Astral Codex Ten Podcast

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Lots of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All the Time Sep 15, 2019

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Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/

Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely. Estimates of prevalence range from about 4% of users (Baggott) to "nobody, the condition does not exist" (Krebs and Johansen). To explore this discrepancy, I asked about it on the 2019 SSC survey. The specific question was:

Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder is a condition marked by visual or other perceptual disturbances typical of psychedelic use that continue for weeks and months after coming off the psychedelic, in some cases permanently. Have you ever had this condition?

2,234 readers admitted to having used psychedelics. Of those, 285 (= 12.8%) stated that they had some hallucinations that persisted afterwards. 219 (9.8%) said they'd had them for a while and then they had gone away. 66 (= 3%) stated that they still had the hallucinations (one limit of the study: I don't know how long it has been since those people took the psychedelics).

SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain Sep 14, 2019

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Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/

Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper]

The predictive coding theory argues that the brain uses Bayesian calculations to make sense of the noisy and complex world around it. It relies heavily on priors (assumptions about what the world must be like given what it already knows) to construct models of the world, sampling only enough sense-data to double-check its models and update them when they fail. This has been a fruitful way to look at topics from depression to autism to sensory deprivation. Now, in Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics, Karl Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris try to use predictive coding to explain the effects of psychedelic drugs. Then they use their theory to argue that psychedelic therapy may be helpful for "most, if not all" mental illnesses.

Priors are unconscious assumptions about reality that the brain uses to construct models. They can range all the way from basic truths like "solid objects don't randomly disappear", to useful rules-of-thumb like "most get-rich-quick schemes are scams", to emotional hangups like "I am a failure", to unfair stereotypes like "Italians are lazy". Without any priors, the world would fail to make sense at all, turning into an endless succession of special cases without any common lessons. But if priors become too strong, a person can become closed-minded and stubborn, refusing to admit evidence that contradicts their views.

F&CH argue that psychedelics "relax" priors, giving them less power to shape experience. Part of their argument is neuropharmacologic: most psychedelics are known to work through the 5-HT2A receptor. These receptors are most common in the cortex, the default mode network, and other areas at the "top" of a brain hierarchy going from low-level sensations to high-level cognitions. The 5-HT2A receptors seem to strengthen or activate these high-level areas in some way. So:

[Partial Retraction] Age Gaps and Birth Order Effects Sep 14, 2019

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Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/09/partial-retraction-age-and-birth-order-effects/

On Less Wrong, Bucky tries to replicate my results on birth order and age gaps.

Backing up: two years ago, I looked at SSC survey data and found that firstborn children were very overrepresented. That result was replicated a few times, both in the SSC sample and in other samples of high-opennness STEM types. Last year, I expanded those results to look at how age gaps affected birth order effects. Curiously, age gaps less than seven years did not seem to attenuate birth order, but age gaps of more than seven years attenuated it almost completely.

Bucky analyzed the same data and found that I bungled one and a half of my results. Left graph in each pair is mine, right is Bucky's.

Book Review: Seeing Like a State [Classic] Sep 07, 2019

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Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/

Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn't, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.

Scott starts with the story of "scientific forestry" in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn't support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and "scientific forestry" spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones.

List of Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Ages of Discord Sep 05, 2019

Show notes

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/04/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-ages-of-discord/

Turchin has some great stories about unity vs. polarization over time. For example in the 1940s, unity became such a "problem" that concerned citizens demanded more partisanship:

Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. Four years later, the committee published a lengthy (and alarmed) report calling for the return of ideologically distinct and powerful political parties. Parties ought to stand for distinct sets of politics, the political scientists urged. Voters should be presented with clear choices.

I have vague memories of similar demands in the early '90s; everyone was complaining that the parties were exactly the same and the "elites" were rigging things to make sure we didn't have any real choices.

On the other hand, partisanship during the Civil War was pretty intense:

Another indicator of growing intraelite conflict was the increasing incidence of violence and threatened violence in Congress, which reached a peak during the 1850s. The brutal caning that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina gave to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1856 is the best known such episode, but it was not the only one. In 1842, after Representative Thomas Arnold of Tennessee "reprimanded a pro-slavery member of his own party, two Southern Democrats stalked towards him, at least of one of whom was arhmed with a bowie knife…calling Arnold a 'damned coward,' his angry colleagues threatened to cut his throat 'from ear to ear'" (Freeman 2011). According to Senator Hammond, "The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers" (quoted in Potter 1976:389). During a debate in 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (Freeman 2011).

In another bitter debate, a New York congressman inadvertently dropped a pistol (it fell out of his pocket), and this almost precipitated a general shootout on the floor of Congress (Potter 1976: 389).

Book Review: Ages of Discord Sep 03, 2019

Show notes

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/

I recently reviewed Secular Cycles, which presents a demographic-structural theory of the growth and decline of pre-industrial civilizations. When land is plentiful, population grows and the economy prospers. When land reaches its carrying capacity and income declines to subsistence, the area is at risk of famines, diseases, and wars – which kill enough people that land becomes plentiful again. During good times, elites prosper and act in unity; during bad times, elites turn on each other in an age of backstabbing and civil strife. It seemed pretty reasonable, and authors Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov had lots of data to support it.

