Astral Codex Ten Podcast

In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person's central point. And that's why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive. Graham's hierarchy is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn't really a hierarchy of disagreements. It's a hierarchy of types of response, within a disagreement. Sometimes things are refutations of other people's points, but the points should never have been made at all, and refuting them doesn't help. Sometimes it's unclear how the argument even connects to the sorts of things that in principle could be proven or refuted. If we were to classify disagreements themselves – talk about what people are doing when they're even having an argument – I think it would look something like this: Most people are either meta-debating – debating whether some parties in the debate are violating norms – or they're just shaming, trying to push one side of the debate outside the bounds of respectability. If you can get past that level, you end up discussing facts (blue column on the left) and/or philosophizing about how the argument has to fit together before one side is "right" or "wrong" (red column on the right). Either of these can be anywhere from throwing out a one-line claim and adding "Checkmate, atheists" at the end of it, to cooperating with the other person to try to figure out exactly what considerations are relevant and which sources best resolve them.

I. A spectre is haunting Europe. Several spectres, actually. One of them is the spectre of communism. The others are literal ghosts. They live in abandoned mansions. Sometimes they wail eerily or make floorboards creak. If you arrange things just right, you might be able to capture them on film. Or at least this must have been the position of the founders of the Fabian Society, Britain's most influential socialist organization. In 1883, ghost hunters Frank Podmore and Edward Pease spent the night at the same West London haunted house, looking for signs of the paranormal. As the night dragged on without any otherworldly visitations, they passed the time in conversation and realized they shared an interest in communist thought. The two agreed to meet up again later, and from these humble beginnings came one of the most important private societies in the history of the world. Before the Fabians, communism was a pastime of wild-eyed labor activists promising bloody revolution. The Society helped introduce the idea of incremental democratic socialism – not just in the sense of Bernie Sanders, but in the sense of the entire modern welfare state. In the process, they pretty much invented the demographic of champagne-sipping socialist intellectuals. Famous Society members included George Bernard Shaw, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Tony Blair; Fabian ideas were imported wholesale into the economic policies guiding newly-independent India, Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, among others. I became interested in the Fabians after reading Kerry Vaughn's excellent essay on the early neoliberal movement. I'm tempted to say "on the early neoliberal conspiracy", choosing that not because any of what they did was secret – it wasn't – but because it seems like the only term that describes their efficiency. A small group of people who wanted to change the world founded an organization, garnered influence in a bunch of little ways, thought strategically and acted with discipline. And after decades of work they got into positions of power and successfully changed the world, shifting the economic consensus from state socialism to free(er) markets. And the Fabians seem like the same story, told in reverse. A small group of idealists, thinking strategically and acting with discipline, moved democratic socialism from the lunatic fringe to the halls of intellectual power. If aspiring generals study Alexander the Great and Napoleon, surely aspiring intellectual movements should study the neoliberals and the Fabians. Kerry's essay on neoliberalism was great, but I really wanted to know how the Fabians progressed from failed ghost hunters to puppetmasters controlling half of the twentieth century.

Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the adversarial collaborations contest. There was a lot of good discussion in the last thread, with lots of people offering projects, but I'm not sure if people actually got in contact with each other and finalized their agreements. So, if you proposed a collaboration in the last thread, please go back, take a look, and see if someone you might want to work with responded to your proposal. I'm going to post two comments in the comment section of this post. One is a coordination comment. If you're looking to find someone who you agreed to do a collaboration with in the last thread, so you can exchange emails with them, please post as a subcomment there. For example "I offered to do a collaboration on gun control, I see Bob839 agreed to partner with me, my email is whatever@place.com, please get in touch with me." The second is a contest registration comment, so I know how many teams there are. If you and a partner have gotten in touch with one another and chosen a topic (you can always change it later), please post a subcomment there so I know that you're officially in. If for some reason you're not comfortable posting there, you can also email me at scott[at]shireroth[dot]org. Please mention your name, your partner's name, your topic, and (if you're comfortable giving it), your email.

