457 Comments

I enjoyed your review of Fussell, and wrote a response, here: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/whats-the-status-of-status TLDR, I'm not sure why we should care so much about status as a heuristic, except insofar as it 1) makes an argument that meritocracy is a construct of the middle and upper middle class and 2) it demonstrates that envy and inequality won't be solved through economics.

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The responses to your GOP post on twitter were fascinating. Snarky rose emoji urbanists who mainly discuss philosophy, politics and transit really *really* don't like to be considered high class.

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Hi there, I've discovered this blog after the entire NYT incident, and SSC and ACX have been a godsend. I'm sure the entire period was less than ideal for a lot of people in the community, but as brand new member i just wanted to express my deepest gratitude to scott and the entire community for just existing.

Love this and glad to be here.

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Feb 28, 2021Liked by Scott Alexander

I was going to suggest that maybe that was real Josh Hawley posting as troll Josh Hawley, much like Picasso's quote about how he paints his own fakes. But then it turns out that Picasso's "I paint fakes, too" quote is itself a fake. How's that for meta?

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You're willing to take bets over future developments for small amounts of money? Oh boy!

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Hi Scott,

Have you considered writing a review of Carl Hart's new book, or a blog post that examines his ideas re: drug use and addiction? I don't know if it interests you, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be up your alley.

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I'm the person you failed to come to terms with, just because the terms were extremely poor. To make this bet work I think you need to offer better odds than just buying Opko stock (who own the only calcifediol formulation in the US). I don't get how you can think there's only a 25% chance that vitamin D works at all, but that there's a 50/50 chance that NICE would approve it by 3/1/21. If this offer is genuine than it seems that you must be more optimistic about vitamin D than you're letting on. Rootclaim would definitely offer better odds because they have quite a lot more money than me. :)

https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1362144763147821056

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How much is too little money for your vitamin D bet?

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Random question: so as a nutrient, "protein" breaks down as a bunch of different amino acids that aren't all biochemically interconvertible by humans and therefore you get a bunch of groups of them that are all each required in various amounts.

A thing I've wondered: how much tolerance is there for intakes that average out across time but at each point in time are heavily unbalanced? Like, say you alternated days where on odd days you consumed plenty of half of them but got very little of the other half, and on even days the other way around. Would this noticeably cause any nutrition problems? What if the alternation was over longer periods, like weeks, or months?

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Last day to finish my entry for the book review contest. I really wish I hadn't waited til last night to start it…

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Have you reached out to rootclaim to see if they'd make the bet for a lower amount? It says on that page, "We are open to discussing lower or higher amounts, and the funds can be pooled from multiple sources.*"

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Ok, any chance someone might help me understand why Bayes seems to play a prominent role in the “rationalist” worldview? Nothing I say here is in the slightest novel; I’m not saying that the community just failed to consider these amazing insights. I’m just curious what the basic take is on what I would guess are fairly stock concerns.

When I first encountered the Bayes theorem it was as a fairly unremarkable lemma in inductive logic. It wasn’t presented as any big deal in itself; it was a piece of a much larger puzzle about how to develop rigorous approaches to scientific and other empirical inferences. Yet it seems this particular theorem is sometimes conceptually isolated and treated almost as if it were a solution to the larger problem in itself. Isn’t the theorem just a transformation rule that doesn’t work unless you come in with a quantified antecedent probability, and unless you have some objective methodology for quantifying your initial likelihood then the theorem isn’t going to give you any more objective basis for any particular probability assessment in the face of new evidence? Second, even if you can somehow justify an antecedent probability, are there non-trivial real-world situations where we have grounds for discerning the requisite numerical inputs to apply the theorem to adjust that prior probability? Are there any real-world problems where the theorem has been used in a meaningful way to advance an argument, beyond simply using arbitrary numbers to illustrate the mundane idea that one should change beliefs to incorporate new evidence as it comes in? If not, in what sense is an emphasis on Bayes really helpful in the context of current, real-world problem solving over and above a generalized emphasis on being open to assimilate new evidence in an appropriate way, keeping in mind the totality of the evidence you had before the new discovery?

