Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Say a prayer for John McCain Who passes from his earthly pain His eyes are shut upon his brow He warmongers to angels now Beyond the sky, where sorrows cease He rails against the Prince of Peace. The Holy Spirit, full of love McCain denounces as "a dove" All of the weak and the cowardly policies Heaven pursues that let sin subsist still Six thousand years of detente with the darkness In hippie cliches about "choice" and "free will" All the fifth-columnists, communists, peaceniks Since ur-commie Lucifer fell from the dawn John McCain pounds them, he trounces, denounces them Hounds them and counsels them: cease and begone All of the saints and the hosts of the angels Run to their weapons of lightning and flame Their swords made of sunbeams and sighs of the martyrs, Their gossamer banners of God's awesome Name, Their heavenly helmets and holy habergeons, Whose breastplates are bright with the light of the dawn; The Archangel Michael in malachite armor Blows blasts on his trumpet and beckons them on Reader, should your weather be Meteors falling lazily Or if your neighborhood should seem A John of Patmos fever dream Then say a prayer for John McCain Now passed beyond all earthly pain Not death, with all the peace it brings Could end his love of bombing things

[Content note: reading this post might cause feelings of suffocation or provoke panic attacks in susceptible individuals. Epistemic status is very speculative.] Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep – all the things that will make your local family doctor say "Take two placebo and call me in the morning". Using my years of medical training and expertise, I was able to…remain completely unaware of the problem while my housemates solved it themselves. There's been a flare-up of research interest in indoor carbon dioxide levels, precipitated by a Berkeley study (paper, popular article) finding that increasing CO2 concentration from the level of a well-ventilated building to the level of a poorly-ventilated building had profound effects on cognitive ability, cutting various test scores by as much as 50%. This was so dramatic as to be implausible, but seems to match the result of previous Hungarian studies and a later Harvard study on the same subject. The Harvard team later replicated their result with real workers in real offices and found that, controlling for other factors, workers in the best-ventilated offices scoredabout 25% better on cognitive tests than in the worst-ventilated ones. NASA got really interested in this research because spaceships require a lot of intellectual work and don't have a lot of open windows. They're still running tests but they say that "preliminary results suggest differences" between better- and worse- ventilated environments. On the other hand, a 2017 study failed to find the effect, possibly because their cognitive tests were easier. And bloggers have pointed out that submarines have more CO2 than the worst terrestrial buildings, but don't have any problems overt enough for the Navy to notice or worry. So it's a crapshoot of contradictory results and considerations, just like everything else. Aware of this research, my housemates tested their air quality and got levels between 1000 and 3000 ppm, around the level of the worst high-CO2 conditions in the studies. They started leaving their windows open and buying industrial quantities of succulent plants, and the problems mostly disappeared. Since then they've spread the word to other people we know afflicted with mysterious fatigue, some of whom have also noticed positive results.

Effective altruism ("EA") is a movement dedicated to redirecting charity-related resources to the most important and successful charities. In practice this involves a lot of research into how important various problems are, and how well various charities work. Some of this research is done by well-funded official institutions. Other research, maybe exploring more unlikely scenarios or starting from weirder assumptions, is done as individual labors of love. These smaller-scale efforts might be self-funded, or supported by a few small donors. For example, Wild Animal Suffering Research, which investigates ways to improve the lives of animals in the wild, has yet to catch the attention of any hedge fund managers. Like everything else, effective altruism is centered around San Francisco. San Francisco is the most expensive city in the world, so this isn't very efficient; most of the relevant research can be done online from anywhere in the world. The official institutional charities eat the expense in exchange for the extra access to funders and other resources, but it's a problem for small independent organizations. There's been lots of research into possible solutions, but only if "let's see how many people we can cram into one house in Berkeley" counts as "research". Blackpool is a beach resort in northern England. "Beach resort in northern England" is exactly as fun as it sounds, so nobody goes there. Everything is really cheap, and you can buy a whole hotel for the cost of a parking spot in San Francisco. Enter Greg Colbourn, an effective altruist and successful cryptocurrency investor. He bought the 17-bedroom Hotel Athena and wants to offer free room and board to researchers working on effective altruist projects Colbourn writes:: Do you long to be free from material needs and be able to focus on the real work you want to do? I know I've certainly been in that situation a few times in the past, but instead have lost time doing unimportant and menial jobs in order to be able to get by financially. Talented effective altruists losing time like this is especially tragic given that a lot of cause areas are currently constrained by the amount of quality direct work being done in them. Buildings in the run-down seaside holiday resort of Blackpool (UK) are really cheap. I've bought a 17 bedroom hotel with dining room, lounge and bar for £130k. Assuming a 7% rental yield (which is reasonably high), this works out at about £45 per person per month rent. Factoring in bills, catering, and a modest stipend/entertainment budget, living costs could be as low as £5700/person/year (or lower for people sharing rooms, see budget). This is amazing value for hotel living with all basic services provided. The idea is to invite people to live there, with all their expenses covered by donors, for up to two years. Funding is already in place (via me) for the first year of operations. The project will be managed by someone who lives on site and deals with all the admin/finances, shopping/cooking/cleaning/laundry, socials/events and morale – they will also have free living expenses, and be paid a modest salary. Note that this should be considered as a potential high impact, high prestige supporting role, for those excited to be involved in such a capacity on an EA mission. Guests will be free from concerns of material survival, and be able to have prolonged and uninterrupted focus on whatever projects they are working on. Obviously these will be largely limited to purely desk-based, or remote work.

