Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Kernel of Doubt: Testing Math Preference vs. Corn-Eating Style Jan 17, 2019

Show notes

In 2010, Ben Tilly of the blog Random Observations wrote Analysis Vs. Algebra Predicts Eating Corn?, which said:

I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know.

Broadly speaking, mathematicians can be divided into those who like analysis, and those who like algebra. The distinction between the two types runs throughout math. Even those who work in areas that are far from analysis or algebra are very aware of the difference between them, and usually are very clear on which their preference is. I'll delve into this in more depth soon, but for now let's just take it for granted that this is a well-known distinction, and it has meaning for mathematicians.

Back when I was in grad school there was a department lunch with corn on the cob. Partway through the meal one of the analysts looked around the room and remarked, "That's odd, all of the analysts are eating corn one way and the algebraists are eating corn another!" Everyone looked around. In fact everyone was eating the corn in one of two ways. One way was to munch over the length of the corn in a straight line, back up, turn slightly, and do another row across. Kind of like how an old typewriter goes. The other way was to go around in a spiral. All of the analysts were eating in spirals, and the algebraists in rows.

There were a number of mathematicians present whose fields of study didn't make it clear whether they were on the analysis or algebra side of things. We went around and asked, and in every case the way they ate corn matched their preference. Since then I've made a point of amusing myself by asking mathematicians I meet whether they prefer algebra or analysis, and then predicting which way they will eat corn. I'm probably up to 40 or so by now, and in every case but one I've been able to correctly predict how they eat corn. The one exception was a logician who claimed to be exactly on the fence between the two. When I explained the corn thing to him he looked surprised, and said that he had an unusual way of eating corn. He went in loose spirals! In other words he truly was a perfect combination of algebra and analysis!

Too Many People Dare Call it Conspiracy Jan 16, 2019

Show notes

[Content warning: References to anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic canards]

I feel deep affection for Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a bizarre screed about the Federal Reserve/Communist/Trilateral Commission plot for a one world government. From its ridiculous title to its even-more-ridiculous cover image, this is a book that accepts its own nature. In the Aristotelian framework, where everything is trying to be the most perfect example of whatever it is, None Dare Call It Conspiracy has reached a certain apotheosis.

But my problem is the opposite of Allen's. Too many people dare call too many things conspiracy. Perfectly reasonable hypotheses get attacked as conspiracy theories, derailing the discussion into arguments over when you're allowed to use the phrase. These arguments are surprisingly tough. Which of the following do you think should be classified as "conspiracy theories"? Which ones are so deranged that people espousing them should be excluded from civilized discussion?

1. Donald Trump and his advisors secretly met with Russian agents to discuss how to throw the 2016 election in his favor.

2. Donald Trump didn't collaborate with any Russians, but Democrats are working together to convince everyone that he did, in the hopes of getting him indicted or convincing the electorate that he's a traitor.

3. Insurance companies are working to sabotage any proposal for universal health care; if not for their constant machinations, we would have universal health care already.

4. The ruling classes constantly use lobbyists and soft power to sabotage tax increases, labor laws, and any other policy that increase the relative power of the poor.

5. America's aid to Israel is not in America's best interest, but is maintained through the power of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups mainly supported by America's Jewish community.

6. The Jews are behind Brexit as a plot to weaken Western Europe.

7. Climate scientists routinely exaggerate or massage their studies to get the results they want, or only publish studies that get the results they want, both because of their personal political leanings and because they know it is good for their field to constantly be discovering exciting things that their funders and their supporters among the public want to hear.

SSC Survey Results 2019 Jan 14, 2019

Show notes

Thanks to the 8,171 people who took the 2019 Slate Star Codex survey. Some of the links below will say 13,171 people took the survey, but that's a bug – sometimes Google just adds 5,000 to things. You can:

– See the questions for the SSC survey.

– See the results from the SSC survey.

I'll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week.

If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. The public datasets will not exactly match the full version, nor will they include some of the sensitive sections like illegal drug use and sexual partners.

Download the public data (.xlsx, .odf)

Paradigms All the Way Down Jan 12, 2019

Show notes

Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I'm a particular fan of this one. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this:

All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly. You wouldn't even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you've gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again.

All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory. The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can't be directly reduced to any specific contradiction.

(I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to this post where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they're neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you're annoying, then they say on balance you're mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win." My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn't look like you "debunking" one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian crisis of faith.)

Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Jan 10, 2019

Show notes

When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into things their theories can't explain. Then some genius develops a new theory, and scientists are guided by that one. So the cycle repeats, knowledge gained with every step.

When I hear philosophers talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds like a madman. There is no such thing as ground-level truth! Only theory! No objective sense-data! Only theory! No basis for accepting or rejecting any theory over any other! Only theory! No scientists! Only theories, wearing lab coats and fake beards, hoping nobody will notice the charade!