Ages of Discord is Turchin's attempt to apply the same theory to modern America. There are many reasons to think this shouldn't work, and the book does a bad job addressing them. So I want to start by presenting Turchin's data showing such cycles exist, so we can at least see why the hypothesis might be tempting. Once we've seen the data, we can decide how turned off we want to be by the theoretical problems.

The first of Turchin's two cyclic patterns is a long cycle of national growth and decline. In Secular Cycles' pre-industrial societies, this pattern lasted about 300 years; in Ages of Discord's picture of the modern US, it lasts about 150:

Meetups Everywhere 2019 Aug 30, 2019

Show notes

Last autumn we organized meetups in 85 different cities (and one ship!) around the world. Some of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent spikes in membership, which sounds like a success, so let's do it again.

For most cities: If you're willing to host a meetup for your city, then decide on a place, date, and time, and post it in the comments here, along with an email address where people can contact you. Then please watch the comments in case I need to ask you any questions. If you're not sure whether your city has enough SSC readers to support a meetup, see the list of people by city at the bottom of this post. There may be more of us than you think – last year we were able to support meetups in such great megalopolises as Norman, Oklahoma and Wellington, New Zealand. But I would prefer people not split things up too much – if you're very close to a bigger city, consider going there instead of hosting your own.

If you want a meetup for your city, please err in favor of volunteering to organize – the difficulty level is basically "pick a coffee shop you like, tell me the address, and give me a time"; it would be dumb if nobody got to go to meetups because everyone felt too awkward and low-status to volunteer.

For especially promising cities in the US: I am going to try to attend your meetups. My very tentative schedule looks like this:

Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence Aug 30, 2019

Show notes

Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened?

I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn't everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don't feel the need to take their case directly to the public. The past ten years have seen AI goal alignment reach that level of maturity too. There are all sorts of new research labs, think tanks, and companies working on it – the Center For Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, OpenAI, Ought, the Center For The Governance Of AI at Oxford, the Leverhulme Center For The Future Of Intelligence at Cambridge, etc. Like every field, it could still use more funding and talent. But it's at a point where academic respectability trades off against public awareness at a rate where webzine articles saying CARE ABOUT THIS OR YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE are less helpful.

One unhappy consequence of this happy state of affairs is that it's harder to keep up with the field. In 2014, Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, giving a readable overview of what everyone was thinking up to that point. Since then, things have been less public-facing, less readable, and more likely to be published in dense papers with a lot of mathematical notation. They've also been – no offense to everyone working on this – less revolutionary and less interesting.

This is one reason I was glad to come across Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services As General Intelligence by Eric Drexler, a researcher who works alongside Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. This 200 page report is not quite as readable as Superintelligence; its highly-structured outline form belies the fact that all of its claims start sounding the same after a while. But it's five years more recent, and presents a very different vision of how future AI might look.

A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum Aug 24, 2019

Show notes

I admitted in my last post on Reaction that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftward. And I now realize that in order to critique the Reactionary worldview effectively we're going to have to go there.

The easiest answer would be "because we retroactively define leftism as the direction that society went". But this is not true. Communism is very leftist, but society eventually decided not to go that way. It seems fair to say that there are certain areas where society did not go to the left, like in the growth of free trade and the gradual lowering of tax rates, but upon realizing this we don't feel the slightest urge to redefine "low tax rates" as leftist.

So what is leftism? For that matter, what is rightism?

Any theory of these two ideas would have to explain at least the following data points:

1) Why do both ideologies combine seemingly unrelated political ideas? For example, why do people who want laissez-faire free trade empirically also prefer a strong military and oppose gay marriage? Why do people who want to help the environment also support feminism and dislike school vouchers?

2) Why do the two ideologies seem broadly stable across different times and cultures, such that it's relatively easy to point out the Tories as further right than the Whigs, or ancient Athens as further left than ancient Sparta? For that matter, why do they seem to correspond to certain neural patterns in the brain, such that neurologists can determine your political beliefs with 83% accuracy by examining brain structure alone?

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/

Don't Fear the Simulators Aug 23, 2019

Show notes

From the New York Times: Are We Living In A Computer Simulation? Let's Not Find Out.

It lists the standard reasons for thinking we might be in a simulation, then brings up some proposals for testing the hypothesis (for example, the cosmic background radiation might look different in simulations and real universes). But it suggests that we not do that, because if we learn we're in a simulation, that might ruin the simulation and cause the simulators to destroy the universe.

But I think a little more thought suggests we don't have anything to worry about.

In order to notice we had discovered our simulated nature, the simulators would have to have a monitor watching us. We should expect this anyway. Although humans may run some simulations without monitoring them carefully, the simulators have no reason to be equally careless; if they can simulate billions of sentient beings, their labor costs are necessarily near zero. Such a monitor would have complete instantaneous knowledge of everything happening in our universe, and since anyone who can simulate a whole planet must have really good data processing capabilities, it would be able to understand and act upon the entire content of its omniscient sensorium. It would see the fall of each sparrow, record the position of ever atom, have the level of situational awareness that gods could only dream of.

What I'm saying is, it probably reads the New York Times.

That means it knows these experiments are going to happen. If it cares about the results, it can fake them. Assuming for some reason that it messed up designing the cosmic background radiation (why are we assuming this, again?), it can correct that mistake now, or cause the experimental apparatus to report the wrong data, or do one of a million other things that would prevent us from learning we are in a simulation.

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