Scott Alexander

It is possible, but I wouldn't put too much confidence in conclusions I've arrived at through application of the Razor on the field I know little about. An interesting concept to that effect is that of "epistemic learned helplessness" http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html Basically, if you're not an expert in some field, then for any given argument, arguments of either side can be made to sound equally convincing to you, so - unless you have time to become an expert in every domain you encounter - your best bet is to accept the general scientific consensus on the topic. (If anything, Occam's Razor is very useful to determine who is arguing for the generic scientific consensus, and who is arguing out of political reasons, or fear driven by ignorance.)

It's been a week and you may be in danger of becoming productive again, so I thought I'd link you to the LJ that the author kept before starting SlateStarCodex: http://squid314.livejournal.com You're welcome.

If anyone hasn't had the chance, I highly recommend reading Scott Alexander's "Meditations" series, particularly the ones on superweapons and bingo: http://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

Here's an interesting blog post that covers just that phrase. http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html > If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!" If you've trained yourself to knee-jerk whenever you hear certain buzzwords, you're probably being intellectually dishonest.

You'll probably enjoy The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting[1] by Scott Alexander[2]. It's a good overview of environmental effects on cognition. There's a section on birth month, and the answer is: It's a trade-off. If you're sending your child to public school, August is best. This makes them the oldest in their grade, giving them advantages that compound throughout school. For private school, February/March might be best, as winter babies have slightly higher intelligence and social skills. 1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html 2. You may have heard of him. Scott is a resident psychologist and writer of Slate Star Codex (http://slatestarcodex.com/).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Christs_of_Ypsilanti "While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines." [EDITED to add: See also http://squid314.livejournal.com/324957.html which is only marginally relevant but anyone who finds "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti" interesting will probably love it.]

Related blog post: http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html By the way, very insightful discussion here!

I'm also reminded of the dynamic between the Native Americans and the European colonist-settlers, in particular Scott's review [1] of the book Empire of the Summer Moon [2]. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant: All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives. [1] http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html [2] http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591…

Perhaps, but I recently read something which suggested they (to be precise, Native Americans) really were happier than the European settlers of the time: "All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives." http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html (There's a lot more on the subject than just the bit I quoted.)

The existence of bingo cards is not an argument, even if patio has made it so easy for us to generate them. You may find the following article interesting: http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html > This tendency reaches its most florid manifestation in the "ideological bingo games". See for example "Skeptical Sexist Bingo", feminist bingo, libertarian troll bingo, anti-Zionist bingo, pro-Zionist bingo, and so on. If you Google for these you can find thousands, which is too bad because every single person who makes one of these is going to Hell.

Ok thanks very much. I guess one example of what I was talking about is your phrase: "your attempt to fudge the definition of "socialism"". That's a rather inaccurate, poisonous misrepresentation of what I said and was doing, it seems to me. Yet you say it like it's the plainest fact, and maybe you believe it is. It's snarky. It's not assuming good faith. It's pure downvote material. I was describing how it seems to me the word is used in the US nowadays. Or as I said, even more carefully, how it "seems nowadays to usually be used". I don't hear much news at all, less from the US, but a fair bit of that (before Trump anyway) has been hysteria about purported socialism, and e.g. any policy or intention Obama had that the far-right didn't like, described as such. It's laughable—at best, The Worst Argument In The World[0]. I likewise can't make any sense of how you thought I was trying to 'fudge the definition' of a word, if I understand what you meant by that. And I can't see which part of what I wrote was 'mocking', at all. The 'hahaha' at the beginning, if you were referring to that, was me laughing - I actually physically laughed like that, it was a record of that. But I really appreciate the effort put into the rest of what you wrote, thanks. [0]http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

> Japan did industrialize first, prior to WWII, and adopted some aspects of western culture afterwards. Except for voting and human rights, Japan adopted all the things I listed before WWII. The Meiji era was full of westernization. I don't think people realize just how insanely dysfunctional other cultures can be. Plenty of poor countries lack concepts we consider basic. Take Haiti, for example. I'll quote a couple paragraphs from a doctor who volunteered there after the earthquake[1]: > It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable. > Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his office. I…

I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful... > that thinks too-logically about politics There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C… - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9WU9TGrec&index=1&list=PL8dP… - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU&index=1&list=PL8dP… For…

