Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender Feb 12, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/

"Autogynephilia" means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a woman. "Autoandrophilia" means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a man. There's no term that describes both, but we need one, so let's say autogenderphilia.

These conditions are famous mostly because a few sexologists, especially Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey, speculate that they are the most common cause of transgender. They point to studies showing most trans women endorse autogynephilia. Most trans people disagree with this theory, sometimes very strongly, and accuse it of reducing transgender to a fetish.

Without wading into the moral issues around it, I thought it would be interesting to get data from the SSC survey. The following comes partly from my own analyses and partly from wulfrickson's look at the public survey data on r/TheMotte.

The survey asked the following questions:

Suicide Hotspots of the World Feb 09, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/05/suicide-hotspots-of-the-world/

[Content warning: suicide, rape, child abuse. Thanks to MC for some help with research.]

Guyana has the highest national suicide rate in the world, 30 people per year per 100,000. Guyana has poverty and crime and those things, but no more so than neighboring Brazil (suicide rate of 6) or Venezuela (suicide rate of 4). What's going on?

One place to start: Guyana is a multi-ethnic country. Is its sky-high suicide rate focused in one ethnic group? The first answer I found was this article by a social justice warrior telling us it constitutes racial "essentialism" to even ask the question. But in the process of telling us exactly what kind of claims we should avoid, she mentions someone bringing up that "80% of the reported suicides are carried out by Indo-Guyanese". I feel like one of those classicists who has reconstructed a lost heresy through hostile quotations in Irenaeus.

Indo-Guyanese aren't American Indians; they're from actual India. Apparently thousands of Indians immigrated to Guyana as indentured laborers in the late 1800s. Most went to Guyana, and somewhat fewer went to neighboring Suriname. Suriname also has a sky-high suicide rate, but slightly less than Guyana's, to the exact degree that its Indian population is slightly less than Guyana's. Basically no Indians went anywhere else in South America, and nowhere else in South America has anywhere near the suicide rate of these two countries. The most Indian regions of Guyana also have the highest suicide rate. Hmmm.

Does India itself have high suicide rates? On average, yes. But India has a lot of weird suicide microclimates. Statewide rates range from from 38 in Sikkim (higher than any country in the world) to 0.5 in Bihar (lower than any country in the world except Barbados). Indo-Guyanese mostly come from Bihar and other low-suicide regions. While I can't rule out that the Indo-Guyanese come from some micro-micro-climate of higher suicidality, this guy claims to have traced them back to some of their ancestral villages and found that those villages have low suicide rates.

Book Review: Human Compatible Feb 02, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/

Clarke's First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he's a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.

I'm only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what's inside, the two defy easy comparison.

S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn't count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear.

HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it's by a famous professor! I'm sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It's just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It's not that it's dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell's life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It's not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they're all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how "the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria". But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.

Assortative Mating and Autism Jan 29, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/

Introduction

Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. If highly analytical tech workers have more autism risk genes than the general population, assortative mating could put their children at very high risk of autism. How concerned should this make us?

Methods / Sample Characteristics

I used the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey to investigate this question. It had 8,043 respondents selected for being interested in a highly analytical blog about topics like science and economics. The blog is associated with – and draws many of its readers from – the rationalist and effective altruist movements, both highly analytical. More than half of respondents worked in programming, engineering, math, or physics. 79% described themselves as atheist or agnostic. 65% described themselves as more interested in STEM than the humanities; only 15% said the opposite.

According to Kogan et al (2018), about 2.5% of US children are currently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. The difference between "autism" and "autism spectrum disorder" is complicated, shifts frequently, and is not very well-known to the public; this piece will treat them interchangeably from here on. There are no surveys of what percent of adults are diagnosed with autism; it is probably lower since most diagnoses happen during childhood and the condition was less appreciated in past decades. These numbers may be affected by parents' education level and social class; one study shows that children in wealthy neighborhoods were up to twice as likely to get diagnosed as poorer children.

Book Review Review: Little Soldiers Jan 26, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/

Little Soldiers is a book by Lenora Chu about the Chinese education system. I haven't read it. This is a review of Dormin111's review of Little Soldiers.

Dormin describes the "plot": The author is a second-generation Chinese-American woman, raised by demanding Asian parents. Her parents made her work herself to the bone to get perfect grades in school, practice piano, get into Ivy League schools, etc. She resisted and resented the hell she was forced to go through (though she got into Stanford, so she couldn't have resisted too hard).

Skip a decade. She is grown up, married, and has a three year old child. Her husband (a white guy named Rob) gets a job in China, so they move to Shanghai. She wants their three-year-old son to be bilingual/bicultural, so she enrolls him in Soong Qing Ling, the Harvard of Chinese preschools. The book is about her experiences there and what it taught her about various aspects of Chinese education. Like the lunches:

During his first week at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey began complaining to his mom about eating eggs. This puzzled Lenora because as far as she knew, Rainey refused to eat eggs and never did so at home. But somehow he was eating them at school.

After much coaxing (three-year-olds aren't especially articulate), Lenora discovered that Rainey was being force-fed eggs. By his telling, every day at school, Rainey's teacher would pass hardboiled eggs to all students and order them to eat. When Rainey refused (as he always did), the teacher would grab the egg and shove it in his mouth. When Rainey spit the egg out (as he always did), the teacher would do the same thing. This cycle would repeat 3-5 times with louder yelling from the teacher each time until Rainey surrendered and ate the egg.

SSC Survey Results 2020 Jan 21, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/

Thanks to the 8,043 people who took the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey.

See the questions for the SSC survey

See the results from the SSC Survey (click "see previous responses" on that page)

Some people expressed concern about privacy on the survey. Originally, respondents could see aggregate responses, including the responses of people who marked their answers private. I figured this was okay because nobody's responses could be connected – ie you could see that one person put their age as 83, and another person put their country as Canada, but because the table order wasn't the same you couldn't link these together to form a coherent picture of an 83 year old Canadian. Some people still expressed concern about a few of the long answers, since some people might have put personal information in there. There's no way for me to eliminate only the private people's responses from Google Forms and still display the information to you like this, so instead I've removed all long answer questions. If you're interested in those, you can find them in the downloadable data files. Sorry for not doing this earlier, and I hope this compromise is okay to everyone. I'll try to get a clearer picture of what people want before the next 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, some overly identifiable questions (eg age) will be binned, and a few sensitive subjects will not be included.

Download the public data (.xlsx, .csv)

Contra Contra Contra Caplan on Psych Jan 18, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/

In 2006, Bryan Caplan wrote a critique of psychiatry. In 2015, I responded. Now it's 2020, and Bryan has a counterargument. I'm going to break the cycle of delay and respond now, and maybe we'll finish this argument before we're both too old and demented to operate computers.

Bryan writes:

1. With a few exceptions, Scott fairly and accurately explains my original (and current) position.

2. Scott correctly identifies several gray areas in my position, but by my count I explicitly acknowledged all of them in my original article.

3. Scott then uses those gray areas to reject my whole position in favor of the conventional view.

4. The range of the gray areas isn't actually that big, so he should have accepted most of my heterodoxies.

5. If the gray areas were as big as Scott says, he should reject the conventional view too and just be agnostic.

I think the gray areas are overwhelming and provide proof that Bryan's strict dichotomies don't match the real world.

2019 Adversarial Collaboration Winners Jan 16, 2020

Show notes

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/13/2019-adversarial-collaboration-winners/

Thanks to everyone who participated and/or voted in the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest. And the winner is…

…

Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese, for Does Calorie Restriction Slow Aging?.

An extraordinarily close second place (26.9% vs. 26.2% of votes) goes to David G and Froolow, for Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?.

Both of these did great research and were written up well. I especially like them as winners because they have such different strengths.

The calorie restriction collaboration was carefully focused on a factual question. I think this is a promising model for adversarial collaborations, and that others failed the further they deviated from this. For example, the circumcision collaboration did a good job assessing the quantifiable benefits and harms of the practice, but it turned out that most people who disagreed about it weren't disagreeing because they assessed quantifiable benefits and harms differently. The abortion collaboration ended up in a similar place. By focusing on a topic where there really was debate about what the research showed, and by hitting the lit review portion out of the park, Adrian and Calvin helped deconfuse a lot of previously confused people.

What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010s? Jan 11, 2020

Show notes

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/08/what-intellectual-progress-did-i-make-in-the-2010s/

One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.

I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It's Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).

Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris' Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn't directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that "psychedelic insight" was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don't feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.

A Very Unlikely Chess Game Jan 09, 2020

Show notes

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/06/a-very-unlikely-chess-game/

Almost 25 years after Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, another seminal man vs. machine matchup:

Neither competitor has much to be proud of here. White has a poor opening. Black screws up and loses his queen for no reason. A few moves later, white screws up and loses his rook for no reason. Better players will no doubt spot other humiliating mistakes. But white does eventually eke out a victory. And black does hold his own through most of the game.

White is me. My excuse is that I only play chess once every couple of years, plus I'm entering moves on an ASCII board I can barely read.

Black is GPT-2. Its excuse is that it's a text prediction program with no concept of chess. As far as it knows, it's trying to predict short alphanumeric strings like "e2e4" or "Nb7". Nobody told it this represents a board game. It doesn't even have a concept of 2D space that it could use to understand such a claim. But it still captured my rook! Embarrassing!

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