One thing I may have seen in the past (or may have imagined, or may be inadvertently caricaturing as I try to re-create it) is the idea that it is better to apply something like a quantitative assessment even if it involves making up arbitrary numbers, as a sort of discipline on your subjective guesswork. But it seems to me that if the inputs are all highly subjective guesses along a very wide range of potential numerical assessments, one may in many cases be likelier to do a much better job using subjective intuition on the whole problem at once—where one can at least think about the problem as a whole—than by trying to guess at each small part in isolation, which could often be harder to meaningfully assess in isolation. I would guess that in most complex situations where there is likely to be meaningful disagreement in the real world, numerical judgments are likely to be more accurate as applied to the totality of a problem than by “solving” a problem using a multiplicity of highly subjective guesses as to component numbers that preclude you from thinking about their interrelationships as you go along.

Hey, sorry if this is all wrong or seems hostile. I’m asking out of sincere curiosity.

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So, inflation. Top economists disagree on the topic. Naive arguments suggest there should obviously be inflation. Will there be? For anyone with savings, anyone nearing retirement or in retirement, this is probably the most important topic to get right at the moment.

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I just checked out the real Josh Hawley's twitter, and after scrolling through several pages the only thing I found offensive was his support for an increased minimum wage. What am I missing?

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Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization 4 with the Fall from Heaven 2 mod. I know there's at least a couple of people here who are fans. I play with the More Naval AI mod personally.

What's everyone's favorite civilization? Of the ones I've tried, I've really like the Luchuirp and the Calabim, they've just got such fun mid-late game mechanics. I'm thinking of learning a civ with a great early game rush, anyone got a preference there? Hippus, Doviello or Grigori seem like good candidates.

Anyone have a good method for playing modded multiplayer Civ IV these days?

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Maybe we can crowdsource the funds so that you can take the $100,000 bet against vitamin D?

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I have a friend in his mid 20s who thinks he might have had dyslexia his whole life but was never diagnosed because he was capable enough in other modes of thinking to work around it in several ways. I've seen him read aloud and he reads pretty slowly+haltingly, misreads a lot, has to go back, etc. You wouldn't know it unless you watched him read, though. He's a very successful computer programmer; when I asked whether he has issues reading his own code he said he mostly uses the indentation/shape of the code to figure out where he is.

He is hesitant to get a formal diagnosis for several reasons, but he is looking for advice. Does anyone have a suggestion for good resources he could use to learn more about whether he does have some kind of dyslexia, and if so, what he can do to improve his reading ability? Past the obvious results it's hard to know what to trust in google results. He is about to start graduate school where he will have to read a lot of papers and textbooks and is worried he won't be able to read quickly enough.

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1. I'm interested in funding part of a Rootclaim bet (say, up to 25k) if the rest can be raised and terms agreed upon - probably give some share of winnings like 10-20% to the debater and the rest to the funders. Debater should probably have some stake in it as well.

2. There was a similar suggestion on Hacker News (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25587410) for the Rootclaim bet on their claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab. I might be interested in funding a team against that as well.

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I had to disable the ACX-tweaks chrome extension because it had the odd effect of hiding all of the comment text from most of the comments. I love the *format* it gives to comments but I'd kind of like to be able to read their *content* as well, so... :-(

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I offer to bet $100 that Vitamin D treats COVID as specified by Rootclaim against Scott. I think it's more likely than not that Vitamin D is reasonably effective. If Scott's not interested, I'll make the same bet once against anyone else I know personally.

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Scott: on your point #1 there was an article in the New Yorker recently which seems pertinent.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others

Bottom line, the pattern of excess deaths in India (and many other countries) does not seem consistent with large numbers of unreported covid deaths. If do, the IFR has large geographic variation even above the effects of demographics. The reason Is not clear but the article does present evidence that some degree of prior immunity may be present (in Asia and Africa but not the Americas). In any case, the addition to your mistakes page may be premature.

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I like the hearts voting system. I just wish the "top first" sorting actually worked

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Has anyone read Brian Muraresku's Immortality Key? About psychedelics as the ancient root of religions

I'm struggling to get through it. It feels like lots of tenuous threads strung together with wishful thinking

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What do people do when they are feeling demotivated? What with the pandemic and everything work feels pointless and absurd in a kafkaesque sense. How does one make tasks feel meaningful without external sensory feedback?

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Regarding the Covid-19 death toll and comparisons:

1. Cutting through the hyperbolic/jingoistic hyperbole from so many sources, one fact remains clear: the differences in national outcomes is the key point. Why the shocking disparities? e.g. USA and UK (and other advanced nations) at one end of the spectrum, with Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, at the other.

