Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumcision-ethical/ [This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Joel P and Missingno] "They practise circumcision for cleanliness' sake; for they would rather be clean than more becoming." – Herodotus, The Histories – 2.37 The debate over circumcision in the Western world today is surprisingly similar to the conflict that Greeks and Egyptians faced 2500 years ago. Supporters tend to emphasize its hygiene and health benefits; opponents tend to call it cruel or to emphasize its deviation from the natural human form. In this adversarial collaboration we address medical aspects, sensitivity and pleasure, and ethical aspects of infant circumcision. Effect on penile cancer Circumcision greatly reduces the relative rate of penile cancer, a relatively uncommon malignancy in developed nations which kills a little over 400 American men each year. Denmark, while it has one of the lowest rates of penile cancer for a non-circumcising country, nevertheless has 10x the rate of penile cancer as Israel – where almost all men are circumcised. Likewise, a Kaiser Permanente study of patients with penile cancer found that 16% of patients with carcinoma in situ had been circumcised; only 2% of patients with invasive penile cancer had been circumcised. Since the circumcision rate of Kaiser patients of the appropriate age was ~50%, this is in line with the 90% reduction.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-collaboration-entries/ Thanks to everyone who sent in entries for the 2019 adversarial collaboration contest. Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it's a good way to make sure you hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate between experts, except all the debate and rhetoric and disagreement have already been done by the time you start reading, so you're just left with the end result. See the 2018 entries for examples. Six teams submitted collaborations for this year's contest. I'll list them here for now, and the names will turn into links as I post them over the next two weeks. They are: 1. "Is infant circumcision ethical?" by Joel P and Missingno 2. "Is eating meat a net harm?" by David G and Froolow 3. "Does calorie restriction slow aging?" by Adrian L and Calvin R 4. "Should we colonize space to mitigate x-risk?" by Nick D and Rob S 5. "Should gene editing technologies be used in humans" by Nita J and Patrick N 6. "Will automation lead to economic crisis?" by Doug S and Erusian (if any of you are unhappy with how I named you or titled your piece, let me know) At the end of the two weeks, I'll ask readers to vote for their favorite collaboration, so try to remember which ones impress you. I think we're all winners by getting to read these – but the actual winners get that plus $2500 in prize money. Thanks again to everyone who donates to the Patreon for making that possible. Please put any comments about the contest itself here, not on the individual entries.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/ On my recent post on autism, several people chimed in to say that "autism" wasn't a unitary/homogenous category. It probably lumps together many different conditions with many different causes. It's useless to speculate on the characteristics of "autism" until it can be separated out further. I get this every time I talk about a psychiatric condition. The proponents of this view seem to think they're speaking a shocking heresy that overturns the psychiatric establishment. But guys, we know this kind of stuff. Psychiatric diagnoses don't have to perfectly match underlying root causes to be useful. Suppose a patient comes to you with difficulty breathing, excessive sweating, anxiety, and extreme discomfort when lying down flat. You recognize these as potential signs of pulmonary edema, ie fluid in the lungs. You do an x-ray, confirm the diagnosis, and prescribe symptomatic treatment – in this case, supplemental oxygen. All of this is good work. But you can have fluid in your lungs for lots of different reasons. Most of the time it's heart failure, but sometimes it's kidney failure, pneumonia, drug overdose, smoke inhalation, or altitude sickness. Some of these causes will have slightly different symptoms, which an alert doctor can notice.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/ Slate Star Codex has regular weekly-to-monthly meetups in a bunch of cities around the world. Earlier this autumn, we held a Meetups Everywhere event, hoping to promote and expand these groups. We collected information on existing meetups, got volunteers to create new meetups in cities that didn't have them already, and posted times and dates prominently on the blog. During late September and early October, I traveled around the US to attend as many meetups as I could. I hoped my presence would draw more people; I also wanted to learn more about meetups and the community and how best to guide them. Buck Shlegeris and a few other Bay Area effective altruists came along to meet people, talk to them about effective altruism, and potentially nudge them into the recruiting pipeline for EA organizations. Lots of people asked me how my trip was. In a word: exhausting. I got to meet a lot of people for about three minutes each. There were a lot of really fascinating people with knowledge of a bewildering variety of subjects, but I didn't get to pick their minds anywhere as thoroughly as I would have liked. I'm sorry if I talked to you for three minutes, you told me about some amazing project you were working on to clone neuroscientists or eradicate bees or convert atmospheric CO2 into vegan meat substitutes, and I mumbled something and walked away. You are all great and I wish I could have spent more time with you. I finally got to put faces to many of the names I've interacted with through the years. For example, Bryan Caplan is exactly how you would expect, in every way. Also, in front of his office, he has a unique painting, which he apparently got by asking a Mexican street artist to paint an homage to Lord of the Rings. The artist had never heard of it before, but Bryan described it to him very enthusiastically, and the completely bonkers result is hanging in front of his office. This is probably a metaphor for something.