Because I hate you, I included this question on the SSC survey: It's a weird trick question, but I would say B is right. Imagine converting "(" to X and ")" to Y. Then the first answer is XYXY, and the second answer is YXXY. I suppose you could group the parentheses in pairs, in which case the answer would be "both", but in practice few people wanted to say that. Of the 6,000 answers I received, most were either A or B. And one factor had a dramatic effect: age. This is a big effect. People in their 20s were more than twice as likely to choose B as people their 60s. There's a slight improvement after 70, but I think that's just noise caused by a low sample size in that group. My first thought was that the younger population on this blog is disproportionately techies, and techies have to work with very finicky parentheses all day. There was indeed a slight tendency for techies to do better on this, but it was a very small part of the effect. Even controlling for that, or limiting the analysis to only non-techies, most of the effect remained.

Traffic to this blog is declining. I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can't help but go viral. I'm going to write about…negative results from the perception questions on last year's survey. The last SSC survey had a lot of optical illusions and visual riddles. I had hoped to expand on some of the work in Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions and Can We Link Perception And Cognition? This post is a very brief summary of results and, basically, an admission of failure. While I was able to replicate the same suggestive results as in the last survey, I was unable to expand on them, strengthen them, or really turn them into any kind of interesting framework. I was able to weakly replicate the headline result from Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions: transgender status still correlated with all three mask illusions, and with the average of all three mask illusions, but very weakly: r = -0.04, p = 0.001. This was true even when I excluded everyone who took place in last year's survey, providing an independent confirmation of the result. But with correlations this low, it's hard to get too excited. I was also able to weakly replicate the headline result from Can We Link Perception And Cognition?. I haphazardly gave people a "weirdness score" based on them having more mental illnesses, more unusual political opinions, and more minority sexual/gender identities (without looking at their illusion results). People with higher weirdness scores consistently had more ambiguity-tolerant results on illusions, with correlations around r = 0.05 for most tests. They also had notably higher average Tolerance of Uncertainty Test scores. But none of these results were very striking and there was minimal individual structure in them. If I was going to take this further I would have come up with a more principled definition of weirdness, but at this point it doesn't seem worth it.

Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and "behavior problems"; unofficially, anger and thrill-seeking – but most people consider these to be some sort of effect of the general attention deficit. Dr. William Dodson pushes a different conception, where one of the key features of ADHD is "rejection-sensitive dysphoria", ie people with the condition are much less able to tolerate social rejection, and more likely to find it unbearable and organize their lives around avoiding it. He doesn't deny the attention and focus symptoms; he just thinks that rejection sensitivity needs to be considered a key part of the disorder. I say "Dr. William Dodson pushes", but this requires a little research before it becomes apparent. What a Google search shows is just a bunch of articles saying that rejection sensitivity is a key part of ADHD that gets ignored by non-expert psychiatrists and that it's important to educate patients about it and include it in any treatment plan. My conclusion is that all of these articles can be traced back to Dr. Dodson or people inspired by Dr. Dodson, of which there are many. The ADHD patient community has gotten really into this and pushed it in a lot of support groups and patient communities and so on, where it is repeated uncritically as "an important ADHD feature psychiatrists often forget about". But the genesis is just Dr. Dodson saying so, with limited formal evidence.

Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. We're scheduled for meetups in 77 cities (and one ship!) in 23 countries, soundly beating last year's list. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. Most people who are on the fence have said they've enjoyed going. Most people who felt intimidated about going have said they've enjoyed going. Most people who felt they were too different from the median SSC reader to fit in have enjoyed going. Most people who worried they weren't smart enough to fit in have enjoyed going. Etc. Some tips from past experience with these meetups: 1. If you're the host, bring a sign that says "SSC MEETUP" and prop it up somewhere on a table 2. Bring blank labels and pens for nametags. 3. Pass around a paper where everyone gives their name and email address, 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. Some things that have worked for later meetups include people giving short presentations on topics of interest to them, or discussion of some particular blog post 6. Nothing is going to get done unless there's a Schelling point for who has to do it, and right now that's the meetup organizer. 7. It's much easier to schedule a second meetup while you're having the first compared to trying to do it later on by email 8. Surprisingly many people will love you forever if you bring stim toys 9. In case people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention reciprocity.io, the rationalist friend-finder/dating site. It runs off Facebook, so you have to Facebook friend the other person first. 10. If you have a vague location like "in the mall" or "at the North Park", nobody will ever find each other. Give a specific place (eg "at the North Park, by the big oak tree in the northwest corner") and be carrying a sign saying "SSC MEETUP". If you were too vague in your description, comment with a better one and I can edit it in. Remaining issues with the times and dates: – Brisbane's time was unclear; please confirm I got it right – Portland did not provide readable information (seriously, ROT12?!) and will have to be clearer and give a location – Copenhagen should finish their debate about whether to move the meetup somewhere else – Paris has a weird phone number with words in it. I don't know if this is a mistake or just how French phone numbers work

STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants' average age was 37 and which did not measure harm. You can find the study involved here. A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages – for example, a graphic murder scene from Crime and Punishment. Half the participants received the following trigger warning before the passage: TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma Participants were asked to rate their anxiety before and after reading the passages. After they had finished, they were asked to fill out a bunch of questionnaires that measured their opinions about how trauma worked. The researchers found that people who received the trigger warning were 5% more likely to endorse the idea that they were vulnerable to trauma, and also 5% more likely to endorse the belief that people with trauma could suffer persistent negative effects from that trauma. There were some subgroup and moderation analyses which I ignore for the usual reasons. What might be some causes for concern with this study? First, Stuart Ritchie points out that the results are statistically weak. Most of the results have p-values around 0.05, and are not corrected for multiple testing. That means it hasn't been formally proven whether or not the results are random chance. I don't like haggling over whether something is just above or just below a significance threshold. But if you do like that kind of haggling, this study doesn't survive it very well.

Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades. More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative. Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors like smoking cessation and not to medical advances. Survival rates are increasing only because cancers are getting detected earlier. Suppose a certain cancer is untreatable and will kill you in ten years. If it's always discovered after seven years, five-year-survival-rate will be 0%. If it's always discovered after two years, five-year-survival-rate will be 100%. Better screening can shift the percent of cases discovered after seven years vs. two years, and so shift the five-year-survival rate, but the same number of people will be dying of cancer as ever. This post tries to figure out which narrative is more accurate. First, incidence of cancer: This chart doesn't look good (in both senses of a chart not looking good – seriously, put some pride into your work). Although there's a positive trend since 2001, it's overwhelmed by a general worsening since 1975. But this isn't the right way to look at things: average age has increased since 1975. Since older people are at higher risk of cancer, an older population will look like higher cancer rates. Also, something has to kill you, so if other issues like violent crime or heart disease get better, it will look like a higher cancer rate.

"Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?" — topic of #slatestarcodex I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. (this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can't pay for the water they use.) Predictably, the move has caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as "drowning in backlash". Groundswell thinks it's a "big blunder". Daily Banter says it's "exactly why everyone hates PETA". Jezebel calls them "assholes", and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery. Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography. People call these things "blunders", but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybodyhas heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about "did this publicity stunt cross the line?" While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren't any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn't lack of agreement. It's lack of publicity. PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody's talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is "I hate them and they make me really angry." Some of the talk is even "I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad."