Scott Alexander

• Scott AlexanderOct 8, 2021, 11:26 PM

  17 points

  on: Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬

  I’ve tried to address your point about psychiatry in particular at https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2019/​​12/​​04/​​symptom-condition-cause/​​

  For the whale point, am I fairly interpreting your argument as saying that mammals are more similar, and more fundamentally similar, to each other, than swimmy-things? If so, consider a thought experiment. Swimmy-things are like each other because of convergent evolution. Presumably millions of years ago, the day after the separation of the whale and land-mammal lineages, proto-whales and proto-landmammals were extremely similar, and proto-whales and proto-fish were extremely dissimilar. Let’s say in 99% of ways, whales were more like landmammals, and in 1% of ways, they were more like fish. Some convergent evolution takes place, we get to the present, and you’re claiming that modern whales are still more like landmammals than fish—I have no interest in disputing that claim, let’s say they’re more like landmammals in 85% of ways, and fish in 15% of ways. Now fast-forward into the future, after a billion more years of convergent evolution, and imagine that whales have evolved to their new niche so well that they are more like fish in 99% of ways, and more like mammals in only 1% of ways. Are you still going to insist that blood is thicker than water and we need to judge them by their phylogenetic group, even though this gives almost no useful information and it’s almost always better to judge them by their environmental affinities?

  (I don’t think this is an absurd hypothetical—I think “crabs” are in this situation right now)

  And if not, at some point in the future, do they go from being obviously-mammals-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this to obviously-fish-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this in the space of a single day? Or might there be a very long period when they are more like mammals in some way, more like fish in others, and you’re allowed to categorize them however you want based on which is more useful for you? If the latter, what makes you think we’re not in that period right now?

• Scott AlexanderOct 8, 2021, 11:11 PM

  25 points

  0

  on: “Eat­ing Dirt Benefits Kids” is Ba­si­cally Made Up

  This rubs me wrong for the same reason that “no evidence for...” claims rub me wrong.

  We have a probably-correct model, the hygiene hypothesis broadly understood. We have a plausible corollary of that model, which is that kids eating dirt helps their immune system (I had never heard this particular claim before, but since you mention it, it seems like a plausible corollary). We should have a low-but-not-ridiculously-low prior on this.

  (probably some people would say a high prior, since it follows naturally from a probably-true thing, but I don’t trust any multi-step chain of reasoning in medicine)

  When I read the title, I thought “Oh! I guess someone showed the specific behavior of eating dirt doesn’t help, so I should update against the hygiene hypothesis!” But the post presents no evidence this is wrong. It’s just saying there are no studies of it.

  This seems kind of like framing the proverbial parachute point as “‘Parachutes prevent falling injuries’” Is Basically Made Up”. It’s not made up! It was assigned a high prior based on other things we know! Nobody has given us any evidence for or against that prior, so we should stick to it.

[Cross­post] On Hreha On Be­hav­ioral Economics

Eight Hun­dred Slightly Poi­soned Word Games

• Scott AlexanderAug 3, 2021, 6:41 PM

  3 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing Newslet­ter: July 2021

  Can you explain the no-loss competition idea further?

  • If you have to stake your USDC, isn’t this still locking up USDC, the thing you were trying to avoid doing?

  • What gives the game tokens value?

• Scott AlexanderJul 22, 2021, 8:22 AM

  8 points

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: (Brain­stem, Neo­cor­tex) ≠ (Base Mo­ti­va­tions, Honor­able Mo­ti­va­tions)

  Thanks, I read that, and while I wouldn’t say I’m completely enlightened, I feel like I have a good basis for reading it a few more times until it sinks in.

  I interpret you as saying in this post: there is no fundamental difference between base and noble motivations, they’re just two different kinds of plans we can come up with and evaluate, and we resolve conflicts between them by trying to find frames in which one or the other seems better. Noble motivations seem to “require more willpower” only because we often spend more time working on coming up with positive frames for them, because this activity flatters our ego and so is inherently rewarding.