Some countries lie, others lack the means for accurate tallies, a few tell the truth. That's why the Spanish Flu of 1918-21 mortality ranged from guesses of from 50 - 100 million. The same is true for this outbreak. We might never know because of the duplicity of China, Russia, and perhaps India.

2. Leadership. It's all about leadership. Clowns like Xi, Trump, and Boris are amongst the greatest mass murderers of the 21st century. History will not remember them kindly. Leadership counts.

3. So let's stop focusing on meaningless mass comparisons. Focus on the individual losses. I know. My 34 year old daughter was one of the casualties.

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I hope to read more of Scott's writing on Effective Altruism-adjacent topics. One topic in particular: how did the economic fall out of the pandemic affected the world's poorest people, and what changes to charity donations should be made based on this.

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Dr. Jason Fung articulates the science behind intermittent fasting pretty well. It is based on the hormonal theory of obesity.

Other than his hugely popular books on that and diabetes, he's also written a book called "The longevity solution", in which the chapter on salt says something controversial. It says that decreasing salt intake to keep blood pressure under check is unnecessary and possibly even harmful to health!

In my view, he implies that the recommendation to reduce salt that cardiologists make (for hypertension), is a confusion about the data.

Would love your opinion on that. A relevant article :

https://www.dietdoctor.com/the-truth-about-salt

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When people send you book reviews, have you been replying to confirm you got them? No worries if not (or if you're behind in doing so), I just don't want to discover that through some quirk of email you didn't get mine.

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I'm curious, how many book review entries did you wind up getting?

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Whoever recommended the video game Outer Wilds a while back - thank you. I finished it months ago, but I still find myself regularly thinking about it from time to time.

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In Scott’s “Still Alive” post, he mentions a woman telling him that SSC was her favorite postpartum reading and hoped the blog would be back before she had another baby. My husband thought this was me, but no!

I did spend a lot of long nights rocking a sleeping newborn while reading SSC, and I’m glad to have ACX in time for our second kid to arrive. I’d love to know how many other moms with little kids are reading the blog.

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Apropos of nothing in particular, I recently came across a quote I thought was striking and might be appreciated here:

"Sanity must outrun power."

(I interpret this to mean that the more power you have, the more sanity you need to avoid doing something disastrous.)

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Recommending this again on the visible Open Thread because I think many people would be interested in this.

History for Atheists Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiNGb4kjorb1XpElFZmvShA

Cons: it concentrates heavily on religious topics because that's where a lot of atheist pop-history misconceptions arise. This might be boring/not my area of interest/are you trying to stealth-convert me? for some people

Pros: it's not stealth-conversion (or any kind of conversion)! it's fun, educational and I find it very informative. Give it a go!

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Thank you again, Scott, for restarting (reinventing?) your blog. I didn't realize how much I looked forward to your posts, and to reading and participating in the comments section, until they were gone. :)

I'm not really online - the toxicity of the internet has driven me away from everything except your blog and one video game board that does its best to stay non-political (sigh, 46 with three kids and still reading about video games) - and when you shut down I really felt the loss. Here's hoping that the excellent community transfers to Substack. Seems to working well so far. :)

So I promised myself I'd participate more than I used to. My first question to throw out to the group:

What was so awful about Henry VI?

I've been listening to Mike Duncan's Tides of History podcast. He did a great series of episodes on the War of the Roses, a topic I only have a vague grasp of. He lays the genesis of the war more or less at Henry VI's feet, which is unusual for Mike Duncan, who isn't a big proponent of the "great men" approach to history.

If I'm understanding Mike correctly, he believes that Henry V handed his infant son a stable, powerful England, and that because of Henry VI's misrule after he came to majority, everything more or less fell to pieces. But Mike's complaint about Henry VI seems to be solely that he was indecisive and timid. Which fine, not good qualities for a (nation? empire?) that usually had bloody and battle-hardened rulers, but these don't seem like capital offenses. I mean, the Roman Empire survived Caligula in pretty good shape, right? Henry was the 16th in a direct line of succession from William the Conqueror. It seems strange to me that such a mild defect could throw the who shebang off like that.

So what about Henry VI's indecisiveness proved so deadly? Or am I (and maybe Mike Duncan, if I'm interpreting him right) laying too much blame on him?

