Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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POSTMODERNISM FOR RATIONALISTS (MY ATTEMPT) Nov 02, 2017

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Some of the Seattleites put together a Postmodernism For Rationalists presentation that's been sparking a lot of discussion. It's not quite the way I would have explained things. I'm no expert in postmodernism, and can't give anything more than a very simple introduction to one of many facets of the movement. But I am an expert in explaining things to rationalists. So it's worth a try.

Last week, I went over the evidence for and against a European Dark Age. Most people on both sides agreed on some facts in favor, like:

AGAINST RAT PARK Oct 26, 2017

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Rat Park is a famous study in which lab rats were kept in a really nice habitat that satisfied their every need. Contrary to the usual results with lab animals, scientists couldn't get these happier rats addicted to drugs. Researchers concluded that drug addiction, far from being the simple biological story everyone assumed it was, was really a just coping mechanism for intolerable social situations. Rats stuck in terrible cages get addicted to drugs, as do humans in terrible slums. But give them other opportunities for happiness, and the problem disappears.

This has since turned into popular legend. From HuffPo: The Likely Cause Of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It Is Not What You Think. From Intellihub: Rat Park Heroin Experiment Shows Cultural Roots Of Drug Addiction. There's even a Rat Park Comic and the inevitable Trump Could Learn From The Rat Park Experiment thinkpiece.

HOW DID NEW ATHEISM FAIL SO MISERABLY? Oct 25, 2017

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The Baffler publishes a long article against "idiot" New Atheists. It's interesting only in the context of so many similar articles, and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting "BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fundies don't have" as the living run away shrieking. But everyone else has long since passed them by.

The New Atheists accomplished the seemingly impossible task of alienating a society that agreed with them about everything. The Baffler-journalists of the world don't believe in God. They don't disagree that religion contributes to homophobia, transphobia, and the election of some awful politicians – and these issues have only grown more visible in the decade or so since New Atheism's apogee. And yet in the bubble where nobody believes in God and everyone worries full-time about sexual minorities and Trump, you get less grief for being a Catholic than a Dawkins fan. When Trump wins an election on the back of evangelicals, and the alt-right is shouting "DEUS VULT" and demanding "throne and altar conservativism", the real scandal is rumors that some New Atheist might be reading /pol/. How did the New Atheists become so loathed so quickly?

KOLMOGOROV COMPLICITY AND THE PARABLE OF LIGHTNING Oct 24, 2017

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A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.

— Paul Graham, What You Can't Say

Staying on the subject of Dark Age myths: what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries?

Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a great patron of science, no one believed in a flat earth, Galileo had it coming, et cetera. Unam Sanctam Catholicam presents some of these stories and explains why they're less of a science-vs-religion slam dunk than generally supposed. Among my favorites:

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE COMMENTS ON DARK AGES Oct 17, 2017

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Thanks to everyone who made interesting comments on yesterday's post about Dark Ages.

Several people challenged the matching of the economic/population decline to the "fall of Rome". For example, from David Friedman:

On the graph you are citing, 36 million is the population in 200 A.D. The fall of the Western Empire is commonly dated to about 450 A.D. By 400 A.D., on the same graph, population is down to 31 million–say 30 million by 450.

WERE THERE DARK AGES? Oct 16, 2017

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Cracked offers Five Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About The Dark Ages; number one is "The Dark Ages Were A Real Thing":

The Dark Ages were never a thing. The entire concept is complete and utter horseshit cobbled together by a deluded writer. The term "Dark Ages" was first used in the 14th century by Petrarch, an Italian poet with a penchant for Roman nostalgia. Petrarch used it to describe, well, every single thing that had happened since the fall of Rome. He didn't rain dark judgment over hundreds of years of human achievement because of historical evidence of any kind, by the way; his entire argument was based on the general feeling that life sucked absolute weasel scrotum ever since Rome went belly-up.

Likewise There Were No European Dark Ages, The Myth Of The Dark Ages, The Myth Of The "Dark Ages", Medieval Europe: The Myth Of The Dark Ages, Busting The "Dark Ages" Myth, and of course smug Tumblr posts.

SSC JOURNAL CLUB SEROTONIN RECEPTORS Oct 11, 2017

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Pop science likes to dub dopamine "the reward chemical" and serotonin "the happiness chemical". God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I'm sure it's cutesy.

In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine might be "the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical", but even that can't be more than a gross oversimplification. As for serotonin, people have studied it for seventy years and the best they can come up with is "uh, something to do with stress".

Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors by Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt tries to cut through the mystery. Both authors are suitably important to attempt such an undertaking. Carhart-Harris is a neuropsychopharmacologist and one of the top psychedelic researchers in the world. Nutt was previously the British drug czar but missed the memo saying drug czars were actually supposed to be against drugs; after using his position to tell everyone drugs were pretty great, he was summarily fired. Now he's another neuropsychopharmacology professor, though with cool side projects like inventing magical side-effect-free alcohol. These are good people.

IN FAVOR OF FUTURISM BEING ABOUT THE FUTURE Oct 11, 2017

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From Boston Review: Know Thy Futurist. It's an attempt to classify and analyze various types of futurism, in much the same way that a Jack Chick tract could be described as "an attempt to classify and analyze various types of religion".

I have more disagreements with it than can fit in a blog post, but let's stick with the top five.

First, it purports to explain what we should think about the future, but never makes a real argument for it. It starts by suggesting there are two important axes on which futurists can differ: optimism vs. pessimism, and belief in a singularity. So you can end up with utopian singularitarians, dystopian singularitarians, utopian incrementalists, and dystopian incrementalists. We know the first three groups are wrong, because many of their members are "young or middle-age white men" who "have never been oppressed". On the other hand, the last group contains "majority women, gay men, and people of color". Therefore, the last group is right, there will be no singularity, and the future will be bad.

SSC SURVEY RESULTS ON TRUST Oct 11, 2017

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Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: "Are people basically trustworthy?"

The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 ("basically trustworthy") to 5 ("basically untrustworthy"). 4853 people answered. The average was 2.49 – so skewed a bit towards higher trust. The overall pattern looked like this:

DIFFERENT WORLDS Oct 11, 2017

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A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy.

We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were lecturing on a particularly boring episode from 19th-century Norwegian history.

I'm not bragging here. I wish I could get my patients to have dramatic emotional meltdowns. As per the textbooks, there should be a climactic moment where the patient identifies me with their father, then screams at me that I ruined their childhood, then breaks down crying and realizes that she loved her father all along, then ???, and then their depression is cured. I never got that. I tried, I even dropped some hints, like "Maybe this reminds you of your father?" or "Maybe you feel like screaming at me right now?", but they never took the bait. So I figured the textbooks were misleading, or that this was some kind of super-advanced technique, or that this was among the approximately 100% of things that Freud just pulled out of his ass.

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