An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It's typically done for scientific papers, but I'm excited about the possibility of people applying the concept to to less formal writeups as well. For example, a pro-gun activist might collaborate with an anti-gun activist to write a joint article on the evidence for whether gun control saves lives. We trust each person to make sure the best evidence for their respective side is included. We also trust that they'll fact-check each other and make sure there aren't any errors or falsehoods in the final document. There might be a lot of debating, but it will happen on high-bandwidth informal channels behind the scenes and nobody will feel like they have tailor their debating to sounding good for an audience. I don't know to what degree true adversarial collaborations are really possible. It might be that people who disagree on high-level issues might not be able to cooperate on a survey of the field at all. But I'd like to find out. So I'm offering a prize, plus a chance to get the results published on SSC, to any teams (probably of two people each) who want to do adversarial collaborations. If you want to participate, comment on this post with what subject you'd like to work on and what your opinion is on the subject. Or look through existing comments, find someone who has the opposite opinion to you on a subject you care about, and reply to them saying you want to be their foil. After that you can exchange emails and start working.

Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who have trouble affording their co-pays. This is a collection of tricks I've learned (mostly from them) to help deal with these situations. They are US-based and may not apply to other countries. Within the US, they are a combination of legal and probably-legal; I've tried to mark which is which but I am not a lawyer and can't make promises. None of this is medical advice; use at your own risk. This is intended for people who already know they do not qualify for government assistance. If you're not sure, check HealthCare.gov and look into the particular patchwork of assistance programs in your state and county. I. Prescription Medication This section is about ways to get prescription medication for cheaper. If even after all this your prescription medication is too expensive, please talk to your doctor about whether it can be replaced with a less expensive medication. Often doctors don't think about this and will be happy to work with you if they know you need it. They may also have other ways to help you save money, like giving you the free sample boxes they get from drug reps. 1. Sites like GoodRx.com. This is first because it's probably the most important thing most people can do to save money on health care. For example, one month of Abilify 5 mg usually costs $930 at Safeway, but only $30 with a GoodRx coupon. There is no catch. Insurances and pharmacies play a weird game where insurances say they'll only pay one-tenth the sticker price for drugs, and pharmacies respond by dectupling the price of everything. If you have insurance, it all (mostly) cancels out in the end; if you don't, you end up paying inflated prices with no relation to reality. GoodRx negotiates discounts so that individual consumers can get drugs for the same discounted price as insurances (or better); they also list the prices at each pharmacy so you know where to shop. This is not only important in and of itself, but its price comparison feature is also important to figure out how best to apply the other features in this category. Even if you have insurance, GoodRx prices are sometimes lower than your copay. 2. Get and split bigger pills. Remember how a month of Abilify 5 mg cost $30 with the coupon? Well, a month of Abilify 30 mg also costs $30. Cut each 30 mg pill into sixths, and now you have six months' worth of Abilify 5 mg, for a total cost of $5 per month. You'll need a cooperative doctor willing to prescribe you the higher dose. Note that some pills cannot be divided in this way – cutting XR pills screws up the extended release mechanism. Others like seizure medication are a bad idea to split in case you end up taking slightly different doses each time. Ask your doctor whether this is safe for whatever medication you use. Do not ask the pharma companies or trust their literature – they will always say it's unsafe, for self-interested reasons. Contrary to some doctors' concerns, this is not insurance fraud if you're not buying it with insurance, and AFAIK there's no such thing as defrauding a pharmacy.

That story about the blockchain-based dating site gets better: its designer is an enlightened being. I got this from Vinay Gupta's wiki, which describes some of his thoughts and experiences. Since reading Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, I've been looking at a bunch of this stuff, and it's interesting how it does (or doesn't) converge. For example, from the MCTB review: If you really, really examine your phenomenological experience, you realize all sorts of surprising things…one early insight is a perception of your mental awareness of a phenomenon as separate from your perception of that phenomenon. And from Gupta: The real process of meditation is paying real close attention to what is happening around you without passing it to the mind immediately for analysis…the mind becomes perceived to be another sense. You see, you listen, you hear, you smell, you think. Once you are aware that you are not your mind and your mind is basically a sense organ, it's a thing that brings information to you, you enter the real work of enlightenment, which is: what is this me that the mind is bringing information to? And that's the big one. That question is at the heart of everybody's enlightenment process. From the MCTB review: The main point of [mindfulness] meditation is to improve your concentration ability so you can direct it to ordinary experience. Become so good at concentrating that you can attain various jhanas – but then, instead of focusing on infinite bliss or whatever other cool things you can do with your new talent, look at a wall or listen to the breeze or just try to understand the experience of existing in time. From Gupta: Building the instrumentation to keep your consciousness stable enough to put the attention on the thing, is about three or four years work. It's like grinding a mirror if you're going to make an astronomical telescope. It takes years to grind a perfectly smooth reflector. Then you silver coat it. Then you point it at the sky and now you can see the moons of Jupiter. It takes you years to design the microscope, you look into the water, now you can see the microbes and you just discovered germ theory. Building the instrumentation takes time. Years and years and years because you need long periods – 35, 40 seconds minimally – when there are no thoughts in the mind to be able to begin to turn the awareness onto itself. So lengthening the gap between thoughts means lowering the mental background noise.