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Does the Mistakes page still, er, exist? It never seems to have reappeared at https://slatestarcodex.com/mistakes/

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I'd briefly like to put a friend's speculative evolution project into the spotlight, here, by linking to a recent post about chimera-genetic plants (by which I mean plants possessing more than one genome in their cell nuclei) native to the world he's been designing from the ground up, because I think this is the sort of world-building some people here might appreciate: https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?s=0f448d599b7f2b514ad1cc016cf55560&showtopic=2786&st=90&#entry35434

Be sure to check out the rest of that thread for context if that post piques your curiosity!

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I'm not trying to spam here, but I think I posted this last week too late for it to be noticed.

Is there any chance for an updated version of this? https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/

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Anyone else who subscribes via RSS and is seeing stub posts show up with contents of "null"?

I assume this is because they're Patreon posts that I'm not allowed to see. But IIRC, Substack promised Scott these wouldn't get in the way for regular non-Patreon readers, so I'm kind of annoyed that this is happening.

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Is the rationalist community aware of this recent 3Blue1Brown video? It explains an amazing new way to look at Baye's Theorem (using odds instead of percentages) that I've never heard before in all my reading of Lesswrong and SSC. (maybe I just haven't read enough?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM

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I've been getting this in my eyes for the past few days; anybody have any experience with this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/27/7a/30277a3a093c5edcf47dfa160e5f0603.jpg

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Rootclaim here - We are very open to discussing lower amounts if we believe it will promote rational thinking, probabilistic inference and elevate public debate. Feel free to contact me to discuss.

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Does anyone know how the Substack API works? They don't publish specs.

I'm looking at a sample way of pulling comments, and I can't figure out what "last_comment_at" means. I set it to be a month in the past, or a month in the future, and I still get all the comments.

//astralcodexten.substack.com/api/v1/post/32218385/comments?token=&all_comments=true&sort=most_recent_first&last_comment_at=2021-02-27T02:53:17.654Z

There seems to be some hidden variable that keeps track of the most-recently-sent comment. If I could understand that variable, I could cache comments and load them a lot faster. . .

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2020 marked the 14th consecutive year of democratic decline in the world: https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-freedom-world-2020-finds-established-democracies-are-decline

Why? Is it because democracy looks less appealing now than it did in the 1990s, when the West decisively won the Cold War and a new age of freedom seemed to be dawning? Is the reason for democratic backsliding the same in immature democracies like Mali or Burma as it is in established democracies like the USA? In the US, income and wealth inequality are skyrocketing. Is it possible that any large group's political power must be proportional to its economic power in order for society to be stable, and that with increasing inequality, the elite will demand (and successfully obtain) increasing power over the middle class, thus eliminating democracy in favor of oligarchy?

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Did you notice there seem to be some spam comments on the page https://slatestarcodex.com/about/

You might want to clean that up?

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Is an open thread like a bleg? Since you know a lot about psychoactive substances, maybe you can post sometime about substance addiction among the most highly creative people. It seems to me there is a very high correlation. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Jimi Hendrix - the list is long. 3 possibilities (not mutually exclusive): 1. There is no correlation once we take into account other variables. 2. Narcotics/psychedelic enhance creativity. 3. Creative people are more drawn to narcotics/psychedelics (availability or personality) but they don't impact their creativity, at least not positively.

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I've read in the Dutch novel "De ontdekking van de hemel" (chapter 26) that Dickens used to host a Christmas dinner every year for his friends, and that he always hired somebody to stand outside under the window in the snowstorm and shout: "Oooh, it's so cold!" all the time, so they could even better enjoy the warmth inside, and the goose.

Dickens and Christmas is a special relationship:

https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-christmas.html

And the BBC thankfully provides us with an elaborate description of Dickens' Christmas dinners: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-46378745

But they don't mention this particular detail, as I thought they definitely should. Perhaps it's not true, after all?

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A thought about heterogeneous treatment effects, and what it might mean.

In a clinical trial of some treatment (or any Randomized Controlled Trial) you can subtract the means of the two groups and get an estimate for the average treatment effect. Suppose it's positive. There could be multiple reasons for this effect:

1. The effect is positive for everyone, but there's noise (measurement error, other factors, ...) which make it necessary to have a large sample to see the effect which is true for everyone.

2. The effect is positive for some people, none for others, negative for yet others. But the positives outnumber (or outweigh) the negatives, so the average effect is positive. This is individual treatment effect heterogeneity.

We often interpret results as if they mean (1) is true. But if (2) is true, then it means for some people the treatment could have negative effects. If those effects are consistent for them, they should actually avoid the treatment. Even more alarming, there could be treatments with average negative effects which are positive for some people, and we might never know. If the individual treatment effect heterogeneity is quite large, there's a strong case for experimenting with many treatments individually to see what works for you.