I decided to read Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions in order to understand this better. Having finished, I have come to a conclusion: yup, I can see why this book causes so much confusion.

At first Kuhn's thesis appears simple, maybe even obvious. I found myself worrying at times that he was knocking down a straw man, although of course we have to read the history of philosophy backwards and remember that Kuhn may already be in the water supply, so to speak. He argues against a simplistic view of science in which it is merely the gradual accumulation of facts. So Aristotle discovered a few true facts, Galileo added a few more on, then Newton discovered a few more, and now we have very many facts indeed.

In this model, good science cannot disagree with other good science. You're either wrong – as various pseudoscientists and failed scientists have been throughout history, positing false ideas like "the brain is only there to cool the blood" or "the sun orbits the earth". Or you're right, your ideas are enshrined in the Sacristry Of Settled Science, and your facts join the accumulated store that passes through the ages.

Preregistration of Investigations for the 2019 SSC Survey Jan 06, 2019

Show notes

This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you've read at least one blog post here before, please take the surveyif you haven't already. Please don't read on until you've taken it, since this post could bias your results.

1. Can we confirm or disconfirm different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts?

2. Can we replicate the study showing that people who eat more beef jerky are more likely to be hospitalized for bipolar mania?

3. Are there differences in side effects among SSRIs? (to be limited to people taking an SSRI one month or more, will be looked at both effect by effect, and with a lumped-together side effect index where each mild effect counts as 1 point and each severe effect as 3 points)

4. Is there a difference in people's efficacy ratings for SSRIs (SSRI Effectiveness, SSRI Overall) depending on whether the person was taking the SSRI for depression vs. for anxiety?

5. What percent of people coming off SSRIs experience discontinuation symptoms? Are there differences among different agents? (main analysis to be limited to people who were taking an SSRI at least a few months, discontinued with a gradual taper lasting at least a few weeks, and were not cross-tapering onto any other psychiatric medication).

What Happened to 90s Environmentalism? Jan 03, 2019

Show notes

0. Introduction

I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation.

What happened to that? I don't mean the Pollution Demons: they're still around, I think one of them runs Trump's EPA now. What happened to everything else? To those teachers, those movies, that whole worldview?

Save The Whales. Save The Rainforest. Save Endangered Species. Save The Earth. Stop Slash-And-Burn. Stop Acid Rain. Earth Day Every Day. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Twenty-five years ago, each of those would invoke a whole acrimonious debate; to some, a battle-cry; to others, a sign of a dangerous fanaticism that would destroy the economy. Today they sound about as relevant as "Fifty-four forty or fight" and "Remember the Maine". Old slogans, emptied of their punch and fit only for bloodless historical study.

If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory – but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn't too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.

The idea that things wouldn't really change – that the environment would neither move noticeably forward or noticeably backwards – but that everyone would stop talking about environmentalism – that you could go years without hearing the words "endangered species" – that nobody would even know whether the rainforests were expanding or contracting – wouldn't even be on the radar. It would sound like some kind of weird bizarro-world.

Just to prove I'm not imagining all this:

Please Take the 2019 SSC Survey Jan 01, 2019

Show notes

Please take the 2019 Slate Star Codex Survey.

The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me with useful informal research data for questions I'm interested it, which I then turn into interesting posts. My favorite from last year was Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, which I think made a real contribution to individual differences psychology and which could not have happened without your cooperation.

The survey is open to anyone who has ever read a post on this blog before December 27 2018. Please don't avoid taking the survey just because you feel like you're not enough of a "regular". It will ask you how much of a "regular" you are, so there's no risk you'll "dilute" the results. The survey will stay open until mid-January, and I will probably be begging and harassing you to take it about once a week or so until then.

This year's survey is in two parts. Part I asks the same basic questions as previous years and should take about ten minutes. Part II asks more questions on research topics I'm interested in and should take about fifteen minutes. It would be great if you could take both parts, but if 25 minutes sounds like too much surveying to you, you can also just take Part I.

As always, the survey is plagued by fundamental limitations, poor technology, and my own carelessness, but a couple of things to watch for:

– Once you click a box on a Google form, you cannot un-click it – i.e. you can change your answer but you can't unanswer the question. If you click a box you didn't mean to, please switch your answer to "Other" if available; if not, then choose the most boring inoffensive answer that is least likely to produce surprising results. I realize how bad this is but there is apparently no way around it.

– Some of the questions are America-centric, because I either have to learn everything about every culture or be something-centric, and America seemed like a good place to center around. Sorry to non-American readers. Feel free to skip any questions that don't apply to you.

