Slate Star Codex Podcast

These are my preliminary choices for California elected positions and ballot initiatives. Some of them are based on Ozy’s recommendations and the Berkeley EA and rationalist community’s recommendations. I agree with the latter’s note that because California ballot propositions are weird superlaws that permanently overrule the legislature unless repealed by voters, in general we should be very cautious about them

[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.] Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – see for example his Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics or Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious. I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Existing sites on how to use Google Trends for research don’t capture some of the things I learned,

[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a small online ad startup. You know the ads on Facebook and Twitter? We tell companies how to get them the most clicks. This startup – I won’t tell you the name – was going to add deep learning, because investors will throw money at anything that uses the words “deep learning”.

I’ve gotten a chance to discuss The Whole City Is Center with a few people now. They remain skeptical of the idea that anyone could “deserve” to have bad things happen to them, based on their personality traits or misdeeds. These people tend to imagine the pro-desert faction as going around, actively hoping that lazy people (or criminals, or whoever) suffer. I don’t know if this passes an Intellectual Turing Test. When I think of people deserving bad things,

[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.] There’s been recent interest in “smart drugs” said to enhance learning and memory. For example, from the Washington Post: When aficionados talk about nootropics, they usually refer to substances that have supposedly few side effects and low toxicity. Most often they mean piracetam, which Giurgea first synthesized in 1964 and which is approved for

[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up eventually; please accept this post instead for now.] In Jewish legend, the Chamber of Guf is a pit where all the proto-souls hang out whispering and murmuring. Whenever a child is born, an angel reaches into the chamber, scoops up a soul, and brings it into the world.

The best thing about personalized medicine is that it’s obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But outside a few special cases like cancer, we don’t know how to predict which treatment will work for which person. Some psychiatric researchers claim they can do this at a high level; I think they’re wrong.

There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty. I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford.

Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this, and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration. 126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open:  People generally reported slight but positive changes: 

[Content note: attempt to consider real people’s real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas] I. Imagine the state of nature, except for some reason there are cities. Some people in these cities play the drums all night and keep everyone else awake. The sleep-deprived people get together and agree this is unacceptable. They embark on a long journey to the wilderness where they found their own community of Nodrumia.

Quixote writes: It’s odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias. But just a few comments down, Lasagna says: I despise (I’m choosing that word carefully) [New York City]. I still commute there every day, and I can’t stand it – the broken infrastructure, the horrible smells, the $14 for a yogurt and coffee in the morning, the massive crowds of unpleasant people (how could we NOT be?

[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I’m not sure I honestly support. This focuses on San Francisco to make it easier, but other cities exist too. Thanks to Nintil for some of the bright-line argument in part four. Conflict of interest notice: I live in a lower-density part of Oakland]

Grand Prize ($1000): Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? Editor’s Choice ($500): Should Transgender Children Transition? Honorable Mentions ($250): Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory?, Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible? I’m sorry for jerking the number and value of the prizes around so many times, but I wanted to balance my preferences, the contestants’ preferences, and readers’ preferences – and this was the best way I could think of to do it.

A neglected gem from Less Wrong: Why The Tails Come Apart, by commenter Thrasymachus. It explains why even when two variables are strongly correlated, the most extreme value of one will rarely be the most extreme value of the other. Take these graphs of grip strength vs. arm strength and reading score vs. writing score:     In a pinch, the second graph can also serve as a rough map of Afghanistan   Grip strength is strongly correlated with arm strength.

A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a person is just starting to develop schizophrenia and is acting a little bit strange while still having some insight into their condition. There’s a big push to treat schizophrenia prodrome as a critical period for intervention.