We might even be able to study this to quantify which of (1) and (2) is true by:

A) Looking for treatment effect heterogeneity among some groups (e.g. it's positive for men but negative for women), or

B) Giving repeated treatments to the same people and seeing if there's a consistent effect for them, or if it's just noise and really (1) is true.

Curious what y'all think.

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Can anyone with experience with a 'second brain', 'personal knowledge base', 'Zettelkasten' or whatever you call it (e.g. Roam, Obsidian, Zettel, paper notebook) share their experiences with it? How they got into it, what software they use and why, what they use it for (every trivial neat thing you learn? or only important stuff you want to put into serious writing later), and what they got out of it, professionally or as far as personal goals are concerned. If you started using one but abandoned it I'm also interested, and if you use one coupled with a spaced-repetition memorizing thing I'm particularly interested.

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I see at least one person beat me to the punch but I'm willing to toss $100 into the Vitamin D challenge assuming Scott's not being inundated with bets. It will probably make me a lot more facile on the discussion than I would ever be otherwise which presumably would save me at least $100 in the long run either way..... as WSB would say, no way can this go (slurs) up?

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I want to share a preprint link to this cool synesthesia article, where the authors describe a cognitive profile underlying synesthesia that has some common traits with autism.

In their model, synesthesia is a trait that emerges from this larger pool of people who are cognitively distinctive in a variety of other ways, including the non-synesthete relatives of synesthetes. They don't go into extensive detail but they do give an idea of what cognitive traits set the group apart, some of which are very common among autistic people, and they note that the incidence of synesthesia in the autistic population is higher. They hypothesize that synesthesia and autism may be two different outcomes of a distinct neurodevelopmental trajectory.

I found this article enlightening as a synesthete because I am definitely not autistic, but I have traits that resemble autism, and I seem to relate very well to autistic people. This model in this article allows for us to have common experiences without placing me on a spectrum for which I'm pretty sure I don't qualify.

I'm often privy to "I think she's on the spectrum" conversations, and I know a lot of people who put themselves there despite being so subtly different that I wonder if they're undermining the whole classification. This paper proposes a new way to think about it: as a larger category that includes autism, or a common neurodevelopmental pathway upstream of autism that produces different outcomes.

Since a lot of people on ssc are either on the autism spectrum or have spectrum traits, I want to ask: does anyone here have synesthesia? Do you see some of these other traits in yourself or your relatives? Does this re-frame how you think of yourself, or do you still find that the autism spectrum is the most appropriate model for you? https://psyarxiv.com/87fuj

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https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1698902.html

Comes with a warning that people who are feeling emotionally fragile shouldn't read it.

An article addressed to the left, about the importance of acknowledging that there could be a very long term change for the worse in their own lives, and that many people have not yet done so. A defense of prepping. (Does it need a defense? Yes, in some social circles.)

An attack on tear-it-downism.

My comment on it, which siderea might not post:

I do think one of things legitimately shocking about this is that normal imagination about disasters at least includes the normal ability to gather for mutual aid, comfort, and pleasure. And yet, here we are.

I agree with the rest of your points. I hadn't thought about just how pathological left-wing anti-prepperism is. This doesn't mean I'm psychologically ready, though I can hope the taoist meditation I've been studying (the teacher's been talking a lot about accepting change) will help.

I'll add your points to my opposition to what I call tear-it-downism-- a viewpoint I see on both the left and the right-- the belief that things are so bad that tearing everything down can only lead to an improvement. They're obviously wrong, but it's nice to have clearer arguments. I'm interested in whatever you want to say about why tearitdownism is becoming more prevalent. Add tearitdownists to the list of disaster amplifiers.

I'm inclined to think that opposition to cars is partly opposition to people having extra capacity. I don't have a car. Having a car means more freedom of movement, move ability to store stuff for emergencies, and spare shelter. There are homeless people living in cars, and they're better off than homeless people without cars. This doesn't mean cars are great, but the anti-car ideology doesn't seem to include the drawbacks of not having a car. However, the idea seems to be that virtuous people have utter trust in the government to make things work. See also left-wing opposition to charter schools and home-schooling.

I could even say a few things about the idea that virtue is shown by driving your fat percentage as low as can theoretically be endured. The science doesn't take it that far (it just ignores what some people can endure), but the culture does.

