Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/ [Followup to: Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science] I. In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water, and a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is taught to every schoolchild as an important chemical fact. You approach their chemists and protest: why include the part about the star going supernova? Why not just say an acid and a base make salt and water? The chemists find your question annoying: your new "supernova-less" chemistry makes exactly the same predictions as the standard model! You're just splitting hairs! Angels dancing on pins! Stop wasting their time! "But the part about supernovas doesn't constrain expectation!" Yes, say the chemists, but removing it doesn't constrain expectation either. You're just spouting random armchair speculation that can never be proven one way or the other. What part of "stop wasting our time" did you not understand? Moral of the story: It's too glib to say "There is no difference between theories that produce identical predictions". You actually care a lot about which of two theories that produce identical predictions is considered true. II.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on? First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. If genes for autism (without autism itself) increase intelligence, we should expect these people to be unusually smart. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. About 13% of autistic children (in this sample from whatever social stratum they took their sample from) have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of (presumably well-matched?) control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ I. LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders. Lovaza is fish oil. "Come on," you say, "surely there's some difference between Lovaza and the fish oil I buy at my local health food store for a couple of tenners per Giant Jar?" And you're right. The difference is, Lovaza costs $300 a month.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/ Ramelteon isn't a bad drug. It's just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system. All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between "idiotically dangerous" and "laughably ineffective", and Ramelteon manages better than most. It outperforms placebo, it's not addictive, it won't sap your ability to sleep without it, and it doesn't screw up your brain so badly that its unofficial mascot is a hallucinatory walrus. How does it do it? Ramelteon is the first melatonergic drug, selectively binding to MT-1 and MT-2 melatonin receptors. Binding to melatonin receptors presumably mimics the effect of the natural hormone melatonin which is believed to serve a sleep-promoting role. Now, you might ask yourself – the natural hormone melatonin is available as an over-the-counter supplement costing a couple cents per pill in every drug store, and provably quite safe and effective. Why would anyone go through the trouble of creating a drug that mimics its action? Especially if a month's supply of the drug costs around $100 – which it does.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/ I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about it. But this took decades of conceptual work by people like van der Kolk, crystallizing some ideas and hacking away at others until they ended up with something legible to the Establishment. Before that there was nothing. It was absolutely shocking how much nothing there was. As soon as the APA officialy recognized PTSD as a diagnosis in 1980, Bessel and his friends applied for a grant from the VA to study it. The grant was rejected on the grounds that (actual quote from the rejection letter) "it has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration". So the first step in raising awareness of PTSD was – amazingly – convincing the US military that some people might get PTSD from combat. After the military relented, the next step was convincing everyone else. PTSD was temporarily pigeonholed as "the thing veterans get when they come back from a war". The next push was convincing people that civilian trauma could have similar effects. It was simple to extend the theory to sudden disasters like fires or violent crimes. But van der Kolk and his colleagues started noticing that a history of child abuse, and especially childhood sexual abuse, correlated with a lot of psychiatric problems later on.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ Aeon: Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoron And It is Dangerous: There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is 'post-empirical' science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous. It's not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we're 'Inside the Mirrorverse'. Its editors bid us 'Welcome to the parallel reality that's hiding in plain sight'. […] [Some physicists] claim that neutrons [are] flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are 'low', or even 'zero', but it doesn't really matter. When it comes to grabbing attention, inviting that all-important click, or purchase, speculative metaphysics wins hands down. These theories are based on the notion that our Universe is not unique, that there exists a large number of other universes that somehow sit alongside or parallel to our own. For example, in the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them. And, as it seems we can't ever experience these other universes, there will never be any evidence for them. As Broussard explained, these theories are sufficiently slippery to duck any kind of challenge that experimentalists might try to throw at them, and there's always someone happy to keep the idea alive. Is this really science? The answer depends on what you think society needs from science. In our post-truth