  I’m still not sure I agree with this. My own base motivation here is that I posted a somewhat different model of willpower at https://​​astralcodexten.substack.com/​​p/​​towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower , which is similar to yours except that it does keep a role for the difference between “base” and “noble” urges. I’m trying to figure out if I still want to defend it against this one, but my thoughts are something like:

  - It feels like on stimulants, I have more “willpower” : it’s easy to take the “noble” choice when it might otherwise be hard. Likewise, when I’m drunk I have less ability to override base motivations with noble ones, and (although I guess I can’t prove it) this doesn’t seem like a purely cognitive effect where it’s harder for me to “remember” the important benefits of my noble motivations. The same is true of various low-energy states, eg tired, sick, stressed—I’m less likely to choose the noble motivation in all of them. This suggests to me that baser and nobler motivations are coming from different places, and stimulants strengthen (in your model) the connection between the noble-motivation-place and the striatum relative to the connection between the base-motivation-place the striatum, and alcohol/​stress/​etc weaken it.

  - I’m skeptical of your explanation for the “asymmetry” of noble vs. base thoughts. Are thoughts about why I should stay home really less rewarding than thoughts about why I should go to the gym? I’m imagining the opposite—I imagine staying home in my nice warm bed, and this is a very pleasant thought, and accords with what I currently really want (to not go to the gym). On the other hand, thoughts about why I should go to the gym, if I were to verbalize them, would sound like “Ugh, I guess I have to consider the fat that I’ll be a fat slob if I don’t go, even though I wish I could just never have to think about that”.

  - Base thoughts seem like literally animalistic desires—hunger seems basically built on top of the same kind of hunger a lizard or nematode feels. We know there are a bunch of brain areas in the hypothalamus etc that control hunger. So why shouldn’t this be ontologically different from nobler motivations that are different from lizards’? It seems perfectly sensible that eg stimulants strengthen something about the neocortex relative to whatever part of the hypothalamus is involved in hunger. I guess I’m realizing now how little I understand about hunger—surely the plan to eat must originate in the cortex like every other plan, but it sure feels like it’s tied into the hypothalamus in some really important way. I guess maybe hunger could have a plan-generator exactly like every other, which is modulated by hypothalamic connections? It still seems like “plans that need outside justification” vs. “plans that the hypothalamus will just keep active even if they’re stupid” is a potentially important dichotomy.

  - Base motivations also seem like things which have a more concrete connection to reinforcement learning. There’s a really short reinforcement loop between “want to eat candy” and “wow, that was reinforcing”, and a really long (sometimes nonexistent) loop between going to the gym and anything good happening. Again, this makes me suspicious that the base motivations are “encoded” in some way that’s different from the nobler motivations and which explains why different substances can preferentially reinforce one relative to the other.

  - The reasons for thinking of base motivations as more like priors, discussed in that post.

  - Kind of a dumb objection, but this feels analogous to other problems where a conscious/​intellectual knowledge fails to percolate to emotional centers of the brain, for example someone who knows planes are very safe but is scared of flying anyway. I’m not sure how to use your theory here to account for this situation, whereas if I had a theory that explained the plane phobia problem I feel like it would have to involve a concept of lower-level vs. higher-level systems that would be easy to plug into this problem.

  - Another dumb anecdotal objection, but this isn’t how I consciously experience weakness of will. The example that comes to mind most easily is wanting to scratch an itch while meditating, even though I’m supposed to stay completely still. When I imagine my thought process while worrying about this, it doesn’t feel like trying to think up new reframings of the plan. It feels like some sensory region of the brain saying “HEY! ITCH! YOU SHOULD SCRATCH IT!” and my conscious brain trying to exert some effort to overcome that. The effort doesn’t feel like thinking of new framings, and the need for the effort persists long after every plausible new framing has been thought of. And it does seem relevant that “scratch itch” has no logical justification (it’s just a basic animal urge that would persist even if someone told you there was no biological cause of the itch and no way that not scratching it could hurt you), whereas wanting to meditate well has a long chain of logical explanations.

• Scott AlexanderJul 13, 2021, 6:14 PM

  12 points

  on: (Brain­stem, Neo­cor­tex) ≠ (Base Mo­ti­va­tions, Honor­able Mo­ti­va­tions)

  Can you link to an explanation of why you’re thinking of the brainstem as plan-evaluator? I always thought it was the basal ganglia.

• Scott AlexanderJun 13, 2021, 7:35 AM

  27 points

  on: Why do pa­tients in men­tal in­sti­tu­tions get so lit­tle at­ten­tion in the pub­lic dis­course?