Beware the Man of One Study [Classic] Dec 29, 2018

Show notes

Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study.

For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In the best case scenario the average study will find the true result – that it's weakly effective.

But there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by some of the experiments being better quality than others. In the end, we might expect something looking kind of like a bell curve. The peak will be at "weakly effective", but there will be a few studies to either side. Something like this:

We see that the peak of the curve is somewhere to the right of neutral – ie weakly effective – and that there are about 15 studies that find this correct result.

But there are also about 5 studies that find that the drug is very good, and 5 studies missing the sign entirely and finding that the drug is actively bad. There's even 1 study finding that the drug is very bad, maybe seriously dangerous.

This is before we get into fraud or statistical malpractice. I'm saying this is what's going to happen just by normal variation in experimental design. As we increase experimental rigor, the bell curve might get squashed horizontally, but there will still be a bell curve.

In practice it's worse than this, because this is assuming everyone is investigating exactly the same question.

Suppose that the graph is titled "Effectiveness Of This Drug In Treating Bipolar Disorder".

But maybe the drug is more effective in bipolar i than in bipolar ii (Depakote, for example)

Or maybe the drug is very effective against bipolar mania, but much less effective against bipolar depression (Depakote again).

Or maybe the drug is a good acute antimanic agent, but very poor at maintenance treatment (let's stick with Depakote).

If you have a graph titled "Effectiveness Of Depakote In Treating Bipolar Disorder" plotting studies from "Very Bad" to "Very Good" – and you stick all the studies – maintenence, manic, depressive, bipolar i, bipolar ii – on the graph, then you're going to end running the gamut from "very bad" to "very good" even before you factor in noise and even before even before you factor in bias and poor experimental design.

So here's why you should beware the man of one study.

If you go to your better class of alternative medicine websites, they don't tell you "Studies are a logocentric phallocentric tool of Western medicine and the Big Pharma conspiracy."

They tell you "medical science has proved that this drug is terrible, but ignorant doctors are pushing it on you anyway. Look, here's a study by a reputable institution proving that the drug is not only ineffective, but harmful."

And the study will exist, and the authors will be prestigious scientists, and it will probably be about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.

And then a lot of people raised on the idea that some things have Evidence and other things have No Evidence think holy s**t, they're right!

On the other hand, your doctor isn't going to a sketchy alternative medicine website. She's examining the entire literature and extracting careful and well-informed conclusions from…

Haha, just kidding. She's going to a luncheon at a really nice restaurant sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, which assures her that they would never take advantage of such an opportunity to shill their drug, they just want to raise awareness of the latest study. And the latest study shows that their drug is great! Super great! And your doctor nods along, because the authors of the study are prestigious scientists, and it's about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.

Refactoring: Culture as Branch of Government Dec 20, 2018

Show notes

Ribbonfarm likes to talk about refactoring, a conceptual change in how you see the world. I'm not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means things like memetics – where you go from the usual model of people deciding what ideas they want, to a weird and inside-out (but not objectively wrong) model of ideas competing to colonize people.

Here is a refactoring I think about a lot: imagine a world where people considered culture the fourth branch of government. Imagine that civics textbook writers taught high school students that the US government had four branches: executive, legislative, judicial, and cultural.

I think about this because I have a bias to ignore anything that isn't nailed down and explicit. Culture isn't nailed down. But if it were in the Constitution in nice calligraphy right beside the Presidency and the Supreme Court, why, then it would be as explicit as it gets.

Like many other people, I was hopeful that nation-building Iraq (or Afghanistan, or…) would quickly turn it into a liberal democracy (in my defense, I was eighteen at the time). Like many other people, I was disappointed and confused when it didn't. The people in the world that considers culture the fourth branch of government weren't confused. Bush forgot to nation-build an entire branch of government. If he'd given Iraq a western-style Supreme Court, marble facade and all, but left their executive and legislature exactly how they were before, that would be a recipe for conflict, confusion, and eventually nothing getting done. So why should westernizing their executive, legislature, and courts – but not their culture – work any better?

The world that considers culture the fourth branch of government doesn't get all confused calling hunter-gatherers or peasant villagers "primitive communism" or "anarchism" or "ruled by elders" or things like that. Those people's governments have a cultural branch but not much else. Why should we be surprised? Medieval Iceland had onlylegislative and judicial branches; medieval Somalia only had a judiciary; some dictatorships run off just an executive.

Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn't acceptable – think Lew Rockwell and other paleoconservatives who hope that the retreat of central government will create strong church-based communities of virtuous citizens. These people aren't considered libertarians. They might be considered principled constitutionalists, the same way as people who worry about the "imperial presidency" and its use of executive orders. But in the end, what they want to strengthen some branches of government at the expense of others. The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.

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