> If you are claiming these do not exist... I'm not. ju-st is implying either that we don't know how to build power plant sized fission reactors, that we've never built and operated one successfully and safely for decades, or both. All projects in the US have delays and cost overruns. I addressed this in my reply to his comment. That doesn't mean that the design and construction of the thing being constructed isn't a solved problem. > Consider that the Fukushima plant life was extended beyond its ["advisable"] lifespan. And yet: > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. [0] Nuclear power is less dangerous than even solar power, hydroelectric power, or wind power! > Rooftop solar power has a per terawatt death rate ten times worse than nuclear power because of - I kid you not - people falling off roofs when installing the panel. Hydroelectric power has a worse fatality rate because of dams bursting and flooding people. Even wind power has a worse fatality per terawatt rate - seventy three people have died in windmill related accidents. [0] [0] http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html

> is it impossible for a criminal to be a hero? I think this is an awful question with awful answers. http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

I found this article convincing. However, I also found Scott Alexander's article about epistemic learned helplessness convincing: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

If all you care about is the camaraderie of people who think like you, that is fine. But many people care about other things too. For example if you believe that climate change is a conspiracy by the Chinese to weaken the American economy, then even if you can go to anti-climate change conferences and be popular among climate change denialists, you won't be very happy because you will believe that in the end the Chinese are still going to destroy your country. You could gain some social power but lose all your structural power[1]. For the sort of people who care more about objective reality than about popularity contests, that is a bad deal. [1] https://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html

Sorry for the terse nature of this reply, but your comment brought to mind the concept of 'Epistemic Learned Helplessness'. You might find this interesting: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

Another (lengthy!) take on the same topic by Scott Alexander: http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html

The worst argument in the world: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html "Feudalism is bad, so anything that can be vaguely compared to it must also be bad."

The Worst Argument In The World: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

Interesting; I was recently binge-reading some old blog posts and came across this[1] not dissimilar claim from 2012. Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all. [1] http://squid314.livejournal.com/320770.html?thread=2386178

For those interested in Scott: his LW posts can be found at http://lesswrong.com/user/Yvain/submitted/ , his old blog at http://squid314.livejournal.com/ , his new blog at http://slatestarcodex.com/ , and a tumblr for shorter things at http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/ If you're not sure where to start, a number of his writings have been received well on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=slatestarcodex&sort=byPopularity&…

This is something people have been going back and forth about for decades. There's even been a study that used more people and was randomized and controlled. You can read actual literature surveys of all the ways parents can affect their kids' IQs here: http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html

> After all, the ad hominem rule is not some generalized prohibition against personal attacks. It is merely a prohibition against baseless or irrelevant personal attacks That reminds me of an earlier-posted article, "The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo". Very interesting read: http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

Whenever I read of messiah delusions I'm reminded of this short story: http://squid314.livejournal.com/324957.html

Read through https://twitter.com/shanley - give it a good hour. You'll come out thinking that you've experienced an alternate dimension, in which all men are evil, all women are victims who need to fight against the oppressor, and the only way forward is some kind of violent revolution, probably accompanied with mass executions of some sort. It's not a caricature. Those people are real, and fairly scary. See http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html for why they're scary.

Someone should try a similar experiment: "Unemployed Homebuilder poses as Software Engineer on Jobs Site, OMFG too many recruiters". Or "Poor Indian wears Fair&Handsome and poses as Rich Western Tourist, barely lasts two hours before getting annoyed by beggars". Related thoughts from the often interesting Scott Alexander: http://squid314.livejournal.com/327849.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/327957.html (Yes, I'm one of those big jerks who has as much sympathy for the sexually deprived as the monetarily deprived, which is not a huge amount. Feel free to make status-lowering comments in response.)

Fine members of the audience, I give you the Myers Shuffle. http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html Will you take the free space kaltai, or can we stop trying to use rhetorical tricks like talking dismissively about(rather than to) and trying to out-meta the other?

Massively, yes. We could start seriously betting on real-world events. It becomes harder to make crappy predictions ("If this bill isn't passed, crime will skyrocket!") when people can just check the going odds. ETA: Much better explanation: http://squid314.livejournal.com/352406.html