****

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

An essay by Zeynep Tufecki about how the people she knows from poor/authoritarian countries were much quicker to believe serious trouble was coming.

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The Lancet preprint "Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes" which claimed 80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths was removed from The Lancet server and is under investigation. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3771318

"India’s case fatality rate is half the US’; if the same pattern holds among missed cases, " The fatality rate among the undiagnosed should be much lower than among the confirmed cases, because hospitalized cases are more likely to receive a positive swab result than the mild cases who recovered at home. On the other hand, I have seen non-scientific sources saying that in India the sick are less likely to seek hospital care, especially if they are poor, so the pattern may not hold.

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Hi Scott - I think I'm the counterparty you've been looking for regarding this Vitamin D bet. I will bet any amount of your choosing. You name the amount and I'll match it. Just one request: If I win, you donate that amount to the Revolution Robotics Foundation. If you win, you can receive the money yourself, or have me donate the amount to a cause of your choosing. Deal?

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Let's say that we have three languages, A, B and Z, where A and B are similar/related and Z is distinct from both of them. As an example, A could be English, B German and Z Japanese. Are there examples of a short paragraph, poem or sentence in A that is "better" translated to Z than it is to B? The trivial case would be if A has some technical word that just so happens to be missing in B and exist in Z, but that's boring. I'm thinking more of unexpected ways in which the "spirit" can be better kept in Z. This will of course be subjective but could still be fun to argue around.

Sadly me myself am lacking in knowledge of languages, so I can't try to find my own examples.

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Back on SSC, I read someone posting their "pet theory" that US vetocracy got worse due to the banning of "Pork Barrel" earmarked spending by congress in 2011. It was an interesting point of view because it's counter-intuitive (earmarks are close cousins of bribes). But congress is bringing them back but with some new limits. I'm intrigued and want to see what happens, and I guess the SSC reader wasn't alone in having this pet theory.

See here for example: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/congressional-earmarks-are-coming-back.html

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Can someone explain why methane release from cattle is a major cause of global warming? I understand that the sheer volume of methane release from cattle is large, but is that a relevant metric? Cows are releasing carbon molecules which were captured from the atmosphere in the recent past through photosynthesis. They are part of the "fast carbon cycle" not the "slow carbon cycle" which releases carbon molecules which have been trapped in the earth for millions of years. The slow carbon cycle accounts for most of the net release of carbon into the atmosphere, which seems like the much more relevant metric. Or am I wrong on this point?

I understand that methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so is it this conversion of CO2 into methane within the bodies of cows that makes them so bad? I've read that methane will also break down in the atmosphere back into CO2, but I'm not clear on whether the time scale for this decomposition is weeks, years or decades.

Note: This is meant to be apolitical.

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I don't know if it's the right place to ask / suggest, but I would like to read Scott's review of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51778153-livewired I often get more from his reviews than from reading the books myself...

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Hi,

Reading the comment on humane treatment standards for animal experimentation made me think of rabbits.

The several people I have met who have worked with rabbits in research settings have all told me exactly the same thing that Primo Levi (and also chef Thomas Keller) said about them: on Day one they are cute, by Day Two they are just rabbits, and around Day Three you pretty much stop caring about the damn rabbits because they are just so useless and dumb.

[“in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation” -- Primo Levi, "The Periodic Table", Ch. 9 'Phosphorus']

I'm not advocating active cruelty to rabbits, just noting the universal opinion, including that of a two-time Nobel Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor who can't even bring himself to care about them.

Mice seem way smarter, rats are tough bastards who deserve some street-respect, but rabbits are not exactly "charismatic macro-fauna."

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Not sure what the statue of limitations is on this, but in the NY Times today... "Another person who flagged a parent’s participation in the riots was Matt Hess, 29 (The Times agreed to identify him using only his middle and last name, because he has experienced harassment online)". It appears that online harassment is grounds for pseudonym use?

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Data Secrets Lox is running its monthly contest to find the best effortpost. There were 16 entries for February, spanning a range of topics. The poll was set up a few hours ago, and will run for the next week.

https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2812.0.html

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So, here is a headline:

“LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate”

https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx

Maybe they are lying. But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory.

“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.

* * *

“One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020) [15.9%].

“The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT — 72% — say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender.

“About half of millennials (those aged 24 to 39 in 2020) who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual. In older age groups, expressed bisexual preference is not significantly more common than expressed gay or lesbian preference.”