  Mental hospitals of the type I worked at when writing that post only keep patients for a few days, maybe a few weeks at tops. This means there’s no long-term constituency for fighting them, and the cost of errors is (comparatively) low.

  The procedures for these hospitals would be hard to change. It’s hard to have a law like “you need a judge to approve sending someone to a mental hospital”, because maybe someone’s trying to kill themselves right now and the soonest a judge has an opening is three days from now. So the standard rule is “use your own judgment and a judge will review it in a week or two”, but most psychiatric cases resolve before then and never have to see a judge. In theory patients can sue doctors if they think they were being held improperly, but they almost never get around to doing this and when they do they almost never win, for a combination of “they’re usually wrong about the law and sometimes obviously insane” and “judges are biased towards doctors because they seem to know what they’re talking about”. Also, the law just got done instituting extremely severe and unpredictable punishments to any doctor who doesn’t commit someone to a mental hospital and then that person does anything bad ever, and the law has kindly decided not to be extremely severe on both sides.

  There are other mental hospitals that keep people for months or years, but these do have very strict requirements for getting someone into them and are much more careful.

• Scott AlexanderJun 4, 2021, 8:52 PM

  47 points

  1

  on: Al­co­hol, health, and the ruth­less logic of the Asian flush

  I have some patients on disulfiram and it works very well when they take it. The problem is definitely that they can choose not to take it if they want alcohol (or sometimes just forget for normal reasons, then opportunistically drink after they realize they’ve forgotten).

  The implants are a great idea. As far as I know, the reason they’re not used is because someone would have to pay for lots and lots of studies and the economics don’t work out. Also because there are vague concerns about safety (if something went catastrophically wrong and the entire implant got released at once and then the patient drank, it would be potentially fatal) and ethics (should a realistically-probably-heavily-pressured patient be allowed to make decisions that bind their future selves)? I think this is dumb and we should just do the implant, but I don’t think it’s mysterious why we don’t, or why (in the absence of the implant) disulfiram doesn’t solve everything.

Toward A Bayesian The­ory Of Willpower

• Scott AlexanderMar 18, 2021, 9:47 PM

  33 points

  on: The EMH is False—Spe­cific Strong Evidence

  I tried to bet on this on Polymarket a few months ago. Their native client for directing money into your account didn’t work (I think it was because I was in the US and it wasn’t legal under US law). I tried to send money from another crypto account, and it said Polymarket didn’t have enough money to pay the Ethereum gas fees to receive my money. It originally asked me to try reloading the page close to an odd numbered GMT hour, when they were sending infusions of money to pay gas fees, but I tried a few times and never got quite close enough. I just checked again and they’re asking me to send them more money for gas fees, which I should probably do but which is a tough sell when they just ate the last chunk of money I sent them.

  I assume the person you’re talking about who made $100K is Vitalik. Vitalik knows much more about making Ethereum contracts work than the average person, and details the very complicated series of steps he had to take to get everything worked out in his blog post. There probably aren’t very many people who can do all that successfully, and the people who can are probably busy becoming rich some other way.

• Scott AlexanderMar 18, 2021, 6:17 PM

  12 points

  on: Acetyl­choline = Learn­ing rate (aka plas­tic­ity)

  Agreed—see https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​articles/​​PMC4236403/​​ and my writeup at https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2018/​​10/​​22/​​cognitive-enhancers-mechanisms-and-tradeoffs/​​ .

Trapped Pri­ors As A Ba­sic Prob­lem Of Rationality

• Scott Alexander 16 Feb 2021 0:01 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: “PR” is cor­ro­sive; “rep­u­ta­tion” is not.

  Thanks, this is a great clarification.

• Scott Alexander 12 Feb 2021 7:59 UTC

  10 points

  on: Still Not in Charge

  Thanks for this.

  I think the UFH might be more complicated than you’re making it sound here—the philosophers debate whether any human really has a utility function.

  When you talk about the CDC Director sometimes doing deliberately bad policy to signal to others that she is a buyable ally, I interpret this as “her utility function is focused on getting power”. She may not think of this as a “utility function”, in fact I’m sure she doesn’t, it may be entirely a selected adaptation to execute, but we can model it as a utility function for the same reason we model anything else as a utility function.