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj's review is better. He begins: UtEB's premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions to occur. The brain then uses those models to guide our future behavior. Emotional issues and seemingly irrational behaviors are generated from implicit world-models (schemas) which have been formed in response to various external challenges. Each schema contains memories relating to times when the challenge has been encountered and mental structures describing both the problem and a solution to it. So in one of the book's example cases, a man named Richard sought help for trouble speaking up at work. He would have good ideas during meetings, but felt inexplicably afraid to voice them. During therapy, he described his narcissistic father, who was always mouthing off about everything. Everyone hated his father for being a fool who wouldn't shut up. The therapist conjectured that young Richard observed this and formed a predictive model, something like "talking makes people hate you". This was overly general: talking only makes people hate you if you talk incessantly about really stupid things. But when you're a kid you don't have much data, so you end up generalizing a lot from the few examples you have.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ I. All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results. Our form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms. Our form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root! All psychotherapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are "nonspecific factors" like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests our form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using our form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using our form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that our form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use our form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of our form of therapy. But when they do, it's going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of our form of therapy is going to be!

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/ [Followup to: Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science] I. In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water, and a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is taught to every schoolchild as an important chemical fact. You approach their chemists and protest: why include the part about the star going supernova? Why not just say an acid and a base make salt and water? The chemists find your question annoying: your new "supernova-less" chemistry makes exactly the same predictions as the standard model! You're just splitting hairs! Angels dancing on pins! Stop wasting their time! "But the part about supernovas doesn't constrain expectation!" Yes, say the chemists, but removing it doesn't constrain expectation either. You're just spouting random armchair speculation that can never be proven one way or the other. What part of "stop wasting our time" did you not understand? Moral of the story: It's too glib to say "There is no difference between theories that produce identical predictions". You actually care a lot about which of two theories that produce identical predictions is considered true. II.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on? First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. If genes for autism (without autism itself) increase intelligence, we should expect these people to be unusually smart. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. About 13% of autistic children (in this sample from whatever social stratum they took their sample from) have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of (presumably well-matched?) control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ I. LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders. Lovaza is fish oil. "Come on," you say, "surely there's some difference between Lovaza and the fish oil I buy at my local health food store for a couple of tenners per Giant Jar?" And you're right. The difference is, Lovaza costs $300 a month.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/ Ramelteon isn't a bad drug. It's just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system. All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between "idiotically dangerous" and "laughably ineffective", and Ramelteon manages better than most. It outperforms placebo, it's not addictive, it won't sap your ability to sleep without it, and it doesn't screw up your brain so badly that its unofficial mascot is a hallucinatory walrus. How does it do it? Ramelteon is the first melatonergic drug, selectively binding to MT-1 and MT-2 melatonin receptors. Binding to melatonin receptors presumably mimics the effect of the natural hormone melatonin which is believed to serve a sleep-promoting role. Now, you might ask yourself – the natural hormone melatonin is available as an over-the-counter supplement costing a couple cents per pill in every drug store, and provably quite safe and effective. Why would anyone go through the trouble of creating a drug that mimics its action? Especially if a month's supply of the drug costs around $100 – which it does.