Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Alex Tabarrok beat me to the essay on Oregon's self-service gas laws that I wanted to write. Oregon is one of two US states that bans self-service gas stations. Recently, they passed a law relaxing this restriction – self-service is permissable in some rural counties during odd hours of the night. Outraged Oregonians took to social media to protest that self-service was unsafe, that it would destroy jobs, that breathing in gas fumes would kill people, that gas pumping had to be performed by properly credentialed experts – seemingly unaware that most of the rest of the country and the world does it without a second thought.

"Birth order" refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc. Then people got around to actually studying it and couldn't find any of that. Wikipedia's birth order article says: Claims that birth order affects human psychology are prevalent in family literature, but studies find such effects to be vanishingly small….the largest multi-study research suggests zero or near-zero effects. Birth-order theory has the characteristics of a zombie theory, as despite disconfirmation, it continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture.

I started reading Foucault's Madness And Civilization with the expectation that it would be tedious and incomprehensible. You know, the stereotype that postmodernism / post-structuralism / Continentalism / etc. involves a lot of negation of the negation of the inversion of the Other within the Absolute within [and so on for 200 pages]. There was a little of that. But there was also a fascinating look at the history of mental illness, an entertainingly bombastic writing style, and a few ideas that I might have actually half-understood.

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, and 2016. And here are the predictions I made for 2017. Strikethrough'd are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can't decide if they're true or not.

I didn't realize how much of a psychiatrist's time was spent gatekeeping Adderall. The human brain wasn't built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can't sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?

The Silmarillion describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maedhros stole another, but regretted his deed and jumped into a fiery chasm. And Maglor took the last one, but threw it into the sea in despair. Well, Venus is still around. But what happened to the latter two? Surely over all the intervening millennia, with so many people wanting a Silmaril, they haven't just hung around in the earth and ocean? After some research, I've developed a couple of promising leads for the location of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age.

[This post is about the 2018 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please take the survey if you haven't already. Please don't read on until you've taken it, since this could bias your results.] I'm preregistering my hypotheses for the survey this year. So far I've glanced at Google's bar graphs for each individual question but haven't started exploring relationships yet, so I'm not cheating too badly. I'll still look for things I haven't preregistered, but I'll admit they're preliminary results only. This is the stuff I've been thinking about beforehand and will be taking more seriously:

If you're reading this and have previously read at least one Slate Star Codex post, please take the 2018 SSC Survey. This year's survey is in three sections. If you're strapped for time, just take Section 1. If you have a little more time, take both Sections 1 and 2. If you have a lot of time, take all three sections. Each section will take about ten minutes. There's some more information on the survey itself.

I wanted NSI-189 to be real so badly. Pharma companies used to love antidepressants. Millions of people are depressed. Millions of people who aren't depressed think they are. Sell them all a pill per day for their entire lifetime, and you're looking at a lot of money. So they poured money into antidepressant research, culminating in 80s and 90s with the discovery of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac. Since then, research has moved into exciting new areas, like "more SSRIs", "even more SSRIs", "drugs that claim to be SNRIs but on closer inspection are mostly just SSRIs", and "drugs that claim to be complicated serotonin modulators but realistically just work as SSRIs". Some companies still go through the pantomime of inventing new supposedly-not-SSRI drugs, and some psychiatrists still go through the pantomime of pretending to be excited about them, but nobody's heart is really in it anymore.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last two posts, especially the many people who disagreed with me. Two things I will admit I got mostly wrong: 1. I was wrong to say there was "no case" for the tax bill. Aside from all of the minor provisions which can be good or bad, the case for slashing corporate rates is that they're more distortionary and less efficient than other forms of taxation. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me. 2. Several people brought up problems with the article saying CEOs say they will just give the money back to shareholders, most notably that giving money back to shareholders may stimulate the economy in other ways.