  I used the example of a Director who genuinely wants the best, but has power as a subgoal since she needs it in order to enact good policies. You’re using the example of a Director who really wants power, but (occasionally) has doing good as a subgoal since it helps her protect her reputation and avoid backlash. I would be happy to believe either of those pictures, or something anywhere in between. They all seem to me to cash out as a CDC Director with some utility function balancing goodness and power-hunger (at different rates), and as outsiders observing a CDC who makes some good policy and some bad-but-power-gaining policy (where the bad policy either directly gains her power, or gains her power indirectly by signaling to potential allies that she isn’t a stuck-up goody-goody. If the latter, I’m agnostic as to whether she realizes that she is doing this, or whether it’s meaningful to posit some part of her brain which contains her “utility function”, or metaphysical questions like that).

  I’m not sure I agree with your (implied? or am I misreading you?) claim that destructive decisions don’t correlate with political profit. The Director would never ban all antibiotics, demand everyone drink colloidal silver, or do a bunch of stupid things along those lines; my explanation of why not is something like “those are bad and politically-unprofitable, so they satisfy neither term in her utility function”. Likewise, she has done some good things, like grant emergency authorization for coronavirus vaccines—my explanation of why is that doing that was both good and obviously politically profitable. I agree there might be some cases where she does things with neither desideratum but I think they’re probably rare compared to the above.

  Do we still disagree on any of this? I’m not sure I still remember why this was an important point to discuss.

  I am too lazy to have opinions on all nine of your points in the second part. I appreciate them, I’m sure you appreciate the arguments for skepticism, and I don’t think there’s a great way to figure out which way the evidence actually leans from our armchairs. I would point to Dominic Cummings as an example of someone who tried the thing, had many advantages, and failed anyway, but maybe a less openly confrontational approach could have carried the day.

• Scott Alexander 17 Dec 2020 1:55 UTC

  31 points

  on: What is it good for? But ac­tu­ally?

  Bronze Age war (as per James Scott) was primarily war for captives, because the Bronze Age model was kings ruling agricultural dystopias amidst virgin land where people could easily escape and become hunter-gatherers. The laborers would gradually escape, the country would gradually become less populated, and the king would declare war on a neighboring region to steal their people to use as serfs or slaves.

  Iron Age to Industrial Age war (as per Peter Turchin) was primarily war for land, because of Malthus. Until the Industrial Revolution, you needed a certain amount of land to support a unit of population. Population was constantly increasing, land wasn’t, and so every so often population would outstrip land, everyone would be starving and unhappy, and something would restore the situation to equilibrium. Absent any other action, that would be some sort of awful civil war or protracted anarchy where people competed for limited resources—aided by wages being very low (so they could hire soldiers easily) and people being very angry (so becoming a pretender and raising an army against the current king was a popular move). Kings’ best way to forestall this disaster was to preemptively declare war against a foreign enemy. If they won, they could steal the enemy’s land, which resolved the land/​population imbalance and fed the excess population. If they lost, then (to be cynical about it), they still eliminated their excess population and successfully resolved the imbalance.

• Scott Alexander 25 Sep 2020 7:21 UTC

  109 points

  0

  on: The ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity’s lo­ca­tion problem

  The Bay Area is a terrible place to live in many ways. I think if we were selecting for the happiness of existing rationalists, there’s no doubt we should be somewhere else.

  But if the rationalist project is supposed to be about spreading our ideas and achieving things, it has some obvious advantages. If MIRI is trying to lure some top programmer, it’s easier for them to suggest they move to the Bay (and offer them enough money to overcome the house price hurdle) than to suggest they move to Montevideo or Blackpool or even Phoenix. If CEA is trying to get people interested in effective altruism, getting to socialize with Berkeley and Stanford professors is a pretty big plus. And if we’re trying to get the marginal person who isn’t quite a community member yet but occasionally reads Less Wrong to integrate more, that person is more likely to be in the Bay than anywhere else we could move. I think this is still true despite the coronavirus and fires. Maybe it’s becoming less so, but it’s hard to imagine any alternative hub that’s anywhere near as good by these metrics. *Maybe* Austin.

  Separating rationalists interested in quality-of-life from rationalists working for organizations and doing important world-changing work seems potentially net negative.

  I think if we were going to move the Berkeley hub, it would have to be to another US hub—most people aren’t going to transfer countries, so even if the community as a whole moved, we would need another US hub for Americans who refused to or coudln’t emigrate.

