (who presumably inherit those traits)? Yes, this probably explains part of the effect. Gratten et al argue that [Risk of psychiatric illness from advanced paternal age is not predominantly from de novo mutations](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27213288/); buried in the paper is a claim that, on certain models and for certain conditions, the mutations only cause about 10-20% of the observed effect. Can we throw out the caveats and take “10 - 20%” as our headline number? Not really. For some diseases that we know are because of de novo mutations, they might be 100% of the effect; for other diseases with lots of different causes, they might be very low. Some diseases might have multiple causes: usually severe autism is caused by de novo mutations, and mild autism is caused by inherited SNPs. For IQ in particular, smarter fathers usually wait longer to have children, so the estimate of the paternal age effect is biased down. Realistically all of this is pretty minimal on an individual level, although on the population level it probably adds a few percent to prevalence of all of these things. Given that you can’t get younger, what can you do about this? [David Sinclair claims](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan?s=w) that nicotinamide mononucleotide supplementation can rewind the epigenetic clock. Would this reverse paternal age effects? I think no, for two reasons. First, paternal age effects are [more likely](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2017.1562) to be because of genetic damage than epigenetic damage. Second, in [the one mouse experiment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31226694/) where they tried this, NMN “reduced sperm count, vitality and increased sperm oxidative DNA damage, which was associated with increased NAD+ in testes”, though not consistently. Is there anything else fathers can do? I would be surprised if there was: the fertilized egg usually undergoes a pretty complete epigenetic reset. Here is [a very unconvincing mouse study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143400420304173) suggesting that paternal low-protein diet is bad for children. Here is [another study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317557/) showing that paternal low folate increases the risk of birth defects. I’m very skeptical of all of this, but fathers might want to be generally healthy just in case. There is a large literature on what increases sperm count, sperm motility, etc, but I haven’t been able to find good evidence that this affects offspring characteristics, as opposed to just chance of getting a mate pregnant. Older mothers don’t get the same type of de novo mutations in their gametes, but they seem to do badly [in other ways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age), especially a higher risk of aneuploidies (eg Down’s syndrome). ### Abdominal Decompression (Tier 4) During pregnancy, the growing fetus compresses the maternal abdomen and is compressed in turn. South African doctor O. S. Heynes invented a suction machine that would suck the abdomen outwards, making it larger and roomier. ([source](https://decompressionbaby.com/what-is-a-decompression-baby/)) The original plan was to use it to ease labor pains, but Heynes thought it might also help with backache and some complications of late pregnancy, so he encouraged women to take the machine home and use it for about 30 minutes daily during the last few weeks of pregnancy. This caught on, and in its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10,000 women - mostly in South Africa - used decompression machines. Rumor in South African maternity wards was that these women’s children developed extraordinarily fast. This reached the attention of Arthur Jensen, who included it in his [pioneering work on prospects for intelligence enhancement](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED023722.pdf): > Heyns has now used the procedure on over 400 women. Their children, when compared with appropriate control groups who have not received the treatment, show more rapid development in the first years of life and manifest overall superiority in tests of perceptual -motor development -- tests of the kind that measure infant "intelligence." The children sit up earlier, walk earlier, talk earlier, and seem generally more precocious than their siblings or other control children whose mothers have not been so treated. We do not yet know if this general superiority persists into later childhood or adulthood, but there is good reason to believe that some substantial overall gain should persist. At two years of age the children in Heyns's experiment had developmental quotients some 30 points higher > than the control children (with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15). > > The explanation for the effects of abdominal decompression on early development, according to Heyns, is that the reduction of intrauterine pressure results in a more optimal blood supply to the fetal brain and also lessens the chances of brain damage during labor. The pressure on the infant's head is reduced from about 22 pounds to about 8 pounds. The obvious potential importance of this work warrants much further research on the postnatal psychological effects of abdominal decompression. What happened when these children grew up? Depends who you ask. If you ask the children themselves, they are definitely unique geniuses - or at least this is the impression I get from [decompressionbaby.com](http://decompressionbaby.com/), the website where they discuss their experiences. Some typical comments: > I am a decompression baby (born in 1965) and I have very unusual abilities/talents as well as disabilities…I would like to find out whether other babies who were part of the South African study group have similar issues. > I am also a decompression baby. I was born in 1968 and am markedly different from my three siblings who were not decompressed during my mother’s pregnancy with them. My mother tells me that I started acting very differently to my siblings from 2-3 years of age. I do have a higher than average IQ and and am very inventive, but have found it hard to fit in with other ‘normal’ people. I am still unsure if this is a blessing or a curse. But if you ask scientists, there are no effects. In 1968, [Liddicoat](https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA20785135_34984) studied 168 babies in a Johannesburg hospital, and found no effect of abdominal decompression on IQ. In 1974, [Griesel](https://www.ajol.info/index.php/samj/article/download/171616/161018) studied the visual evoked response (sometimes considered a useful measure of infant intelligence) in 41 decompression babies in Johannesburg and Pretoria, and found no difference from a matched control. A [2012 Cochrane Review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7050618/) examined these and other studies and concluded there was no role for abdominal decompression in normal pregnancy, although it might be helpful for certain rare conditions associated with elevated abdominal pressure. These studies seem unanimous, and Cochrane is usually excellent, so I can’t recommend decompression. I do have one tiny remaining note of uncertainty, which is: all of this abdominal decompression research was done in Johannesburg and Pretoria between 1968 and 1974. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. I’ve tried to find information on whether or not his mother was a test subject, but come up blank. I assume someone would have mentioned it if she were. Must be one of those coincidences. ### Summary Here’s a very fast and low-confidence attempt at estimating some numbers - please, I can’t stress this enough, don’t take it too seriously: “% true” is my personal credence that any given result represents a real phenomenon. Most are lower than 50%. This is intentional - I assume most of this field won’t replicate. “% relevant” is my totally unfounded guess at what percent of the population any given finding will be relevant for - for example, “don’t eat licorice” is only relevant for people who would otherwise eat a lot of licorice. “IQ equiv” is how many IQ points this intervention saved in the studies. If it wasn’t measured in IQ points, I tried to figure out how many IQ point loss seemed equally bad compared to whatever it was measuring, which is obviously a total guess. I can’t stress enough how rough these numbers are. By this very rough estimate, doing everything in this guide would be a gain equivalent to (not of!) ~2 IQ points. I didn’t include embryo selection in the estimate, because that lowers risk of many serious diseases by a lot, and this is both hard to translate into IQ points - and, if translated into IQ points, would probably overwhelm everything else on here, making everything else look kind of irrelevant. I published the first edition of this guide in 2012, before the replication crisis. I was young and stupid, believed all the studies, and estimated that you would gain the equivalent of 17 IQ points by following a similar package of interventions. Now I’m older, wiser, and more pessimistic. I’m still not at all sure it’s pessimistic enough.	Scott Alexander	52041324	Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know	acx

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