[Content warning: harassment. This discusses the comments to SSC Survey Results: Sexual Harassment Levels By Field] brmic writes: Thank you for posting this and the data file. FWIW, I tried to reproduce the results and couldn't reproduce the correlations between female victimization, male victimization and male perpetration. fem vic vs. male vic is 0.65, same as yours. fem vic vs. male perp is 0.01 for me, and male vic vs. male perp is 0.21 for me. Everything else more or less checks out. As a reviewer, I'd say the combination score is not convincing, especially since it ignores all considerations of different male to female ratios in the various industries. Also, if you have two measures with r = 0.8, Fig 6 is not a good idea IMHO. It's probably just noise. (Also, it should be a dotplot centered around 1, because the relevant info is distance from 1:1 ratio.) Instead, I'd focus on the correlation between female victimization at work and female victimization outside work of 0.65 (for me) and the same for males at 0.59, which also leads to the conclusion that there's a strong 'people in fields' effect, without having to go through the combination score. If you're so inclined, you might then do the at-work by outside-work ratios and end up a kind of cross-validation set, where you can see whether the bad fields for women are bad for men as well. Of course, once you then consider sex ratios per field. it's story time all over again. Still, e.g. men report similar levels of out of work victimization in computers (20%) and Health Care (24%), but at work victimization of 4% and 12% respectively, which strongly suggests that Health Care is worse. Their code is available here. Thanks for doing the work to try to replicate my results. I've removed the non-confirmed correlations from my post until I can figure out what's going on with them. I agree that Figure 6 was barely worth it, which is why I tried to make Figure 4 (the unadjusted version) the center of my thesis. Chris quotes a TIME article that argues that predominantly-male communities generally have lower harassment rates than predominantly-female communities:

[content note: sexual harassment] I. Recent discussion of sexual harassment at work has focused on a few high-profile industries. But there has been relatively little credible research as to how rates really differ by occupation type. There are many surveys of harassment rates in specific industries, but they can't be credibly compared with one another. The percent of people who report sexual harassment varies wildly from survey to survey – thus studies finding that anywhere from 12 percent to 48 percent to 60 percent to 85 percent of women have been harassed at work. If a survey shows that 60% of female nurses get sexually harassed at work, does that mean nurses are victimized particularly often (because more than 12%) or are unusually safe (because less than 85%)? It doesn't matter, because another study says only 19% of nurses get harassed. Why do all these numbers differ so dramatically? The most important issue seems to be how you ask the question. "Have you ever been harassed?" gets numbers more like 12%; giving a long list of specific behaviors and asking "Have you ever experienced any of these?" gets numbers closer to 85%, depending on what the behaviors are. Surveys also differ on whether they ask all employees or just women, whether they include a time frame (eg "…in the past two years"), whether they specify that it had to be at work vs. work-related events, and whether they include witnessing someone else's harassment. Taking these surveys entirely seriously would lead to the conclusion that Uber has the lowest sexual harassment rate of any company or industry in the world; I choose not to take them seriously. This means we need investigations that use the same methodology across multiple fields. Whenever the media talks about this – see eg the Washington Post's The Industries With The Worst Sexual Harassment Problem – they're working off of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's records. But these are totally unsuitable for the task – they just report raw number of claims per industry. The industries that rank lowest in EEOC's data tend to be small industries with very few women – for example, taken seriously the WaPo's graph shows that mining has the least problem with sexual harassment of any industry in the world. Is this thanks to their uniquely progressive culture – or because there are practically no female miners? I'm going to say the second one. The takeaway that most real researchers take from the EEOC claims is that the lowest-paying and most mundane occupations – retail, restaurant work, hotel work, etc – have much higher sexual harassment rates than the prestigious occupations people generally talk about. Eyeballing the data, this looks basically true. But trying to get anything more fine-grained than that out of EEOC is basically hopeless. I only know of two surveys that have even attempted to compare different fields in a principled way, and neither really inspires confidence.

