Slate Star Codex Podcast

Traffic to this blog is declining. I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can’t help but go viral. I’m going to write about…negative results from the perception questions on last year’s survey.

Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and “behavior problems”; unofficially, anger and thrill-seeking – but most people consider these to be some sort of effect of the general attention

Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. We’re scheduled for meetups in 77 cities (and one ship!) in 23 countries, soundly beating last year’s list. Full list of cities, times, and places is below.

STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants’ average age was 37 and which did not measure harm. You can find the study involved here. A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages – for example, a graphic murder scene from Crime and Punishment. Half the participants received the following trigger warning before the passage:

Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades. More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative. Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors like smoking cessation and not to medical advances.

“Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?” — topic of #slatestarcodex I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. (this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.)

Last year we had organized meetups in sixty different cities around the world. A couple of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent spikes in membership, which sounds like a success, so let’s do it again. I’ll repeat the city list from last year, which has every city where at least ten people expressed interest in a meetup. A few nearby cities are merged to make sure they have enough people.

The Tourist Board of Xanadu Did recently impose a fee On those who travel far from home To visit Kubla’s pleasure dome Of $20, 9 – 3 So twice five miles of fertile ground With fence and wire are girdled round And signs proclaiming “ENTRY AT THE GATE” Where gather many a camera-bearing crowd And here are docents, who in solemn state Explain the Mongol histories aloud

[Previously in sequence: Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental, The Whole City Is Center. This post might not make a lot of sense if you haven’t read those first.] I. Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s posts. Some of the best comments seemed to converge on an idea like this: Confusing in that people who rely on lower-level features are placed higher, but the other way would have been confusing too.

Related to yesterday’s post on people being too quick to assume value differences: some of the simplest fake value differences are where people make a big deal about routing around a certain word. And some of the most complicated real value differences are where some people follow a strategy explicitly and other people follow heuristics that approximate that strategy.

Ozy (and others) talk about fundamental value differences as a barrier to cooperation. On their model (as I understand it) there are at least two kinds of disagreement. In the first, people share values but disagree about facts. For example, you and I may both want to help the Third World.

Yesterday I wrote about melatonin, mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why.

[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

The rationalist community started with the idea of rationality as a martial art – a set of skills you could train in and get better at. Later the metaphor switched to a craft. Art or craft, parts of it did get developed: I remain very impressed with Eliezer’s work on how to change your mind and everything presaging Tetlock on prediction. But there’s a widespread feeling in the rationalist community these days that this is the area where we’ve made the least progress.

I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. (You may recognize these names: Toby Ord founded the effective altruism movement; Eric Drexler kindled interest in nanotechnology; Anders Sandberg helped pioneer the academic study of x-risk, and wrote what might be my favorite Unsong fanfic)