Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide? I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there's no more caliphate. You'd think maybe they'd let the matter rest. Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they're supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over. And so we return again to Robbers' Cave:

This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 'the non-linear model of innovation.' "Innovation is often described with a "linear" model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I'll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using examples including the transistor at Bell Labs and the career of Louis Pasteur."

I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of "I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they're 'so speshul' and go see a competent doctor." Beth answered something along the lines of "I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don't have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you're saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism." Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word "cunt" was used. I notice two things about the exchange. First, why did Beth take the bait? Alice said she hated people who frivolously self-diagnosed without knowing anything about the disorder. Beth clearly was not such a person. Why didn't she just say "Yes, please continue hating these hypothetical bad people who are not me"? Second, why did Alice take the bait? Why didn't she just say "I think you'll find I wasn't talking about you?"

I. One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn't directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have. While I sympathize with adjuncts' terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doing their work. You can probably trace the argument- imagine a simplified toy model where the only two jobs are professor and salesperson, and being a professor is fun and high-status but being a salesperson is boring and low-status. Everyone will become a professor, and this will decrease the demand for professors and increase the demand for salespeople until the employers involved change their policies accordingly. Eventually it will stabilize where the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are perfectly compensated by the monetary advantages of being a salesperson. If professors are getting paid shockingly little, it means the system is sending a signal that the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are shockingly high, or else why would people keep trying? If we demand that professors get paid more, then we're letting them keep all their nonmonetary advantages over salespeople but demanding they have monetary advantages as well. It destroys the system's incentives to have people go into less fun but nevertheless necessary fields.

David Friedman on Legal Systems Very Different from Ours: A brief survey of a range of legal system, past and present, from Imperial China and Periclean Athens to modern Amish and Romany. David Friedman is an academic economist with a doctorate in physics recently retired from spending the previous twenty-three years teaching in a law school. His first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973 and includes a description of how a society with property rights and without government might function. There as elsewhere, he offers a consequentialist defense of libertarianism. His most recent non-fiction book is Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, covering systems from Periclean Athens through modern Amish and Romany. He is also the author of three novels, one commercially published and two self-published, and, with his wife, a self-published medieval and renaissance cookbook and a larger self-published book related to their hobby of historical recreation. Much of his published work, including journal articles, essays, drafts of forthcoming work and the full text of several books, can be read on his web page: https://www.daviddfriedman.com

[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized] Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well… Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year. I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let's say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that's 25,000 classicists at any given time. Some classicists work on Rome, so let's say there are 10,000 classicists who focus solely on ancient Greece. Estimates of the population of classical Greece center around a million people, but classical Greece lasted for several generations, so let's say there were ten million classical Greeks total. That gives us a classicist-to-Greek ratio of 1:1000.

I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn't. For example, I don't think any of them would say something like "Oh, obviously you just haven't met the right woman. I know this really cute girl Alanna, a friend of my sister's. I'll introduce you next time she's around." Or "You must have just had a bad experience with women growing up. Maybe you always got into fights with your mother as a child. But there's no reason to let that control you now."

Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism Summary - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others.

I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we're likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced. Let's back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. They work out rules for punishing defectors – your trolls, your harassers – and appoint a hierarchy of trusted individuals to carry out those rules. They try to balance competing concerns like free expression and public decency. They host cliques, power grabs, flame wars, even religious strife. They try to raise revenue, they establish a class system of Power Users and Premium Users, they deal with resentment from people who aren't getting their way. They develop a culture.

[Epistemic status: something I've been thinking about recently. There's a lot of complication around these issues and this is more to start a discussion than to present any settled solution] There's a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is describing his peaceful little town. He says they never fight – except that one time about a horse some people thought was a mule. Someone interrupts him to say it was really a mule some people thought was a horse, and then everyone in town starts shouting "MULE!" or "HORSE!" at each other until they get drowned out by the chorus. The town is happy and peaceful as long as nobody brings up the horse/mule thing. As soon as somebody brings it up all of the old rancor instantly resurfaces and everybody's at each other's throats. And the argument itself never gets more sophisticated than people yelling "HORSE!" or "MULE!" at each other. Maybe it would be worth it to create a norm around never bringing it up? The rationalist/EA/etc community has a norm that people must be able to defend their beliefs with evidence, and a further norm that people shouldn't be confident in their beliefs unless they've sounded them off others and sought out potential counterarguments. These are great norms. But their failure mode is a community where dredging up interminable horse/mule style arguments is seen as a virtue, and avoiding them is seen as a cowardly refusal to expose one's own beliefs to challenge.