Medicine loves guidelines. But everywhere else, guidelines are still underappreciated. Consider a recommendation, like "Try Lexapro!" Even if Lexapro is a good medication, it might not be a good medication for your situation. And even if it's a good medication for your situation, it might fail for unpredictable reasons involving genetics and individual variability. So medicine uses guidelines – algorithms that eventually result in a recommendation. A typical guideline for treating depression might look like this (this is a very over-simplified version for an example only, NOT MEDICAL ADVICE): 1. Ask the patient if they have symptoms of bipolar disorder. If so, ignore everything else on here and move to the bipolar guideline. 2. If the depression seems more anxious, try Lexapro. Or if the depression seems more anergic, try Wellbutrin. 3. Wait one month. If it works perfectly, declare victory. If it works a little but not enough, increase the dose. If it doesn't work at all, stop it and move on to the next step. 4. Try Zoloft, Remeron, or Effexor. Repeat Step 3. 5. Cycle through steps 3 and 4 until you either find something that works, or you and your patient agree that you don't have enough time and patience to continue cycling through this tier of options and you want to try another tier with more risks in exchange for more potential benefits. 6. If the depression seems more melancholic, try Anafranil. Or if the depression seems more atypical, try Nardil. Or if your patient is on an earlier-tier medication that almost but not quite works, try augmenting with Abilify. Repeat Step 3. 7. Try electroconvulsive therapy. The end result might be the recommendation "try Lexapro!", but you know where to go if that doesn't work. A psychiatrist armed with this guideline can do much better work than one who just happens to know that Lexapro is the best antidepressant, even if Lexapro really is the best antidepressant. Whenever I'm hopelessly confused about what to do with a difficult patient, I find it really reassuring that I can go back to a guideline like this, put together by top psychiatrists working off the best evidence available. This makes it even more infuriating that there's nothing like this for other areas I care about.

Bizzolt writes: DC Public Schools HS teacher here (although I'm not returning next year, as is the case with many of my colleagues). As noted, one of the biggest factors in the graduation rates is the unexcused absences–if you look at the results of our external audit and investigation here, you see that for many schools, a significant number of our seniors "Passed Despite Excessive Absences in Regular Instruction Courses Required for Graduation"–over 40% of 2017 graduates at my high school, for example. So the attendance policy is being strictly enforced now, and you can see how from that alone, a ~30% drop in expected graduates is possible. Some more details about strictly enforcing the attendance policy though: 1: DCPS has what's called the '80 20′ rule: A student that is absent for at least 20% of their classes is considered absent for the whole day. 2: Most schools have 5 periods, so an absence in one class would be considered an absence for the whole day. 3: If you have 10 or more unexcused absences in a class, you automatically get an F for the term. 4: If you are over 15 minutes late for a class, that is considered an unexcused absence. 5: A majority of these absences are in first period. 6: A majority of students in my school and many others live in single parent households. 7: These students are typically responsible for making sure their younger siblings get to school, if they have any. 8: Elementary and middle schools in my neighborhood start at the exact same time as high school. 9: Their doors do not open until 5 to 10 minutes before the starting bell, presumably for safety reasons. 10: Refer to point 4. There's many other problems at DCPS to be sure, but this set of circumstances alone is causing the largest increase in failing grades and graduation ineligibility at my high school, and basically every other 90+% black school in the district. You could see how this accounts for quite a bit of the difference between white and black graduation rates as well. There's a reason why across the board, DCPS schools were not strictly enforcing this policy in previous years. It looks like most other school districts don't have this policy; it seems plausible that this is the main difference between DC and other poor school districts that nevertheless manage to pass most of their kids. Userfriendlyyy also focuses on the absences: Looks to me like the policy they changed was losing credit for bad attendance. This might be from a few things. Kids might need to help out with the family finances. The only part of the job market that is doing well right now is low end unskilled workers who are willing to get paid crap (no matter how much the financial press wants to pretend otherwise, I listened to an hour of local NPR and the Topic was 'call in and tell us how the booming job market is helping you out', 20 callers not one had anything good to say and my state has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country). If you know you don't have the grades for a scholarship, your family is broke and since we have effectively made going to college impossible for anyone but the offspring of the oligarchy, and you can find a minimum wage job easily; what exactly is the utility of that little piece of paper compared to the ability to put food on the table tonight?