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Hi Scott,

Just over six years ago, you said "If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo". Now that you have your private practice, are you still considering it?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

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4. Isn't a large amount of the bet is the point? I mean, for money that I'm comfortable to lose I could bet on pretty much everything.

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You can take the Rootclaim net for $10,000

"We are willing to reduce the stakes as low as $10,000 for applicants already involved in public debate on the issue"

https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_challenge

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"If I Ran the Zoo" and five other books by Dr. Seuss now banned. No longer on Amazon. You can still buy Huckleberry Finn. (I checked) Sorry, I had to rant somewhere.

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This is an open query that needs rationality to delve deeper into. It concerns the variants of the Covid19 virus. I refer to the Lancet report of December 8 2020 into the safety and effectiveness of the Astra Zeneca vaccine https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext .My skills are solely in pattern recognition. I noticed that the trials of the AZvaccine were conducted in locations from which the most virulent variants have arisen - United Kingdom and Brazil are referenced in the attached report, and South Africa in other reports not linked to here. The variants were identified in December 2020 when the attached report was published. This led me to the query - what chance the same place and same time of the wide-spread Phase 3 testing of the AZ vaccine are also the locations of the most virulent variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Same place - coincidence with high certainty? Same time - coincidence with moderate certainty? Same time and place - I'd bet on low certainty of coincidence. Anyone have any insights for me?

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Some good food for thought and discussion here - Mark Lilla "On Indifference"

https://marklilla.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Lilla-On_Indifference.pdf

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founding

There seems to be something wrong with the way Substack is generating message-ids for comment reaction notifications. It seems like they might generate the same ID for every reaction to a given comment, or something.

I'm not sure why this is something they'd be doing manually -- it seems like something their MSP (mailgun) ought to handle. But I doubt mailgun would generate duplicates like this, and fail to catch it immediately.

The consequence of this for my email client (OS X mail.app) is that it can't tell those messages apart -- it's showing them to me as if the are all a single message, with the subject of one but the body of a different one.

(This is a pretty stupid way to write an email client, but there's no accounting for bad engineering.)

I don't know if there's anybody at Substack you could talk to, or if there's any chance they'd understand my complaint if you did, and pass it on to anybody who can fix it. But this is a pretty bad bug. (I assume it hasn't been caught yet because Gmail doesn't trust the message-id to be unique, and displays the messages sensibly, unlike Mail.app, so most people don't hit it.)

I have examples with full headers I'm happy to pass along.

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Want an introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy? Want someone to guide you through it? Here is the video series for you! He will be covering each canto in English translations, one per video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6yPwlSl6r0&list=PLpiUReQm8Y8a6EVTuhjE6KK7dnS_IaPud

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This is a (hopefully unobtrusive) test comment.

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Gripe about the state of public health communication [crossposted from my FB share of https://nyti.ms/3bchUvh]:

Tbh I think saying e.g. "The efficacy of J&J is 72%", by itself, is always so vague that it might as well be gibberish. It's basically just saying,

"The J&J covid-19 vaccine causes a ~72% reduction in the risk of."

It's an incomplete sentence, and put in plain English like that, the incompleteness is obviously ridiculous. Reduction in the risk *of what*? Infection? Symptoms? Severe symptoms? Hospitalization? Death? If the sentence doesn't tell you that, it literally hasn't told you anything.

I'm glad Carl Zimmer is here to help explain these ambiguities—he's a great science writer—but it's shameful that the state of public health communication is so bad that we even got to the point of needing him. There should never have been press releases or headlines or news articles reporting "The efficacy of __ is __%" by itself, as though that meant anything at all, in the first place. It should always have been, "__ reduces the risk of __ by __%."

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Biden says the US will have enough vaccines for every adult in May. Does this mean that any adult who wants to get vaccinated in May will be able to get vaccinated? Or are there weird rhetorical tricks at play?

(The one exception I know of is the US *taking delivery* which is distinct from *it making it to a distribution point* but I seriously do not expect this to add more than a week.)

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Have you considered creating a community space for editing UNSONG? Feels like a thing the community could do (with upvoting specific edits), an interesting technical challenge and a way to think about how books might work in the future. Also I imagine the community could add a few genuinely funny extras, if that's a thing you wanted.

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Would be good if substack allowed you to collapse comments, rather than just their replies. Still takes quite a lot of scrolling to scroll past a long base comment.

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