Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn't. For example, I don't think any of them would say something like "Oh, obviously you just haven't met the right woman. I know this really cute girl Alanna, a friend of my sister's. I'll introduce you next time she's around." Or "You must have just had a bad experience with women growing up. Maybe you always got into fights with your mother as a child. But there's no reason to let that control you now."

Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism Summary - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others.

I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we're likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced. Let's back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. They work out rules for punishing defectors – your trolls, your harassers – and appoint a hierarchy of trusted individuals to carry out those rules. They try to balance competing concerns like free expression and public decency. They host cliques, power grabs, flame wars, even religious strife. They try to raise revenue, they establish a class system of Power Users and Premium Users, they deal with resentment from people who aren't getting their way. They develop a culture.

[Epistemic status: something I've been thinking about recently. There's a lot of complication around these issues and this is more to start a discussion than to present any settled solution] There's a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is describing his peaceful little town. He says they never fight – except that one time about a horse some people thought was a mule. Someone interrupts him to say it was really a mule some people thought was a horse, and then everyone in town starts shouting "MULE!" or "HORSE!" at each other until they get drowned out by the chorus. The town is happy and peaceful as long as nobody brings up the horse/mule thing. As soon as somebody brings it up all of the old rancor instantly resurfaces and everybody's at each other's throats. And the argument itself never gets more sophisticated than people yelling "HORSE!" or "MULE!" at each other. Maybe it would be worth it to create a norm around never bringing it up? The rationalist/EA/etc community has a norm that people must be able to defend their beliefs with evidence, and a further norm that people shouldn't be confident in their beliefs unless they've sounded them off others and sought out potential counterarguments. These are great norms. But their failure mode is a community where dredging up interminable horse/mule style arguments is seen as a virtue, and avoiding them is seen as a cowardly refusal to expose one's own beliefs to challenge.

Connor Leahy discusses the idea of an 'AGI Fire Alarm' and argues GPT-3 might be the last such warning we'll receive before it's too late to act.

Suppose a lot of that stuff about bravery debates is right. That lots of the advice people give is useful for some people, but that the opposite advice is useful for other people. For example, "You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic" versus "Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you've hit bottom." Or "You need to remember that the government can't solve all problems and that some regulations are counterproductive" versus "You need to remember that the free market can't solve all problems and that some regulations are necessary." Or "You need to pay more attention to your diet or you'll end up very unhealthy" versus "You need to pay less attention to your weight or you'll end up in a spiral of shame and self-loathing and at risk of eating disorders." Or "Follow your dreams, you don't want to be working forever at a job you hate", versus "Your dream of becoming a professional cosplayer may not be the best way to ensure a secure future for your family, go into petroleum engineering instead."

It's been two and a half months since I deleted the blog, so I owe all of you an update on recent events. I haven't heard anything from the New York Times one way or the other. Since nothing has been published, I'd assume they dropped the article, except that they approached an acquaintance for another interview last month. Overall I'm confused. But they definitely haven't given me any explicit reassurance that they won't reveal my private information. And now that I've publicly admitted privacy is important to me – something I tried to avoid coming on too strong about before, for exactly this reason – some people have taken it upon themselves to post my real name all over Twitter in order to harass me. I probably inadvertently Streisand-Effect-ed myself with all this; I still think it was the right thing to do. At this point I think maintaining anonymity is a losing battle. So I am gradually reworking my life to be compatible with the sort of publicity that circumstances seem to be forcing on me. I had a talk with my employer and we came to a mutual agreement that I would gradually transition away from working there. At some point, I may start my own private practice, where I'm my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I'm most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure. I'm trying to do all of this maximally slowly and carefully and in a way that won't cause undue burden to any of my patients, and it's taking a long time to figure out.

Trigger warning: deliberately provoking horror about graduates' real-​world post-​college prospects. Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be! I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unpolished. I was called in on very short notice after your original choice for graduation speaker, Mr. Steven L. Carter, had his invitation to speak rescinded due to his offensive and quite honestly outrageous opinions. Let me say in no uncertain terms that I totally condemn him and everything he stands for, and that I am glad to see the University of [mumble] taking a strong stand against this sort of thing.

[Related: Tyler Cowen on rationalists, Noah Smith on rationalists, Will Wilkinson on rationalists, etc] If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was "annoying person who's never read any economics, criticizing economists", I think I could nail it. I'd say something like: Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with 'models' based on ideas like 'the only motivation is greed' or 'everyone behaves perfectly rationally'. But they didn't predict the housing bubble, they didn't predict the subprime mortgage crisis, and they didn't predict Lehman Brothers. All they ever do is talk about how capitalism is perfect and government regulation never works, then act shocked when the real world doesn't conform to their theories. This criticism's very clichedness should make it suspect. It would be very strange if there were a standard set of criticisms of economists, which practically everyone knew about and agreed with, and the only people who hadn't gotten the message yet were economists themselves. If any moron on a street corner could correctly point out the errors being made by bigshot PhDs, why would the PhDs never consider changing?

So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here's my explanation. Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. "Scott Alexander" is my real first and middle name, but I've tried to keep my last name secret. I haven't always done great at this, but I've done better than "have it get printed in the New York Times".