  I don’t think Moraga (or other similar places near the Bay) are worth trying. They’re just as expensive as Berkeley, but almost all single-family homes, so it would be harder for poorer people to rent places there. Although there’s a BART station, there’s not much other transit, and most homes aren’t walkable from the BART station, so poorer people without cars would be in trouble. And it really isn’t much less expensive than Berkeley, and it’s got the same level of fire danger, so we would be splitting the community in two (abandoning the poor people, the people tied to MIRI HQ, etc) while not gaining much more than a scenery upgrade. I think they’re a fair alternative option for people who can’t stand the squalor and crime of the Bay proper, but mostly in the context of those people moving there and commuting to Berkeley for community events.

  If we made a larger-scale move, I think it would be to avoid the high housing costs, fires, blackouts, taxes, and social decay of the Bay. That rules out anywhere else in California—still the same costs, fires, blackouts, and taxes, although some places are marginally less decayed. It also rules out Cascadian cities like Portland and Seattle—only marginally better housing costs, worse fires, and worse social decay (eg violence in Portland).

  If we wanted to stick close enough to California that it was easy to see families/​friends/​colleagues, there are lots of great cities in or near the Mountain West—Phoenix, Salt Lake, Colorado Springs, Austin. All of those have housing prices well below half that of the Bay (Phoenix’s cost-of-housing index is literally 20% of Berkeley’s!). Austin is a trendy exciting tech hub, Colorado Springs frequently tops most-liveable lists, Salt Lake City seems unusually well-governed and resilient to potential climate or political crisis, and Phoenix is gratifyingly cheap.

  The most successful adjacent past attempt at deliberate-hub-creation like this I know of was the Free State Project, where 20,000 libertarians agreed to create a libertarian hub. They did some analyses, voted on where the hub should be, created an assurance contract where every signatory agreed to move once there were 20,000 signatories, got 20,000 signatories, and moved. They ended up choosing New Hampshire, which means we might want to consider it as well. It’s got great housing prices (Manchester is as cheap as Phoenix!), a great economy, beautiful scenery, a vibrant intellectual scene, it’s less than an hour’s drive to Boston, it’s very politically influential (small, swing state, presidential primaries), and (now) has 20,000 libertarians who are interested in moving places and building hubs.

  If people are interested in this, I think the first step would be to consult MIRI, CFAR, CEA, etc, and if they say no, decide whether splitting off “the community” from all of them is worth it. If they say yes, or people decide it’s worth it to split, then make an organization and take a vote on location. Once you have a location in mind, start an assurance contract where once X people sign, everyone moves to the location (I’m not sure what X would be—maybe 50?)

  I think this is a really interesting project, but probably am too tied to my group house to participate myself :(

  What links here?

  • Kaj_Sotala's comment on The ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity’s lo­ca­tion problem by mingyuan (1 Oct 2020 16:57 UTC; 17 points)

• Scott Alexander 11 Aug 2020 23:14 UTC

  4 points

  on: Moloch and multi-level selection

  I mostly agree with this—see eg https://​​slatestarcodex.com/​​2020/​​05/​​12/​​studies-on-slack/​​

• Scott Alexander 11 Jun 2020 21:30 UTC

  8 points

  on: Ide­ol­ogy/​nar­ra­tive sta­bi­lizes path-de­pen­dent equilibria

  I think you might find http://​​www.daviddfriedman.com/​​Academic/​​Property/​​Property.html helpful here. It explains legitimacy as a Schelling point. If everyone thinks you’re legitimate, you’re legitimate. And if everything expects everyone else is going to think you’re legitimate, you’re legitimate.

  America has such a strong tradition of democracy that the Constitution makes an almost invincible Schelling point—everyone expects everyone else to follow it because everyone expects everyone else to follow it because...and so on. A country with less of a democratic tradition has less certainty around these points, and so some guy who seizes the treasury might become the best Schelling point anyone has.

• Scott Alexander 18 May 2020 18:55 UTC

  14 points

  0

  on: English Bread Regulations

  Banning fresh bread doesn’t decrease human caloric needs. Wouldn’t making fresh bread less desirable just mean people replace it with other foods, spending the same amount of money overall (or more, since bread is probably cheaper than its replacement) and removing any benefit from bread price controls? Or was the English government working off a model where people were overconsuming food because of how tasty fresh bread was?