age of casual lies, fake news and alternative facts, society is under extraordinary pressure from those pushing potentially dangerous antiscientific propaganda – ranging from climate-change denial to the anti-vaxxer movement to homeopathic medicines. I, for one, prefer a science that is rational and based on evidence, a science that is concerned with theories and empirical facts, a science that promotes the search for truth, no matter how transient or contingent. I prefer a science that does not readily admit theories so vague and slippery that empirical tests are either impossible or they mean absolutely nothing at all. As always, a single quote doesn't do the argument justice, so go read the article. But I think this captures the basic argument: multiverse theories are bad, because they're untestable, and untestable science is pseudoscience. Many great people, both philosophers of science and practicing scientists, have already discussed the problems with this point of view. But none of them lay out their argument in quite the way that makes the most sense to me. I want to do that here, without claiming any originality or special expertise in the subject, to see if it helps convince anyone else. II. Consider a classic example: modern paleontology does a good job at predicting dinosaur fossils. But the creationist explanation – Satan buried fake dinosaur fossils to mislead us – also predicts the same fossils (we assume Satan is good at disguising his existence, so that the lack of other strong evidence for Satan doesn't contradict the theory). What principles help us realize that the Satan hypothesis is obviously stupid and the usual paleontological one more plausible? One bad response: paleontology can better predict characteristics of dinosaur fossils, using arguments like "since plesiosaurs are aquatic, they will be found in areas that were underwater during the Mesozoic, but since tyrannosaurs are terrestrial, they will be found in areas that were on land", and this makes it better than the Satan hypothesis, which can only retrodict these characteristics. But this isn't quite true: since Satan is trying to fool us into believing the modern paleontology paradigm, he'll hide the fossils in ways that conform to its predictions, so we will predict plesiosaur fossils will only be found at sea – otherwise the gig would be up! A second bad response: "The hypothesis that all our findings were planted to deceive us bleeds into conspiracy theories and touches on the problem of skepticism. These things are inherently outside the realm of science." But archaeological findings are very often deliberate hoaxes planted to deceive archaeologists, and in practice archaeologists consider and test that hypothesis the same way they consider and test every other hypothesis. Rule this out by fiat and we have to accept Piltdown Man, or at least claim that the people arguing against the veracity of Piltdown Man were doing something other than Science. A third bad response: "Satan is supernatural and science is not allowed to consider supernatural explanations." Fine then, replace Satan with an alien. I think this is a stupid distinction – if demons really did interfere in earthly affairs, then we could investigate their actions using the same methods we use to investigate every other process. But this would take a long time to argue well, so for now let's just stick with the alien. A fourth bad response: "There is no empirical test that distinguishes the Satan hypothesis from the paleontology hypothesis, therefore the Satan hypothesis is inherently unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscientific." But this can't be right. After all, there's no empirical test that distinguishes the paleontology hypothesis from the Satan hypothesis! If we call one of them pseudoscience based on their inseparability, we have to call the other one pseudoscience too! A naive Popperian (which maybe nobody really is) would have to stop here, and say that we predict dinosaur fossils will have such-and-such characteristics, but that questions like that process that drives this pattern – a long-dead ecosystem of actual dinosaurs, or the Devil planting dinosaur bones to deceive us – is a mystical question beyond the ability of Science to even conceivably solve. I think the correct response is to say that both theories explain the data, and one cannot empirically test which theory is true, but the paleontology theory is more elegant (I am tempted to say "simpler", but that might imply I have a rigorous mathematical definition of the form of simplicity involved, which I don't). It requires fewer other weird things to be true. It involves fewer other hidden variables. It transforms our worldview less. It gets a cleaner shave with Occam's Razor. This elegance is so important to us that it explains our vast preference for the first theory over the second. A long tradition of philosophers of science have already written eloquently about this, summed up by Sean Carroll here: What makes an explanation "the best." Thomas Kuhn ,after his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions led many people to think of him as a relativist when it came to scientific claims, attempted to correct this misimpression by offering a list of criteria that scientists use in practice to judge one theory better than another one: accuracy, consistency, broad scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. "Accuracy" (fitting the data) is one of these criteria, but by no means the sole one. Any working scientist can think of cases where each of these concepts has been invoked in favor of one theory or another. But there is no unambiguous algorithm according to which we can feed in these criteria, a list of theories, and a set of data, and expect the best theory to pop out. The way in which we judge scientific theories is inescapably reflective, messy, and human. That's the reality of how science is actually done; it's a matter of judgment, not of drawing bright lines between truth and falsity or science and non-science. Fortunately, in typical cases the accumulation of evidence eventually leaves only one viable theory in the eyes of most reasonable observers. The dinosaur hypothesis and the Satan hypothesis both fit the data, but the dinosaur hypothesis wins hands-down on simplicity. As Carroll predicts, most reasonable observers are able to converge on the same solution here, despite the philosophical complexity.