Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy Jan 31, 2021

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Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post.

(consider this a standing offer to anyone else I write a post criticizing to do the same)

I've very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on his website, his Twitter, or by buying his book.

I am grateful for your taking the time to respond. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be productive, which I'll briefly address here.

1. Let me start with concessions. There are many points where @slatestarcodex correctly highlights various areas where my grasp of beliefs and facts are limited or wrong, especially in the depth of my grasp of the views of the rationalist community. I freely admit that there are serious limits to how much I've been able to research the views of people in this community and I certainly hope they are not as I characterized them, though as I will point out below many elements of Scott's response confirm my concerns.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy Jan 30, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy

I am not defending technocracy.

Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers. Yet for some reason libertarians don't win every single national election. Strange, isn't it?

Maybe it's one of those Russell conjugations - "I am firm, you are obstinate". I support rule of law, you're a statist. I want checks and balances on mob rule, you're an elitist. I like evidence-based policy, you're a technocrat.

I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics Jan 28, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions

[reposted from here, with edits]

Taxometrics is the study of whether psychiatric conditions are categorical or dimensional.

Something is categorical if it neatly, objectively separates into different groups. For example, consider humans and rabbits. If we take a mixed group containing some humans and some rabbits, and graph them along some variable like weight, it would probably look like this:

There's one big obvious group around 3 lbs (weight of the average rabbit) and another around 140 lbs (weight of the average human). Not a lot of subtletly here. If we used some other graphable variable – height, lifespan, IQ – we'd probably get something similar.

Maybe the biggest rabbit in the world is bigger than the smallest human. That doesn't mean they're not two obvious categories. It just means they're two obvious categories with a tiny overlap. It happens.

If we wanted to be clever, we could create a multivariate distance measure that combines weight, height, lifespan, IQ, and lots of other ways humans and rabbits could differ, into a 0 – 1 variable where 0 is "most rabbity" and 1 is "most humanish". Probably these scores wouldn't overlap at all – if they did, it would mean there's some human who's more like a rabbit than some rabbit is, which would be pretty surprising. But even if this were true, it wouldn't change the fundamental finding that humans and rabbits are pretty different. Or to put it some other way, there's a fundamental hidden generator producing differences between humans and rabbits (in this case, the species difference).

By contrast, something is dimensional if it's just a spectrum and there's no obvious place to separate it into different groups. For example, consider tall people vs. short people. We take a general cross-section of the population, and graph them by height, and it would probably look like this:

There's no clear point where short people stop and tall people begin. Some people are a little taller than others, and other people taller still, and so on until you're at Yao Ming.

Know Your Amphetamines Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol. If you're familiar with any of: the 1950s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?" and the answer is yes, loads of them. Obetrol was a mix of four different amphetamine salts: racemic amphetamine sulfate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, methamphetamine saccharate, and methamphetamine hydrochloride. Why did they need four different kinds of speed? I'm not sure. The uncharitable explanation is: for the same reason Dr. Nick's Cure-All Home Remedy has twelve different herbs, ie customers think things with more ingredients are better.

By the 1970s, people figured out meth was bad, so Obetrol replaced their two methamphetamine salts with two more kinds of non-methylated amphetamine. But the FDA continued to crack down, and although the historical paper trail goes kind of dark, it looks like Obetrol had disappeared by the 1980s.

Logistics Jan 25, 2021

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Logistics Don't worry, there will be real posts next week. Jan 22

Substack

First, thanks for following me to Substack.

I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings.

And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming. My weak answer is that so far Substack has been great at resisting calls for this, I think it's worth rewarding them with my business, and I'm proud to contribute to companies that share my values. My strong answer is that if I start feeling too constrained, I'll leave. The past six months weren't fun, but at least I credibly signaled willingness to destroy everything and start over when needed. I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know.

And I know Substack is supposed to be an email newsletter thing, but consider reading it online instead so you can participate in the comments. If you miss the old layout, the anonymous author of Applied Divinity Studies has made a Chrome extension thing you can use to convert the Substack layout to the older one.

You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive

Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.

I'm happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.

Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money.

(also "arthropod", but insects creep me out so I'll be skipping this one)

Still Alive Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive

This was a triumph I'm making a note here, huge success

No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.

I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.

513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.

[Classic] Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower Jan 17, 2021

Show notes

Mark Twain:

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology.

At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a "look under the hood" of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as well-supported as anything in physics or biology, and much more intuitively comprehensible. This is why it's one of my favorite scientific fields.

But at its worst, social psychology is a flamethrower. People grab hold of it to try to fry their political opponents, then end up lighting their own hair on fire or burning down half a city. Because social psych is really hard to do right.

[Classic] Lizardman's Constant Is 4% Jan 10, 2021

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

Beware of Phantom Lizardmen

I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we put up a website where people answered some questions about themselves (like "what country are you from?") and then took the psychological test.

And so of course people screwed it up in every conceivable way. There were the merely dumb, like the guy who put "male" as his nationality and "American" as his gender. But there were also the actively malicious or at least annoying, like the people (yes, more than one) who wrote in "Martian".

[Classic] We Are All MsScribe Dec 28, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/

AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them?

At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox's write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it).

Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all my blog readers are intimately familiar with it?

If not, read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.

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