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. "Not interested," I said, preparing to slam the door in his face. "Please," said the acolyte. Before I could say no he'd jammed a wad of $100 bills into my hand. "If this will buy a few moments of your time." It did, if only because I stood too flabbergasted to move. Surely they didn't have enough money to do this for everybody. "There is no everybody," said the acolyte, when I expressed my bewilderment. "You're the last one. The last unenlightened person in the world." And it sort of made sense. Twenty years ago, a group of San Francisco hippie/yuppie/techie seekers had pared down the ancient techniques to their bare essentials, then optimized hard. A combination of drugs, meditation, and ecstatic dance that could catapult you to enlightenment in the space of a weekend retreat, 100% success rate. Their cult/movement/startup, the Order Of The Golden Lotus, spread like wildfire through California – a state where wildfires spread even faster than usual – and then on to the rest of the world. Soon investment bankers and soccer moms were showing up to book clubs talking about how they had grasped the peace beyond understanding and vanquished their ego-self.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ I. About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of Dr. Zamboni posited the theory that multiple sclerosis was caused by blockages in venous return from the brain causing various complicated downstream effects which eventually led to the immune system attacking myelinated cells. The guy was a good surgeon, nothing about the theory contradicted basic laws of biology, and no one else had any better ideas, so lots of people got excited. As far as I can tell, the medical community responded exactly one hundred percent correctly. They preached caution, urging multiple sclerosis patients not to develop false hope. But at the same time, they quickly launched studies investigating Zamboni's experiments and used newly gathered data to test the theory. All the results that came back made the idea look less and less likely, so that to my understanding by now it is pretty much discredited. Having successfully spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to empirically disconfirm Zamboni's hypothesis, we can now reflect at leisure on the reasons it was kind of dumb and we should have realized it all along.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ Thucydides predicted that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations. This is how I feel about New Atheism. If I were to describe the power of New Atheism over online discourse to a teenager, they would never believe me. Why should they? Other intellectual movements have left indelible marks in the culture; the heyday of hippiedom may be long gone, but time travelers visiting 1969 would not be surprised by the extent of Woodstock. But I imagine the same travelers visiting 2005, logging on to the Internet, and holy @#$! that's a lot of atheism-related discourse what is going on here? My first forays onto the Internet were online bulletin boards about computer games. They would have a lot of little forums about various aspects of the games, plus two off-topic forums. One for discussion of atheism vs. religion. And the other for everything else. This was a common structure for websites in those days. You had to do it, or the atheism vs. religion discussions would take over everything. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal. In 2005, a college student made a webpage called The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was a joke based on the idea that there was no more scientific evidence for God or creationism than for belief in a flying spaghetti monster. The monster's website received tens of millions of visitors, 60,000 emails ("about 95 percent" supportive), and was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Daily Telegraph. Six publishing companies entered a bidding war for the rights to the spaghetti monster's "gospel", with the winner, Random House, offering an $80,000 advance. The book was published to massive fanfare, sold over 100,000 copies, and was translated into multiple languages. Putin's thugs broke up a pro-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster demonstration in Russia. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/ NYT: Economic Incentives Don't Always Do What We Want Them To (h/t MR). For the first time in history, the title actually understates the article, which argues that incentives can be surprisingly useless: Economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be. The article starts with some surprising facts. Increased taxes on the rich don't make rich people work much less. Salary caps on athletes don't decrease athletic performance. Increased welfare doesn't make poor people work less. Decreased job opportunities in one area rarely cause people to move elsewhere. Then it presents a neat chart showing that most people believe others would respond to an incentive, but deny responding to that incentive themselves. For example, 60% of people say a Medicaid program with no work requirement would prevent many people from seeking work, but only 10% of people say they themselves would stop seeking work with such a program.